Did Google's August 2026 Spam Update Penalize AI Content? 60 Sites, 10 Days of Data

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Издатель Sep 1, 2026

Did Google's August 2026 spam update penalize AI content? We create content for about 60 different websites and 100% of it is AI-generated, so I went through the data to find out.

I compared the 10 days after the update finished rolling out to the 10 days before. Most of our clients saw at least a 10% shift in organic traffic from Google, and some saw as much as 60%. But there was no correlation between the AI-generated content we created and the human-created content those sites had before they started working with us. Our pages tended to fare better, though I don't think that's because they're AI-generated.

This is Google's third spam update of 2026, after one in June. More people are using AI to generate slop at scale, so Google has to keep updating their systems to keep up. Google has spelled out multiple times that they have no problem with you using AI to generate content. Google is one of the biggest publishers of AI-generated content there is. You can read their spam policies, which is what these updates are based on. What Google is trying to stop is low quality content ranking high, and tactics that let pages rank higher than they otherwise should.

Glenn Gabe published a good analysis of the sites that saw the biggest drops. The pattern was programmatic pages created with AI that add little to no value: thin affiliate pages scraping product data from Amazon and adding nothing except affiliate links back to Amazon.

Most of the sites we manage are small to medium-sized businesses with between 100 and 10,000 pages. We publish one page a week to one page a day, not thousands at once.

The one pattern I found across our clients: pages targeting broad competitive keywords went down, and pages targeting keywords relevant to our clients' specialties went up. That's been the case for essentially every Google update for the past five to ten years. Increasing the weight on authority is one of the easiest levers Google has to pull to reduce spam, so bigger brands keep winning and it gets harder for smaller ones.

Focus on what you're actually the best at. Don't try to compete with companies 10 or 100 times your size. Go after long tail, bottom of the funnel keywords that closely match what your ideal customer would be searching for.