September Spam Update, AI Overviews, and Followable Search Profiles

Barry Schwartz just covered three things worth your actual time: the September spam update’s early wobble, reports of loading AI Overviews, and the state of followable Search profiles. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhDSHFI9JMs 🎯

Why I’m writing this: these are the seams where Google reprices organic clicks, and if your CTR model or entity graph isn’t instrumented, you fly blind. I’m translating Barry’s roundup into a short, testable plan you can run this week, no vibes, just segmentation, instrumentation, and entity hardening.

// My reaction

Reaction: facepalm

Bold action beats speculation. Ship small, measured fixes, then watch by segment—not sitewide screenshots.

What Barry reported this week

• Early chatter and examples of the September 2026 spam update moving rankings. It’s early. Expect reversals and second-order effects. 📉 Per Google’s status dashboard, this rollout began September 24, 2026 at 09:15 PDT, applies globally across all languages, and may take up to two weeks. Incident details. (status.search.google.com)
• Reports of loading AI Overviews in results. That timing matters, users may see classic results first before the AI box renders. 🔎 Google is testing a “Loading…” control in place of “Show more” under AI Overviews. Coverage. (seroundtable.com)
• The Follow button for Search profiles disappeared on desktop but remains on mobile, profiles are US‑only right now and eligibility is tied to follower thresholds. Profiles don’t directly boost rankings, but they can influence what followers see in Discover. SER coverage • Create a Search profile (eligibility + US‑only) • Manage your Search profile (ranking/Discover note) • Add a Search profile badge (Discover effect).

I do not state numbers here because none were provided. Treat these as directional signals, not settled facts.

What to do about the spam update this week

You do not fix volatility with vibes. You fix it with segmentation and proof.

1) Segment the damage by template and intent

• Break out impacted URLs by directory and page type. Product vs article vs category. Commercial vs informational vs local. Do not average the site, the template matters more than your sitewide score.
• Compare losers’ SERP features vs winners. Did you lose featured snippets, FAQs, or review stars, that is a signal, not a mystery. Pull before and after.

2) Separate Search vs Discover traffic

• Discover repricing can look like a penalty. It usually is not the same thing. Separate it in your dashboards and annotate any feed or content card changes on your side.

3) Prune obvious junk and thin appendices

• Kill doorway pages, spun summaries, orphaned tag archives, and pagination dead ends. Keep crawl for content with intent match and demand. If you would not put your name on it, it should not be indexable.

4) Strengthen review and experience signals where it counts

• If you sell or recommend, your review content needs actual criteria, proof of use, and clear authorship. Screenshots, test methods, comparisons, conflict disclosures. Not platitudes.

“Loading AI Overviews” changes the attention clock

If the AI box shows a loading state, users get a beat to scan organic results before the AI answer steals the viewport, so CTR might bump on some queries and drop on others depending on snippet strength and brand.

• Track presence and position of AI Overviews for your head and money terms with the AI Visibility Checker, sample on a schedule and log state changes. 🧰
• Watch branded vs non branded deltas. Brand queries often see different AI behavior than generics, so do not blend them.
• Cross check with the playbook: AI Answers and SEO: Protect Traffic From Clickless Search. Use it to prioritize snippet work and entity support where AI is most aggressive.

Followable Search profiles raise the entity bar

Do not guess whether this matters, assume entity quality compounds into rankings, Discover, and AI answers, then build accordingly.

• Make authors real, full bio page, consistent headshot, a single canonical “About the author” URL used everywhere. Link to high signal profiles like academic pages, GitHub, LinkedIn, or press pages. 🧵
• Mark up Person and Organization cleanly. Validate and expand with the Schema Opportunity Analyzer.
• Align bios with your top topics. If an author writes in B2B data but their bios scream lifestyle blogger, you are confusing Google and users.
• Publishers, cross reference the quick plan for AIO and PAA displacement: AI Overviews Replacing People Also Ask: Quick Publisher Playbook.

Fast checks you can run today

• Pull a 14 day diff of top losers by directory. Correlate to on site changes shipped in the last month. 📈
• Sample 25 head terms and 25 money terms for AI Overview presence and state. Log the load timing and position.
• Audit your top three authors’ bio consistency across site, LinkedIn, and knowledge eligible sources. Fix mismatches.
• Remove or noindex any page that exists only to catch filler variations. You will not miss it, your crawl budget will thank you.

Bold action beats speculation. Ship small, measured fixes, then watch by segment, not sitewide screenshots.

Takeaway

Early update noise, AI Overview timing, and followable profiles all point at the same truth, entities and extractable proof are doing more work than ever. If you segment impact, instrument AI Overview presence, and harden your author and org entities, you will keep more of the clicks that still exist. That is how I would run it this week, tight loops, clean data, and only changes I can measure. And yes, this loops right back into SEO and GEO and AI practice, structured entities feed AI answers, timing changes reshape CTR, and updates punish weak sections before weak sites. 🙂

// My reaction

Reaction: celebration