Industry News

Google has completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update, following a 27-day rollout cycle. This update started on August 26, 2025 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on September 22, 2025. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update, similar to the December 2024 spam update but took 20 days longer to rollout.

Google is testing a new AI Search based option codenamed Darksteel. This reminds me of when we caught Google testing 47 different AI Search options back in March but Darksteel was not one of them.

As you know, Google dropped the num parameter to see more search results on a page, then the third-party tools scraping became severely impacted and many saw impression declines in Search Console. Google confirmed the num parameter is not officially supported. So what was the real impact on Search Console data?

Google is testing AI-generated product summaries in the AI Mode results, after you click on a specific product. I was able to generate this in one out of every four browser attempts, and here is how it works.

Google is testing a button that takes you from Google Search short translations answers, to the ability to translate a full conversation in another interface.

The Google August 2025 spam update will probably be marked as completed tomorrow, September 22, 2025. That is what John Mueller from Google said deep inside a comment on a LinkedIn post. He wrote today, "Just between us, we'll probably mark it complete tomorrow."

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

For the original iTunes version...

Google announced that AI Mode will be coming to the Chrome address bar, Omnibox, soon. This means you can type in long queries and then select AI Mode to enter the AI Mode experience directly. Plus, you will be able to search the page you are on, using the Chrome Omnibox and get an AI Overview, where you can do follow-up questions in AI Mode.

Google is testing placing the citation cards/boxes at the bottom of the AI Overviews, instead of on the right-hand side, on the desktop search interface. This requires you to scroll to click on the sources and links for those AI Overviews.