Whats been happening in search this month for Sept 2026
Plenty of people spent September braced for a big Google core update. It hasn't come. A spam update arrived at the last minute instead, but the more interesting changes this month weren't algorithm updates at all.
What happened instead is quieter and, I'd personally argue, more important. Google keeps changing what "being found" actually looks like. Being number one matters less than it did. Being seen, trusted and quoted, across Maps, AI answers, images and the old blue links, matters more.
I’ve stopped calling this stuff SEO (search engine optimisation) some time ago and now simply call it search exposure. And what’s becoming ever more apparant to me is that a few of the shortcuts people have been leaning on are being closed off.
Here's what’s caught my eye in September, and what it means if you run a small business.
1. You can now see how you show up in AI answers, and in image searches.
On 31 August, Google rolled out its generative AI reports in Search Console to every website. For the first time, you can see where your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with impressions by page, country and device.
This matters because most business owners have been guessing. They hear "AI is taking our traffic" and either panic or shrug. Now there's actual data.
One word of caution. An AI impression is not the same as a normal search impression. Being mentioned in an answer doesn't mean anyone clicked. Treat it as a measure of reputation rather than traffic, which, oddly, is probably what it is.
Google has also added a switch that lets you opt your site out of its AI features entirely. It says opting out won't affect your normal rankings. But you'd also vanish from AI answers completely. For most small businesses, I'd leave it on and gather a few months of data before deciding anything. Choosing to be invisible is rarely a winning strategy.
Then, on 24 September, Google went a step further. Search Console now has a "multimodal" filter, showing when your pages appear for searches made with an image: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads, and Chrome's "Search this image". You won't see what the photo was, only which of your pages turned up.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. People increasingly search by pointing their phone at something. Someone photographs a lovely resin driveway, a garden room or a set of shutters on a neighbour's house, and asks Google who does that. If your website is full of stock photos, you're not in that conversation. Photos of your actual work have quietly become a way of being found, not just decoration.
2. Position one isn't what it used to be
Google confirmed in late August that some AI Overviews now expand automatically into a much longer answer. No "show more" click needed. The result looks a lot like AI Mode, sitting right at the top of the page.
The practical effect is simple. Your organic listing gets pushed further down, especially on a phone. You can rank first and still be below the fold.
There's now some hard evidence on what this does to clicks. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University tracked the real searches of 1,100 people for a week. When their searches were pushed into Google's AI Mode, the rate at which they clicked through to an outside website fell by 18.8 percentage points compared with normal Google. They also liked the experience less. The study was US-only and is still a draft, but the direction is hard to argue with.
This is a useful reminder that rankings were only ever a proxy. Nobody actually wants to rank first. They want the phone to ring. A number one position under a wall of AI text, a map pack and some adverts is a very different thing from a number one position on a clean page.
So when someone tells you "we got you to position one", the better question is: what does the page actually look like around it? And did anything happen as a result?
3. Blocking AI bots, and accidentally blocking Google
This is the one I'd worry about most.
Lots of site owners, understandably fed up with AI companies scraping their content, have been switching on blanket bot-blocking settings in Cloudflare and similar services. The trouble is, some of those settings also lock out Googlebot. Result: pages drop out of the index, rankings collapse, and in some cases Google Ads campaigns break too, because Google can't check the landing pages.
It's a classic case of a sensible-sounding fix causing a bigger problem than the one it solved. And because it happens in a settings panel rather than on the website itself, nobody notices until the enquiries dry up.
If you or your web person have touched bot protection or "crawl control" settings this year, check that Googlebot, Bingbot and Google's Ads crawler are explicitly allowed. It takes ten minutes and could save you months.
While you're at it, a related finding from Search Engine Land research: pages that are only linked to through JavaScript are often invisible to AI crawlers. Make sure your important pages have at least one plain, old-fashioned link pointing at them.
4. The Reddit shortcut just got shut
For a while, one of the popular "AI visibility" tricks was to plant flattering mentions of your business in Reddit threads, in the hope ChatGPT would pick them up and quote them.
According to Promptwatch data, Reddit held a steady 3.8% share of ChatGPT's citations until 14 August. Then it dropped to around 0.5%, almost overnight. Google's AI features are citing Reddit less too, though not as sharply.
Nobody outside those companies knows exactly why. But the pattern is familiar. Every shortcut in search has a half-life. Link farms, keyword stuffing, spun articles: they all worked, briefly, until they didn't.
The things that don't get switched off are the dull ones. Being genuinely good at something, and having real customers say so in public. It's less exciting than a hack, but it compounds rather than expires.
5. Your Google Business Profile is still doing the heavy lifting
Whitespark analysed around 1.8 million Google Business Profiles and found two things local businesses should pay attention to.
First, businesses using a specific primary category appeared in the top 10 local results 12.5% of the time. Those with a generic category managed 9.2%. "Resin driveway installer" beats "contractor".
Second, completeness matters. Profiles with a website, description, opening hours, photos and a claimed listing appeared in the top 10 about 13% of the time. The least complete profiles managed about 4%.
This is correlation, not proof. But think about it from the customer's side. A half-empty profile sends a signal, and it's not a good one. If you can't be bothered to add your opening hours, what else can't you be bothered with? Completeness is a cheap way of showing you care, and people notice that long before Google does.
The updates: one arrived, one didn't
Google's last broad core update finished on 2 June. Plenty of people expected another in September. It still hasn't been announced.
What did arrive, on 24 September, was a spam update. It's Google's fourth of the year, after March, June and August. The difference this time is the timescale: the earlier ones finished in a day or two, while this one could take up to two weeks. Google hasn't said what it's targeting.
The August spam update was more disruptive than usual too. SE Ranking found 16.71% of URLs that had been in the top 10 dropped beyond position 100.
If your traffic wobbles over the next fortnight, don't panic, and don't start rewriting pages. A drop during a spam update doesn't automatically mean Google thinks you're a spammer. When one site falls, another rises. Wait for the rollout to finish, then look at which pages moved, when, and what replaced them.
What I'd do this month
Log into Search Console and look at the new AI and multimodal reports, just to set a baseline
Swap stock photos for real photos of your work, your team and your premises
Check your Cloudflare or bot protection settings aren't blocking Googlebot
Make sure your key pages have plain HTML links pointing at them
Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile, and pick the most specific category you honestly can
Ignore anyone selling Reddit or AI citation "hacks"
Sit tight while the spam update rolls out
Judge rankings by what they produce, not where they sit
None of this is glamorous. But the question that matters hasn't changed. When somebody is looking for what you sell, are they finding you, or somebody else? The businesses that keep answering "us" aren't the ones chasing every change. They're the ones who've quietly got the basics right, and are still standing when the latest trick gets switched off.
Thanks for reading,
Ollie
