Google's anti-spam update launched on 18 August 2026 officially ended on 21 August (Search Status Dashboard), but independent tracking tools recorded a new volatility peak in the following days, documented on 26 August by Search Engine Roundtable. For SEO teams, this instability without official confirmation turns a measurable signal into an uncertainty that is hard to act on.
The facts
- The aggregate index of Search Engine Roundtable's Google Volatility Chart, which compiles fourteen search results tracking tools, climbed back to 35.2 out of 100 on 26 August, after a trough below 25 between 14 and 16 August.
- The Wireboard sensor, which for its part aggregates twelve SEO data providers, fell to 3.5 out of 10 on 16 August before climbing back to 6.1 on 26 August, a level comparable to its 27 July peak (6.2).
- Between the end of the June spam update, on 26 June, and the launch of the August one, Search Engine Roundtable counted six volatility peaks not confirmed by Google (the episode nicknamed the “7-Eleven update”, 18-19 July, 24 July, 1 to 3 August, 5 August, then 12-13 August), before this new movement observed since 21 August.
Why does Google keep this new wave vague?
Google only publicly confirms its named updates, core update or spam update. Between two announcements, the algorithm is adjusted continuously, and third-party tools translate any deviation above the usual noise into a volatility peak. When several independent trackers measure the same rise at the same time, the coincidence becomes a more reliable clue than an isolated figure, even without official confirmation. Barry Schwartz, who has documented these cycles for more than twenty years, sums up the situation: everything looks as though Google were rolling out a new update right after the spam update, without announcing it.
The fact that this peak starts right after the close of an anti-spam update whose rollout was completed in under three days also weighs on how the signal is read. On the SEO forums relayed by Search Engine Roundtable, several publishers report traffic losses in Search and Discover in the days following the 21 August close; one of them even describes visitors being sent to 404 error pages for two weeks, with no confirmed link to the update. The recommended caution is to avoid reacting to the aggregate average, which smooths out very different situations from one sector to another, and to check the ranking of your priority pages on your own topic before drawing a conclusion.
AIxH's view
AIxH's SEO & GSO practice tracks these composite indices alongside its clients' real rankings, because a single tool can react strongly to a handful of isolated keywords without reflecting an underlying trend. A post-update movement of this scale takes several weeks of tracking to read properly; a single reading tells you little. That is the method we apply as an SEO agency in Luxembourg: measure and segment before correcting. If you have observed an unexplained traffic variation since 21 August, a quick diagnosis places your case in relation to this general movement.