LabraSEO

Big ranking update coming 🔔, Google fights AI spam with AI 🤖, ChatGPT image ads 🖼️

Issue 5, 6 October 2026

What changed in search and AI answers, for marketing teams, in five minutes.

Headlines & Launches

Google says spam updates now use AI to catch AI spam (4 minute read)

At a Google Search Central event in Europe, Google said it is running more spam updates because content volume has exploded and is now using AI to catch more of it, with Gary Illyes citing a figure of 40 billion spam pages filtered a day. Google also pointed to "AI slop" increasing in the Discover feed and said user feedback shapes new spam filters. For sites built on thin or templated content, this is another signal that scale without quality is a growing risk, not a shortcut.

OpenAI to test ads inside ChatGPT image generation (4 minute read)

OpenAI announced it will test a new ad format that shows ads alongside images as ChatGPT generates them, starting later this month in the US with a small group of advertisers. OpenAI says ads will be clearly labelled and will not influence ChatGPT's answers. If you advertise, this is a new placement to watch, though it is a limited early test, not a general rollout.

Search Console dark mode announcement was a joke (3 minute read)

A Google engineer appeared to announce dark mode for Search Console at a live event in Barcelona, complete with screenshots, but John Mueller later confirmed it was a joke and Google is not building it. Nothing changes for your reporting workflow; file this under conference humour, not a product update.

Deep Dives & Analysis

Google may be preparing a major update before the holidays (7 minute read)

Search Engine Journal's Roger Montti argues that Google's pattern of pre-holiday core updates, combined with a two week spam update now running and recent changes to Google's helpful content guidance on user satisfaction and authentic content, points to a significant update coming before year end. The updated guidance stresses that page quality depends on how well the main content serves its purpose and satisfies the user, which Montti flags as more important than the related warning about fake author profiles. If this pattern holds, now is the time to review whether your content genuinely satisfies the intent behind your target queries, rather than just targeting keywords.

Google shares rare data on how long crawling and indexing take (4 minute read)

At the same European event, Gary Illyes presented internal Google data breaking down typical and slowest timeframes for crawling, indexing and serving, including around 20 hours typically for discovering a new URL versus weeks in the slowest cases. Illyes noted the stages are linked, so a delay in crawling pushes back indexing too. This gives marketing teams a rough benchmark for how long to wait before worrying that a new or updated page has not appeared in Search, though Illyes cautioned the numbers were an internal exercise, not a formal guarantee.

AI agent traffic surge may be pushing Google to restrict rank tracking (5 minute read)

Search Engine Journal links Google's recent crackdown on SERP scraping to a reported 1,700% year on year rise in AI agent traffic cited by Cloudflare, with agents now accounting for over half of internet traffic by some measures. The concern is that AI driven search results are more computationally expensive to serve, so high volumes of automated querying strain Google's systems more than regular search. If your team relies on third party rank trackers, expect more friction and possible gaps in tracking data as Google tightens access, separate from any change in your actual rankings.

Tactics & Tools

Treat AI citations as a signal to investigate, not a win to report (8 minute read)

Ahrefs' Constance Tan recommends monitoring AI answers for recurring gaps around customer problems, comparisons and brand facts, then checking cited sources and bot access before deciding whether to fix a page, run outreach or publish something new. She also warns against reporting AI visibility as a standalone metric; discuss it alongside conversions and customer feedback instead. For marketing leads, this is a practical filter before any AI visibility report reaches leadership: confirm the citation reflects something fixable, not just noise.

RankZero's free AI SEO audit (Sponsor)

See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find and cite your brand. Free, results in 30 seconds, no signup.

From X and LinkedIn

Brodie Clark: Check your product feed for missing images, not just your site (1 minute read)

On X, Brodie Clark describes auditing an ecommerce account with over 2 million products and an average of one image per listing in Google Merchant Center, despite the images existing and rating as high resolution. Adding more images per product strengthens how free listings perform, separate from click through rate. If your product detail pages have more images than your Merchant Center feed, syncing them is a low effort fix worth checking this week.

Cyrus Shepard: what Google actually means by content effort (1 minute read)

Cyrus Shepard explains that Google's updated helpful content docs use effort to mean evidence of useful work visible on the page, not how much work actually went into it, pointing to leaked API data points like contentEffort and ugcDiscussionEffortScore. He argues high effort pages tend to include original facts or unique perspectives that AI tools cannot easily replicate.

Jake Ward: why Google AI should be the first AI search priority (1 minute read)

Jake Ward argues that Google AI Overviews alone handle roughly 5.9 billion searches a day versus around 200 million across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity combined, making Google the platform to optimise for first before expanding to other AI tools.