Sunday, September 27, 2026
10 stories · 3 topics · 8 outlets
Agent-to-Agent Marketing
2Answer Engines
3Google AI Overviews Have More Links, But Not All Reach The Web
Search Engine Journal reports that Google now places more links inside AI Overviews, and that some of those links send the click into AI Mode rather than to a website. Search Console counts the two kinds of interaction differently, so an AI Overview link in a report does not always mean a visit. Marketers should check which AI Overview placements actually reach their pages before counting them as traffic.
GEO: why technical and web content teams can no longer work in silos
The Journal du Net column argues that no single department owns generative engine optimization: technical teams, SEO staff and communications all have to work on it together if a brand is to be cited in AI answers. It is a first-person argument piece rather than new data or a product announcement. Marketers should treat GEO as a shared process across engineering, SEO and content instead of parking it with one team.
B2B answer engine optimization: How to show up in AI
Semrush published a guide to B2B answer engine optimization, arguing the work improves the odds of appearing in the AI answers that buying committees read. The post covers how B2B buyers use AI tools and how content should be written for those answers. Marketers selling to buying groups can use it as a starting checklist for the pages they want cited.
Search & Platforms
5Google September 2026 Spam Update Has Been Unleashed
Google announced the September 2026 spam update and said the global rollout will take a couple of weeks and affect all languages. Google says only sites that break its spam policies are affected. Marketers should watch rankings over the next two weeks for any pages they rely on for AI-answer citations, because a page that drops out of Google's index cannot be quoted by Google's AI features.
How To Find All PDFs That Have Been Recently Deindexed Using The Search Console API, URL Inspection API, And Analytics Edge
Google has been dropping PDFs from its index at scale, with many affected URLs showing as "Crawled, not indexed" in Search Console, Glenn Gabe writes, crediting Savanna Gray with spotting it on LinkedIn. Gabe sets out a method that uses the Search Console API, the URL Inspection API and Analytics Edge to find every PDF a site has lost, and he says some sites have since seen PDFs reindexed and clicks recover. Sites that keep product sheets, specs or documentation in PDFs should check those URLs in Search Console and move the content to HTML where they can.
Google Rolls Out September 2026 Spam Update Globally
Google's September 2026 spam update is rolling out worldwide and may take up to two weeks to complete, Search Engine Journal reports. Spam updates change which pages survive in search results, and those results feed the sources behind AI Overviews and AI Mode. Marketers should watch Search Console for ranking losses over the rollout window on the pages they depend on for AI citations.
Announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console
Google Search Console now reports performance for multimodal web searches, so site owners can see how people reach their pages through searches that mix images and text, Google says. The post does not name the individual surfaces that feed the report. Marketers should open the new report and check how much of their traffic and impressions come from visual and multimodal queries.
Google starts rolling out its September 2026 spam update worldwide
Google began rolling out the September 2026 spam update on September 24, its fourth spam update of the year, according to the Search Status Dashboard and a Google Search Central post. The rollout is global and covers all languages, and Google's John Mueller told Search Engine Roundtable it can take up to two weeks, longer than the earlier 2026 spam updates. Google has not said which parts of its spam detection changed. Expect ranking and organic traffic movement over the next two weeks, and check Search Console before drawing conclusions from a single day's numbers.