A Google update is rolling out right now, the August 2026 spam update, and my inbox looks the way it always does in a rollout week: screenshots of the Performance chart, one red arrow, and the question “what should I change?”. So instead of answering it one email at a time, here is the checklist I actually run on every property I manage when Google announces an update. It is short, and most of it is refusing to do things.
The honest summary first: during a rollout you gather evidence and change nothing. Every useful action either happens in the first hour or after the dashboard says complete. The middle is where people do damage.
What should I do when Google announces an update?
Three things, all on day one, all boring.
Write the date down. Search Console has no annotations feature, so the start date goes in my own spreadsheet, against every property. Not “mid August”. The exact date from the Search Status Dashboard, because that dashboard is the only primary record of when a rollout started and ended, and in a month you will not remember.
Take an indexing snapshot. Ranking updates and indexing are reported in different places, and an update can remove pages from the index, not just move them down. On day one I pull per-URL index status for every template-driven folder I look after, using the bulk URL inspection tool on this site, and file it as the before. If a folder full of URLs moves from Indexed to “Crawled - currently not indexed” across the rollout, that is a stronger finding than any position wobble, and you can only see it if you captured the before. If pages do start vanishing, I wrote up what to check when pages drop out of the index.
Fix your before window now, on paper. The clean before is the seven days ending the day before the announcement. For the current update that means 11 to 17 August, because the dashboard says 18 August and John Mueller has confirmed Google does not roll updates out ahead of the announcement. Do not let your own chart pick the date: if your numbers wobbled on the 15th, that wobble belongs to something else, and backdating the update to match it will send your whole diagnosis to the wrong place.
What not to do while it rolls out
Know how long you are waiting before you start waiting. I timed the last ten rollouts from the dashboard in how long Google updates take to roll out: core updates cluster around two weeks, spam updates do not cluster at all, and knowing which one you are in front of decides how long the quiet period lasts.
Do not act on daily Performance data. Positions move, settle, and move again during a rollout; a page that drops on Tuesday and recovers by Friday was not hit, it was re-evaluated twice. Do not rewrite pages mid-rollout, because if you change a page on Wednesday you have destroyed the only clean measurement of what the update did to it. And do not promise anyone a recovery date: Google’s own core updates documentation says improvement, when it comes, can take months and may wait on future updates. Anyone quoting you a faster schedule during week one is guessing. Check Google’s data anomalies before you trust any comparison window too: August 2026 alone put three reporting gaps in the middle of one, including two days missing from crawl stats.
The full timeline, which is really just three windows and one rule:
How do I know if a Google update affected my site?
Only after the dashboard marks the rollout complete, and only with the two windows above. Impressions first, then clicks, because impressions tell you whether Google still shows the page at all. Weekday-matched, because comparing a week with a weekend against a week without one manufactures a drop out of nothing.
Then look at pages, not the property total. Updates rarely shave an even percentage off a site; they take out a class of pages. If the property fell 20% and 90% of the loss sits in one folder, that folder is the finding, and the fix is whatever that template is missing. The property-level line on the chart is for feelings. The page-level table is for decisions.
Open the Manual actions report too, because a manual action is not an update and the two get confused constantly. If there is an entry there, the rollout is not your story, and the site reputation policy in particular now behaves differently by region, which I covered in Google’s site reputation policy update.
And check indexing separately, against your day-one snapshot. Same folders, same tool, second run. Position changes and index removals are different verdicts with different fixes.
Why the checklist is mostly restraint
Because the biggest cost of an update week is rarely the update. It is the rushed rewrite of pages that were never hit, done mid-rollout on noisy data, which then can’t be separated from the update’s own effect. Every step above exists to keep one clean before-and-after per page, and everything I am doing for the current rollout is logged in my running note on the August 2026 spam update. So far that note says: still rolling, nothing changed, snapshots on file. That is what a good update week looks like.
Sources
- Google Search Status Dashboard, ranking incident history
- Google Search Central, Google Search core updates and your website
- John Mueller on LinkedIn, 19 August 2026, confirming Google does not roll out an announced update before it announces it