Google August 2025 spam update done rolling out

Google’s August 2025 spam update rollout is now complete. The spam update started on August 26, 2025, just under 27 days ago, finishing on September 22, 2024. This was the first spam update of 2025, while there were three spam updates in 2024.

This update was a general and broad spam update. Google did not announce anything unique with this spam update.

Google wrote, “The rollout was complete as of September 22, 2025.”

What we saw. This spam update touched down very quickly, where sites that were impacted by this update saw the results within about 24 hours. It hit hard and fast. Then, around September 9th, the update heated up again, with a number of sites noticing ranking fluctuations and indexing issues.

While many impacted sites saw steep declines in Google Search organic visibility, some sites that were hit by previous spam updates saw significant recoveries.

Previous spam updates. The last spam update was on December 19, 2024 and was named December 2024 spam update, it completed on December 26.

Here’s our past coverage of confirmed Google spam updates:

• December 2024 spam update
• June 2024 spam update
• March 2024 spam update
• October 2023 spam update
• December 2022 link spam update
• October 2022 spam update 
• November 2021 spam update
• July 2021 link spam update.
• A two-part Spam Update – June 23 and June 28

Why we care. When Google announces and confirms a Google search update, it is generally significant. This one was a significant update and has impacted many sites in a very big way. Some saw their traffic vanish, while others saw nice boosts in rankings and/or recoveries.

A spam update should not impact most sites, but if you were, make sure to check out Google’s documentation on spam updates and make the necessary changes so you can recover with Google’s next spam update.

Spam updates. Google linked to its standard spam updates documentation that reads:

“While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates.

For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.

Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.

In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement. This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.”