Google released the August 2025 spam update on August 26, 2025, at around 12:00 pm ET. This update applies globally and to all languages and will take a few weeks to complete.
Today we released the August 2025 spam update.
It may take a few weeks to complete, and we’ll post on the Google Search Status Dashboard when the rollout is done.
The previous spam update was the December 2024 spam update that shocked everyone, since it started right before the holiday season. That update finished in seven days, whereas the August update is expected to take three times as long.
August 2025 Google Spam Update Quick Facts
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google August 2025 Spam Update
- Launched: August 26, 2025, at about 12:00 pm ET
- Rollout: Will take about three weeks to fully roll out.
- Targets: Sites violating some of the Google search spam policies.
- Does Not Target: This update does not target link spam; it does not target the site reputation abuse policy and some other policies.
- Penalty: It penalises some of the spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions and languages.
- Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, Google said you should review its spam policies to ensure they are complying with those.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to the spam update. It can take many months to recover, Google said.
What Google Said
Google didn’t say much but did write:
Released the August 2025 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take a few weeks to complete.
Google also posted this on X:
There is nothing specifically new about this update, outside of Google saying they are running it again. There are no changes to its documentation around this update, but I do suspect Google modified its spam algorithm a bit.
The spam update page was last updated on August 22, 2025, but there were no changes from last December’s version.
This document 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.