Google has just announced the release of the August 2026 spam update and said it should only take a few days to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google is dropping support for Euro-denominated check payments for AdSense publishers after August 7, 2026. Google wrote this as a note in this document saying, “Effective August 7, 2026, Google will no longer support Euro-denominated check payments. If you’re receiving payments via USD-denominated checks, you can continue to do so.”

Gary Illyes from Google said Google Search will eventually support the new HTTP QUERY method. He said as the “ecosystem catches up” Google will then support the HTTP QUERY method.

As expected, Google is now enabling those with Google Search Profiles to edit their handle, their short name. This is available by going to your Google Search Profile, click Edit profile and then next to your @handle, click Edit.

Google is testing underlining and maybe hyperlinking the word in the related searches for section of the search results. Normally, that section is not underlined, but for some reason, Google is testing underlining the query.

Sometimes when you look at the ads within OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you might notice an ad from one advertiser first loads and then it quickly blinks and loads a different advertiser. I suspect this is a bit of a deficiency with the ad server, but I am not certain.

There are a number of reports that the performance reports, both for Google Search and the Generative AI features reports, are showing a decline in impressions and clicks (AI report does not show clicks) starting around August 12th and 13th. This seems like a bug because the drop seems to be super widespread.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google is testing blue hyperlinks in the ad descriptions within the sponsored results. These are clickable, keyword rich, links in the ads, similar to what we saw last week with the keyword rich anchor text links but those were black links, not blue.

Google Ads is testing a new layout for review stars for a product in the mobile sponsored results within Google Search. I am pretty sure I’ve seen this layout before, but it is not common and I don’t think I covered it before.

Apple has added over 4,000 new IP addresses for Applebot, Apple’s Siri and Apple Intelligence crawler, to crawl from. Specifically, there are now 18 of /24 CIDR ranges and 3 of /28, which totals 4,656 new IP addresses.

Microsoft Advertising is testing displaying larger images in the Bing sponsored results. These images are full block size images that take up a lot of space in the search results.

Late on Friday, Google’s Robby Stein and Rajan Patel announced on X and X that Google Search is now using its latest AI model named Gemini 3.7 Flash. This model was first announced on Thursday, but Google made no mention of Search, it only said it is its “most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding […]