Digital Marketing News Mid-October 2026: The Spam Update Winds Down, Fake Authors Get Flagged And Google Ads Grabs Your Offers

When people read the digital marketing news mid-October 2026, they mostly want to know which bits touch their own business. Here is each story in plain English, with what (if anything) to do about it.

Google announced its September 2026 spam update on 24 September and said this one would roll out over around two weeks rather than the usual couple of days. Ranking trackers spiked on 25 to 27 September, again on 30 September and again from 4 to 6 October, which Search Engine Roundtable reads as the third and probably final wave.

At a Google Search Central event in Barcelona, Google explained why there have been so many spam updates this year: there is far more new content than before, and Google is now using AI to help catch spam. According to one attendee’s recap, Google’s Gary Illyes warned that scaled content is becoming more of a problem than link spam, and the recap’s advice was to expect more spam updates.

We checked our own site while the trackers lit up. Semrush’s daily UK data for flypostmarketing.com shows ranking keywords rising from 175 on 24 September to 185 on 7 October, with no dip on any of the spike days. One small site proves nothing about yours, but a busy tracker chart is not the same thing as your traffic falling.

What to do: if you have not been churning out pages in bulk or buying links, there is nothing to fix. If you do have a stack of near-identical pages, one per town or service, now is a good time to ask whether each one says something useful.

Google updated its guidance on AI-generated content to say it is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy before publishing. Its reasoning is blunt: AI tools predict a likely sequence of words rather than look facts up, so they can get things wrong with total confidence.

Google also added a line to its helpful content guidance warning against deceptive authorship information. Made-up author names, AI-generated headshots and false credentials are now described as a form of deception and a signal of a low-quality page.

What to do: if AI helps write your blog or service pages, have someone who knows the subject read every page before it goes live. Put a real name on it, or simply the business name, rather than an invented expert with a generated face.

Google has emailed some advertisers to say that from 12 October 2026 it will automatically pull promotions from your website into your ads, things like coupons and deals. It only applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets that do not already have promotion assets attached.

It is switched on by default. To turn it off, go to your account-level automated assets settings, find Automated Promotions and select Off.

What to do: if your website still shows last month’s offer, or a deal that only applies at one branch, either tidy the site or switch the setting off before Monday. An ad promising a discount you no longer honour is a quick way to pay for an awkward phone call.

Searching a big brand’s name used to bring up its own site and not much else. One test of around 100 large brands found AI Overviews showing for 93% of them, and DemandSphere reported that AI Overviews on branded searches tripled in September. In most of the examples, the AI answer sat further down the page, below the company’s own result.

That data covers big brands, not local firms, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than something happening to your name today.

What to do: search your business name once a month and look at what comes up, AI answer or not. If your website, opening hours or service list are out of date, fix those first, because they are the parts you control.

Google is now showing WhatsApp buttons in the local panel in search results, next to call, directions, website and share, so people can message a business directly. Google previously asked businesses to add WhatsApp numbers to their Business Profile, and more recently added numbers itself for some businesses.

What to do: open your Business Profile and check whether a WhatsApp number is listed. If it is, make sure it goes to a phone somebody checks during working hours, and remove it if nobody does. An unanswered message is an enquiry you never knew you lost.