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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Google completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update today…

@DrEliDavid Worst since Germany 1930s — Mike Martin (@MikeMartinGB) Sep 22, 2025 from Twitter https://twitter.com/MikeMartinGB September 22, 2025 at 03:55PM

@Elonov_MMA He will get knocked off it, and I that will probably be the last big fight he’ll ever see, he doesn’t have the heart for the top tier — Mike Martin (@MikeMartinGB) Sep 22, 2025 from Twitter https://twitter.com/MikeMartinGB September 22, 2025 at 03:53PM

@Keir_Starmer What’s this about you bankrupting the country to Palestine, who now want 2 trillion in reparations? Did you royally screw the UK? — Mike Martin (@MikeMartinGB) Sep 22, 2025 from Twitter https://twitter.com/MikeMartinGB September 22, 2025 at 03:33PM

Google is testing AI-generated product summaries in the AI Mode results, after you click on a specific product. I was able to generate this in one out of every four browser attempts, and here is how it works.

As you know, Google dropped the num parameter to see more search results on a page, then the third-party tools scraping became severely impacted and many saw impression declines in Search Console. Google confirmed the num parameter is not officially supported. So what was the real impact on Search Console data?

Google is testing a new AI Search based option codenamed Darksteel. This reminds me of when we caught Google testing 47 different AI Search options back in March but Darksteel was not one of them.

Google has completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update, following a 27-day rollout cycle. This update started on August 26, 2025 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on September 22, 2025. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update, similar to the December 2024 spam update but took 20 days longer to rollout.