English-language and Russian-language media have picked up the claim that a new Google Core Update has “cleaned up” search results. There is no confirmation: the Google Search Status Dashboard shows no incidents as of October 21, 2026, and no ranking entries for the past eight days.
In the incident history for rankings, the last core update is the May one. It started May 21 and ran 11 days and 21 hours. Before it was the March update, which started March 27 and ran 12 days. After May, Google reported only spam updates: the June one (from June 24), the August one (from August 18), and the September one.
The September spam update started September 24 and ran 13 days and 16 hours, so it ended around October 8. If your traffic dropped in October, first check the dates in Search Console against this window. Spam updates hit different sites than core updates: those that violate spam policies, such as large-scale unhelpful content.
The article that prompted this claims that “classic EMD sites” are falling and review sites are rising, but it gives no figures, no update name, and no dates. It offers no measurements and no case studies. The rest boils down to the claim that networks of dozens of automatically generated review sites reach the top within a week. There is no confirmation of this either, and Google is actively fighting large-scale content of this kind. It is not advisable to base planning on it.
What to check: the date when the drop began and the type of pages that lost visibility, then compare them with the spam update window. If a next core update happens, Google usually notes it on the same dashboard. The release date is unknown.
