Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Google’s September 2026 webmaster report shows the company dropped the “Show More” button in favor of pushing searchers directly into AI Mode, started rolling out google.com/goto tracking redirect parameters aimed at blocking third-party scraping tools like SerpAPI, and deployed its August 2026 spam update that caused real ranking volatility across the month. AI Overviews now runs on Gemini 3.7 Flash after a brief, paused experiment with AI-generated images inside the feature.
Three separate changes, one clear direction. Google spent the last month making search results feel less like a list of links and more like a conversation you’re being steered into, while quietly making it harder for anyone outside Google to track what’s actually happening in the results.
The “Show More” button is gone
Google dropped the traditional “Show More” button that used to let users expand deeper into a results page manually. In its place, the company is pushing searchers more directly into AI Mode, its conversational search experience. New features layered into that push include link carousel cards for breaking news, plus AI Mode capabilities like flight price tracking, hotel booking, and stock price charts built directly into the conversational interface.
This isn’t a subtle design tweak. Removing a button that let users control how they browsed traditional results, while simultaneously expanding what the AI-driven alternative can do, is Google actively narrowing the on-ramps back toward classic search behavior. For publishers who’ve spent years optimizing for people scrolling through blue links, that on-ramp is getting smaller by the month.
The goto redirect nobody asked for
The more technical change involves google.com/goto, a tracking parameter Google started rolling out on search result links. The stated purpose is protecting search results from third-party tools scraping ranking data, with SerpAPI specifically named as one target. Whether that’s the full story or partly about tightening Google’s grip on click data that rank-tracking tools rely on is a fair question the SEO community is already debating.
Practically, this matters for anyone running rank-tracking software or scraping SERPs to monitor visibility. The report notes that tools have already developed fixes for the technical change, which tells you two things: the redirect is real and already affecting data collection, and the cat-and-mouse game between Google and third-party SEO tools continues exactly as it always has, with Google making a move and vendors patching around it within weeks.
The spam update that actually moved rankings
Underneath the UI changes, Google deployed its August 2026 spam update between August 18 and 21, with additional unconfirmed movement both before and after that window. Spam updates tend to cause real, measurable ranking volatility, and this one was no exception based on community reporting throughout the month.
A few smaller items rounded out the report. Favicon bugs that had been causing display issues got fixed. Crawl stats data problems, which had been frustrating site owners trying to diagnose indexing issues, were resolved. The IRS website reportedly experienced a significant ranking drop during the month and has since recovered, an odd but real data point about how even major government sites aren’t immune to volatility during a spam update cycle. Fewer PDF results are showing up in search overall, and Reddit, despite plenty of speculation to the contrary, gets no special ranking preference according to Google’s own account.
AI Overviews’ image experiment came and went fast
Google briefly tested AI-generated images embedded directly inside AI Overviews before pausing the experiment shortly after launch. The underlying model powering AI Overviews is now Gemini 3.7 Flash. The quick pause on the image feature suggests either technical issues or quality concerns severe enough that Google didn’t want it running while they sorted it out, which is notable restraint for a company that’s otherwise been moving fast on AI Mode expansion this month.
Bottom Line: None of these changes individually would make headlines. Together, they show a search engine actively engineering its own interface to funnel more traffic through AI-generated answers while making the data needed to monitor that shift harder to collect from outside. Publishers and SEOs who are only tracking rankings the old way are increasingly missing half the picture.
