What's up everyone and welcome to the Surfside PPC Newsletter!

Two things happened this week that will show up in your account whether or not you do anything about them. Google put an October 19 deadline on the business name in your ads, and the September spam update moved rankings a second time on September 30, after most people had already decided what it cost them.

That second one is the frustrating part. If you checked your traffic the week the update launched, wrote down the damage, and moved on, you were looking at a number that was not finished yet. The rollout was still running. Nobody sends you a notice when a second wave lands, so the rest of the drop shows up in a report you already closed.

Here is what changed this week, starting with the one that has a date attached.

Google Ads is loosening its business name rules on October 19​
You can now run a business name that does not match your destination domain, but only if it is a real brand, you have a verified relationship with the domain owner, and the products are sold on that site. Resellers, affiliate distributors, and booking intermediaries are shut out entirely. Pull every ad where the name and the domain do not line up, because one disapproval here can take a whole ad group out of the auction.
​Read the full breakdown​

The September 2026 spam update hit again on September 30​
Volatility came back on September 30 and October 1, and site owners reported sharp drops on the 30th specifically. Google never called it phase two, but it did say up front that this one would roll out over about two weeks with multiple impact cycles. Log your exact dates and verify the movement in Search Console before you change anything structural.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google rewrote its content guidance and called out fake author profiles​
Google updated two documentation pages on October 1. Fabricating creator profiles with AI headshots or false credentials is now explicitly called deception and a low-quality signal, and Google defined main content and named its quality one of the most critical factors in judging a page. It also told you plainly to fact-check AI output before publishing, metadata included.
​Read the full breakdown​

Performance Max asset groups now support A/B testing​
You can finally test headlines, descriptions, images, and video against what you are already running, which means PMax creative advice stops being a matter of opinion. The catch is that the asset group locks to every other edit once the experiment starts. Make your fixes before you hit go, not after.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Ads will translate your whole Search campaign into a new market​
A new beta takes an English US Search campaign and rebuilds it in another language, carrying over headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, callouts, and keywords. It also copies your budgets and bids across without converting currency, so set those by hand before it serves. Your landing pages are still your problem.
​Read the full breakdown​

If you only do one thing this week, pull every ad where the business name does not match your final URL domain and decide which of Google's three conditions you can actually document. You have until October 19, and fixing it yourself is a lot cheaper than finding out through a disapproval.

If you ever have any questions, please feel free to reply directly to this email. Thanks for subscribing!

-Corey Frankosky

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