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

Four of this past week's five changes move your numbers without anything in your account looking different. Your rankings shifted over the weekend because Google started a spam update on Thursday. Your Search Console text search totals may have dropped on September 24 because Google pulled image searches into a separate bucket. And the way you have been judging bid changes for years turns out to be the wrong measurement entirely.

That is what makes a week like this one frustrating. None of it shows up as an alert. You find it a month later when you are trying to explain a traffic drop or a cost per lead change to somebody, and the honest answer is that the reporting moved, not the performance.

Here is what changed, starting with the one that is still running right now.

Google's September 2026 spam update is rolling out and the weekend was loud. Google released it on September 24, it applies globally and to all languages, and the rollout can take up to two weeks. Independent trackers lit up from Friday through Sunday, with Saturday the loudest day. Do not start changing pages while it is still running, because you will never know afterward whether a recovery came from your fix or from the update settling. Export your Search Console data now and wait for the completion notice.
​Read the full breakdown​

Customer Match now takes IP addresses, and they are not hashed. Google added two columns to the upload file, user IP address and user interaction timestamp. Every other identifier gets hashed before it leaves your machine. These two do not. The feature is unavailable in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, and Google is putting the job of excluding those users on you. Get a real answer on consent before you upload anything.
​Read the full breakdown​

Smart Bidding learning is now measured in conversions, not days. Google reframed its documentation to say learning can take up to around 50 conversions or three conversion cycles. Two weeks means something completely different at 40 conversions a week than it does at 4. If you have been evaluating a low-volume account on a two-week clock, you have been making decisions on a model that was still guessing.
​Read the full breakdown​

Search Console now separates image search traffic from text search. The new multimodal filter covers Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome's search-this-image option. It started rolling out September 24. There is no query data attached, so you get pages, countries, and devices and nothing about intent. If your text search numbers dipped that day, check this before you go looking for a ranking problem.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Ads API v25.2 brings competitor benchmarks into your reporting tools. Version 25.2 shipped September 23 with competitive benchmark percentiles, asset group level URL controls for Performance Max, and a new alert for when your target CPA or target ROAS is too restrictive to enter auctions. That last one is the useful part, because a target set too tight does not fail loudly, it just quietly stops competing.
​Read the full breakdown​

If you only do one thing this week, export your Search Console data today. The spam update is still rolling, and the multimodal split changed what your web search totals mean as of September 24. Pull a clean baseline now so you have something honest to compare against in two weeks.

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

-Corey Frankosky

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