How Does an SEO Company Handle Google Algorithm Updates?

When Google announces an update, a competent SEO company’s first move is to wait and measure. It confirms the update on Google’s Search Status Dashboard, lets the rollout finish, and segments which pages and queries moved. Only then does it respond: a content review for core updates, removal of the specific violation for spam updates, and no change at all for pages the data shows were not affected.

Confirm the Update on Google’s Own Dashboard

Google lists confirmed ranking updates, with start and end times, in the ranking history on its Search Status Dashboard. An agency checks it alongside its own rank tracking and third-party volatility trackers, so it knows an update is rolling out before a client calls about a drop.

Rollout length varies too much to predict from the announcement. Google’s March 2026 spam update began on March 24 at 12:00 Pacific with a note that “The rollout may take a few days to complete”. It was complete by 07:30 the next morning, about 19.5 hours later. The September 2026 spam update, by the dashboard’s record, ran for nearly 14 days. Core updates in 2025 took between about 14 and 18 days; in 2024 they ranged from about 6 days (December) to 45 days (March 5 to April 19).

Let the Rollout Finish Before Judging

Changing pages while an update is still rolling out mixes the update’s effect with your own. Google’s core updates documentation recommends “waiting at least a full week after a core update completes before analyzing your site in Search Console.” The days in between are for confirming which update is running and collecting the data, not for rewriting pages.

There is one exception. A severe drop across the whole site that matches no announced update calls for a technical check first, without waiting: noindex tags, robots.txt, redirects, server errors. That diagnosis is laid out in the steps an SEO company takes to recover lost rankings. If Search Console shows a manual action, the case belongs to the penalty process in how an SEO company identifies and fixes SEO penalties.

Segment What Moved

Once the rollout is over, the agency compares before-and-after data by page type, query group and device, and checks whether the movement is broad across the niche or isolated to the client. A comparison group helps: pages and queries that did not move show what the update did not touch.

Separate the update from changes in the results page itself. Queries that show an AI answer behave differently from those that do not: Seer Interactive’s September 2025 update, covering informational and educational queries across 42 client organizations, found organic CTR of 0.61% on queries with an AI Overview against 1.62% without one. First Page Sage’s 2026 CTR report (last updated September 22, 2026) puts position-1 CTR at 3.6% when an AI answer appears and 22.6% when none does. A page that kept its ranking but lost clicks may have been hit by a change in the results page rather than by the update.

Respond by Update Type

Core updates reassess how Google’s systems judge relevance and quality across the web, so there is no single setting to change. The response is a content review of the pages that lost the most visibility: thin, outdated or templated sections, missing first-hand detail, weak sourcing. Google’s March 2024 core update post reported after the rollout that results showed “45% less low-quality, unoriginal content” against the 40% improvement it had expected. Recovery can be slow: Google’s core updates documentation notes that “If it’s been a few months and you still haven’t seen any effect, that could mean waiting until the next core update.”

Spam updates target violations of Google’s spam policies, from link spam and cloaking to the three policies Google added or strengthened with the March 2024 update: scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse. The fix is removing the specific violation, then waiting for Google’s systems to reprocess the site. Google’s spam updates documentation says improvement may come “over a period of months” once the systems learn the site complies.

Changes in AI search are not a named update but a gradual shift in how results are built. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, so answers that can be quoted near the top of a page are an editorial choice, not a replacement for ranking work: in Conductor’s 2026 benchmarks, based on U.S. traffic across 1,215 of its enterprise customers’ domains from May to September 2025, AI referrals were 1.08% of all website traffic across the 10 industries studied. That figure counts visits sent by AI assistants, a different measure from how often your pages appear inside Google’s own AI features, which Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts as impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. How to structure content for AI answers is the subject of how an SEO company optimizes content for search engines.

What Strong Fundamentals Do, and Their Limit

Pages written from first-hand knowledge with cited sources, no thin or templated sections and no paid or exchanged links can reduce a site’s exposure to core and spam updates. They do not make a site immune. Core updates reassess relevance across the web, so a well-built site can still lose positions when competitors improve or Google changes what it rewards. A drop during an update is a reason to look, not proof that the fundamentals are broken.

What a Client Should Receive After a Confirmed Update

• The name and rollout dates of the update the agency is matching the movement to.
• A before-and-after comparison by page type and query group, made after the rollout finished.
• A list of what the agency will change and what it will leave alone, with reasons.
• The date of the next check, tied to the reporting already agreed; how an SEO company measures SEO campaign success shows how campaign results are judged.

If the agency has no fix yet, the report should say so and name what it is testing.

Three Questions Before You Approve Any Change

Ask which update and rollout dates the agency is matching the movement to, which page types and queries moved compared with those that did not, and what it will wait to see before touching content. The first two answers show whether the agency has diagnosed anything; without the third, it may change pages that were never the problem.