Google started a spam update that can run two weeks, and it overlaps the Perplexity cutoff on 27 September, so the next fortnight is a bad window to measure any before and after.

The update started on 24 September at 09:15 Pacific. Google's incident says it "applies globally and to all languages" and the rollout may take up to two weeks. Search Engine Journal notes this is longer than the three earlier 2026 spam updates, which finished in under three days each. Google has not said what it targets.

Checked against the live repository with the token this morning: ten remote branches, none named for perplexity, sonar or agent; `main` still at `20b1172` dated 22 August; `src/adapters.ts` line 14 still `perplexity: "sonar"`, line 91 still `/chat/completions`. The local working copy has uncommitted changes, none of them to `adapters.ts`. The changelog's newest entry adds a `search_type: "fast"` option for the Agent API and nothing about Sonar.

Spotted by Sachin Patel: in a test, Bing's "Copilot Search" tab is labelled "AI Mode", Google's name for its own AI search. This follows an August test where Bing relabelled its Copilot answer box "AI Overview". No Microsoft statement.

As reported by SEJ: Google Search referrals to Chartbeat's publisher network fell 40.2% year over year for July 2025 to July 2026, against 21.9% the year before; Discover fell 34.3%. AI referrals reportedly grew eightfold over two years but remain a tiny share of traffic. The network skews to news sites, and SEJ notes it is unclear whether the figures are counts or shares. The report itself is behind a form, so these numbers were not read first-hand.

A small model that generates ten sub-queries per question, reported at a "12 to 20" times speedup over the usual approach. Tested on 4-billion-parameter open models. The post does not say it runs in AI Mode or AI Overviews.