Google now calls a made-up author name "a form of deception", and says it marks a page as low quality.

Yesterday's issue covered the new effort and originality sections on this page. What is new today is a passage in the "Who (created the content)" section that Search Engine Journal reported on 2 October. It reads, verbatim: "However, avoid using deceptive authorship information. Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page." The same page still asks "Do pages carry a byline, where one might be expected?" and "Is the use of automation, including AI-generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?" Search Engine Journal notes the wording previously lived only in the quality rater guidelines. Google's documentation changelog does not list this page, so the date rests on the page footer and the trade report. It is guidance about Google Search. It does not mention AI Overviews or any other assistant, and it is not a ranking announcement.

A Reddit user posted that Gemini had begun adding UTM tracking tags to outgoing links, calling it "very new 24hours or so". Google's John Mueller replied in the thread: "Nice. I see it too. Doesn't Gemini have a referrer too though? I thought you could already track them." He added that he would pass on reproducible reports about the referrer going missing. Search Engine Journal states the limit plainly: "Google's implementation of the UTM parameter is undocumented so it's unknown under what circumstances UTMs are triggered within Google Gemini." The article does not print the tag itself, and we have not seen it first-hand. This is separate from the unconfirmed tag on Google AI Overviews links reported on 2 October, which Google has still not commented on.

Google's incident for the September 2026 spam update still carries only the 24 September launch post, on day ten of a rollout Google said "may take up to two weeks". Search Engine Roundtable reported a second wave on 30 September, quoting Glenn Gabe ("I received emails from several site owners explaining they saw a huge drop right on 9/30") and tracking tools showing a spike. Google has made no statement about phases. Perplexity's migration page is unchanged and still names no model for re-routed Sonar requests. Anthropic's table still shows `claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929` deprecated with retirement on 30 November 2026.