#BlinkTank: Google rolls out the June 2026 spam update

#BlinkTank: Google rolls out the June 2026 spam update The last week brought the UK its hottest June day on record, 37.3°C in Suffolk on 26th June, breaking a mark that had stood since the 1950s. Air conditioning is still a rarity here, at least for now, but we have all managed to survive. Unsurprisingly, this has had an impact on buying behaviour. Across our clients and partners the patterns shifted over those few days, and not always in the way you would expect. Some stores saw sales dip during the hottest days and then rebound almost immediately afterwards. Others barely moved. And a few outdoor brands, the ones you would assume do well in a heatwave, saw below-average sales, because when it is 37 degrees the last thing people want to do is go outside. This is three or four days of an anomaly, so there is not much to draw from it yet. But it is a reporting problem we will see more of, because these events are only becoming more frequent, and it’s easy to forget the root cause when doing year-on-year comparisons. And this, as it happens, is not the only thing making your data hard to read this week. On to the news! Google rolls out the June 2026 spam update Google released the June 2026 spam update on 24 June and confirmed it finished rolling out on 26 June, so a two-day rollout that is already complete. It applies globally and to all languages, and it is the second spam update of the year after the one in March. Google announced no new spam policies alongside it, which usually points to a tightening of how the existing ones are enforced rather than a change in the rules. The two-day window looks fast, but it is normal for a spam update, which refreshes the systems that catch policy violations rather than reassessing quality across the index. The complication for anyone watching their numbers is the timing. The May core update only finished rolling out on 2 June, so if you have seen movement in organic over the last few weeks you now have at least two possible causes, plus the normal background volatility. There is also the AI angle, given how much we have written about AI-written copy. Google updated its spam policies on 15 May to explicitly cover attempts to manipulate AI answers in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and this update arrives about six weeks later. Google has named no specific target, so this is not confirmed as an AI-spam update. But if you have a lot of thin, generated content sitting on the site, the direction of travel is not in your favour. 🔗 Google Search Status Dashboard Google is testing relevance labels on Search ads Google has started a small experiment that adds a “Strongest match” or “Strong match” badge to certain Search ads, announced by Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin on 23 June. It is live for a small percentage of US users for now. The badge marks the ad Google considers most relevant among the ads already selected for a query, using the existing ad quality and relevance signals rather than any new input, and Marvin was clear that it has no effect on the auction or on how ads rank. It is a user-facing label, nothing more, at least at this stage. What Google has not explained is how an ad qualifies, how the underlying signals are weighted, or whether advertisers will ever see which of their ads earned a label. There’s currently no reporting for it, so we’re filing it very much as one to watch. For a large catalogue, there’s an obvious alignment with taxonomy. A badge for relevance rewards tight alignment between the query, the ad and the page it points to, and that alignment comes from how well the catalogue is structured and categorised in the first place. 🔗 Search Engine Land on the Strongest match test Google is building a way to label ads as AI-generated Version 24.2 of the Google Ads API came out on 24 June, and the part worth noting is that Google is starting to build a way for ads to be labelled as AI-generated. Advertisers will be able to mark whether an ad or image was made by AI, and whether a person reviewed it or it was produced automatically. Google can add its own label alongside that. The reason is a new EU law, the AI Act, which starts requiring this kind of transparency from 2 August. It is not switched on yet. The groundwork is in place but the labelling does not fully work until the next update in July, so there is nothing to set up today. AI-made ad creative is now everywhere, and this is the start of a system that records and reports whether an ad was made by AI and whether a human checked it. If you run Performance Max or Demand Gen with automatically generated assets, that is going to become a normal, expected thing to disclose. 🔗 Announcing v24.2 of the Google Ads API Metafield Groups, our free extension, gets a 2.8 update Andy Russell, Blink’s senior developer, has put out version 2.8 of Metafield Groups, the free Chrome and Firefox extension he built to fix one of the more tedious parts of working in the Shopify admin. Shopify shows every metafield in one long list with no separation or context, which on a large catalogue means scrolling through dozens of undifferentiated fields trying to work out what each one is for. The extension injects named, colour-coded groups directly into the admin, so whoever is editing can see at a glance what they are looking at and what still needs filling in. The rest of it is built for teams managing a lot of fields: you can lock a group to stop accidental edits, run multiple profiles for different users or workflows, and export your group setup as a single JSON file to share across the team. It is CSS-only injection, so nothing touches Shopify’s underlying admin and there is no risk to your data. 🔗 Metafield Groups Jobs Hiring: The Growth Foundation are hiring a Senior Ecommerce Manager for a fast-growing consumer brand in Manchester, £50k to £60k depending on experience, hybrid with four days on site. It is a trading-led role owning the numbers across DTC, B2B and marketplaces, setting the trading calendar and running the testing strategy, with strong Shopify experience and a CRO and A/B testing track record near the top of the list. Emma Green is recruiting for it, and you can apply through the listing or message her directly. Salt are recruiting a Head of Digital & E-Commerce on behalf of a fast-growing business, £85k to £110k depending on experience, Greater London and hybrid. It is a senior leadership role owning the digital and ecommerce strategy, new product launches and online growth. Justin Allen is handling it, and applications go to jallen@welovesalt.com. Looking for work: Rebecca Scott is an ecommerce and brand operator with fifteen years across the industry. She built a UK DTC activewear brand from scratch, bootstrapped it, raised capital and scaled it to multi-seven-figure revenue, including a move into the US. The combination she offers is having run a brand commercially and being able to execute on the technical side, which is rarer than it sounds. She is looking for fractional head of growth, brand or ecommerce work. If you are hiring and the role fits someone with large-catalogue Shopify experience, or you are looking and have that background, send me a message. Partner shout-outs Propel is the new marketing attribution agency from Timo Dechau and Barbara Galiza. Attribution is the topic most people in measurement route around because it is incredibly hard, and Timo and Barbara address it with the necessary thoroughness. Timo is without doubt one of the smartest people I have come across in this field, and Barbara is every bit his equal on this. If your reporting is full of unassigned and direct traffic you cannot explain, they are the people to talk to. Alfred is a browser extension from Junaid Ahmed that streamlines a lot of the repetitive parts of working in Shopify. Our whole team at Blink have found it useful, and if you spend your days in the Shopify admin it is well worth a look. As ever, thanks for reading. If you found this useful, I would love it if you could share it with someone you think would find it interesting - whether that is someone managing a large-catalogue Shopify store or anyone else who follows this kind of thing. See you next week. Sam Who am I and what does Blink do? I’m Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We’re a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn’t just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place. We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery. If you found this useful and aren’t already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank. If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.