Is a Big Google Update Coming?

The bigger question is whether we’re getting close to another major Core Update.

It’s been almost four months since the last one, so looking at the historical intervals, we’re starting to run a little overdue.

I have a feeling something bigger is coming.

The timing would also be very Google. We’re heading into conference season, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get the classic Core Update around SBC next week or SiGMA Rome in November.

The more interesting question is what Google might actually change.

Is Google going to crack down on AI content?

A lot of people are expecting some kind of crackdown on AI content. I’m not sure that’s how it will happen.

Google has already launched three spam updates in 2026, compared with just one in 2025. From what I’ve seen, those updates have clearly affected websites doing what we normally call “content at scale” – hundreds or thousands of articles produced mainly to capture search traffic.

I would actually say Google has been fairly successful here.

A Core Update is different. This is where things like quality, relevance, originality and usefulness can be weighted differently.

And this is where AI gets interesting.

Right now, if you have a decent domain, it can still be surprisingly easy to rank an article written largely with ChatGPT, Claude or another AI tool. You’re not publishing 5,000 pages, so you don’t necessarily fall into the content-at-scale bucket.

But the content might still be average.

That’s why I don’t think Google necessarily needs to “detect AI”. They just need to get better at separating average content from content that deserves to rank.

We all see the difference. You land on some pages and within 30 seconds you know exactly how the article was produced. Then you find another page that just hits. Better information, actual experience, useful data, a different opinion, something original.

Both might have used AI.

The difference is what happened around it.

Haven’t we seen this before?

AI reminds me a little of what happened when SEOs figured out the importance of links.

The iGaming SEOs who lived through Panda and Penguin are probably getting close to retirement by now, but there’s a lesson from that period worth remembering.

We found something that worked.

Then we did more of it.

Then we scaled the shit out of it.

Links influenced rankings, so naturally the industry got extremely good at producing links. Eventually Google became much better at understanding the difference between good links and bad links.

Not perfect. Still not perfect.

But anyone who has been in SEO for long enough knows that what we consider a “good link” has changed dramatically over time.

Then Panda and Penguin happened, and for a lot of sites it was a bloodbath. Things that had worked for years suddenly became liabilities.

I’m not saying we’re about to get a Panda or Penguin for AI content. But I do think the pattern is worth looking at.

With AI, we found another huge efficiency.

So naturally we started asking:

How much can we automate? How much content can we produce? How many keywords can we cover? How cheap can we make each article?

And eventually: How much of the writer can we remove and replace with credits and tokens?

Maybe we’ve pushed that last question a little too far.

AI isn’t going away, and I certainly don’t think we should stop using it. But the next stage might be less about how much content AI allows us to produce and more about what we can use it for without making the end product worse.

The question isn’t really whether you use AI anymore.

It’s what you use it for.

What does this mean for iGaming?

This is where I think the next Core Update could give us some very interesting cases.

Of course companies should spend money on content. The question is how they should spend it.

AI has completely changed the economics.

A few years ago, a large part of the content budget went to writers, editors and research. Today, you can produce an enormous amount of content for a fraction of that cost.

And maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far.

Have we become so obsessed with automation, efficiency and scale that we’ve almost eliminated the writer and replaced humans with credits and tokens?

That’s where I think we’re going to see some really interesting cases over the next year.

Within iGaming, we’ve seen this particularly clearly with:

• Casino reviews
• Slot reviews
• Mass-produced content on high-authority domains

The last one is probably the most interesting.

Over the past year, we’ve seen strong domains publish large amounts of fairly generic content and still rank extremely well.

If that works, the economics are obvious.

Why pay a good writer for one article when the same budget can buy you 50?

At the same time, I know some pretty large companies that have gone in the opposite direction. They use AI, but they’ve continued spending heavily on writers, research, proprietary data, testing, tools and features.

That could turn out to have been a genius move.

Or a very expensive way to produce content.

This is why I think we’re going to get some fascinating case studies over the next year.

Maybe one person with AI really can replace ten writers.

Maybe companies that almost removed the writer from the process went too far.

Most likely, there will be parts of the process where AI is simply better and cheaper, and other parts where removing the human makes the final product worse.

That’s the part I’m interested in.

Not AI versus humans.

Where does the human still create enough value to justify the cost?

What I’ll be watching

If we get a major Core Update soon, I’ll be watching what happens to sites that have taken very different approaches.

What happens to generic AI content sitting on very strong domains?

What happens to companies that spent considerably more money creating original content, doing actual research and building useful features?

And what happens to the companies somewhere in between?

If the first group keeps winning, that tells us something.

If the second group suddenly starts taking market share, that tells us something too.

I don’t think Google is going to “kill AI content”. That would also miss the point.

The last couple of years have been about figuring out how much of the writer we can replace with AI.

Maybe the next couple of years will be about figuring out which parts of the writer we shouldn’t have replaced in the first place.

That’s what I’ll be watching when the next Core Update hits.

We’re actually testing this

And if you’re particularly interested in following this over time, we actually have a live experiment running under our Experiments section: AI vs Human Content.

We’re tracking two iGaming websites side by side. One is built with content written 100% by AI, while the other takes a human-led approach.

The tracking is live and updated every day, so you can follow how both sites develop over time rather than just seeing a before-and-after case study once the experiment is finished.

It’s still way too early to draw any conclusions. But that’s also what makes it interesting.

If we do get a major Core Update, we’ll be able to see what happens to both sites as the update rolls out – and whether the gap between AI and human content starts to change.

For now, it’s just two sites and a very premature experiment.

But it could become a pretty interesting one to follow.