Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition in under 5 minutes. Data window: SEO visibility August 10 to August 31, 2026 (21 days).
Exec Summary
Amazon closed the 21 days to August 31 at its lowest visibility since tracking began in November 2022: 1,705, down 16.9%, in a window where Google ran a spam update and served fewer PDFs for 2 weeks.
Google’s August 2026 spam update ran from August 18 to 21. The index slipped 2.4% across 1,842 companies in the 21 days to August 31.
The IRS lost 59.6% (69 to 28), the Small Business Administration 52.8% and the Department of Education 30.8% in the 21 days to August 31, while Google served fewer PDF files in results. The other 40 federal domains in the index round-tripped.
Ecommerce fell 7.9% across 290 companies in the same 21 days, with Home Depot -14.7% and Wayfair -26.5%, while Walmart (+5.9%) was the only large retailer up.
YouTube gained 8.7% (3,391 to 3,687), its first up-window after 2 down issues, while Reddit fell 9.3% to its lowest level since April and TikTok fell 20.3% to its lowest since September 2025.
Images rose 13.9% in the 21 days to August 31, the largest vertical gain, with the paid stock libraries up 23.8% together (Getty Images +24.4%, Shutterstock +22.9%) while the free libraries slipped 2.7%.
Wikipedia lost 5.6% in the 21 days to August 31, from 8,280 to 7,820, the largest raw loss in the index at 460 points, and References fell 4.8% as a vertical, the largest share loss in the index.
Let’s dig in.
SEO landscape check
Below is a quick read on the current state of search, built from the SSI (Search Signals Index - quick explainer here): roughly 2,600 companies tracked across 26 verticals on 2 dimensions: SEO visibility and AI mentions. Think of it as an S&P 500 for organic search. Like the stock index, it follows a fixed panel of companies week after week, so the total tells you whether search as a whole gained or lost, and one company’s number tells you how much of Google’s results it holds against everyone else in the panel.
The index slipped 2.4% across 1,842 companies in the 21 days to August 31. Six trends carried the move.
1/ Amazon fell to a record low and Ecommerce gave back its August gain
Amazon lost 16.9% in the 21 days to August 31, from 2,051 to 1,705, and closed below every reading in its history, with data back to November 2022. The same 3 weeks cost Amazon 1.1% in 2023, 0.7% in 2024 and 9.5% in 2025. This year’s loss is nearly double the worst prior August, on top of a slide from 3,560 in November 2024 to 2,226 in January 2026, and it landed while the index around it slipped 2.4%.
The ad budgets moved in the same direction:
Back-to-school spending on TikTok rose 20 to 40% year over year across July and August
TikTok Shop sales grew 84% in the year to February and
Go Fish Digital’s clients shifted money to TikTok after hitting “max spend on Amazon and Google,” where they found it “right behind Amazon” in sales volume.
Google search costs rose about 20% in August at the same time. Amazon’s organic shelf shrank in the weeks advertisers hit their ceiling on Amazon and Google and routed the overflow to TikTok Shop. TikTok itself sits at its lowest Google visibility since September 2025 (below), so the platform winning the retail budget is losing Google’s shelf while it does.
Ecommerce fell 7.9% across 290 companies in the 21 days to August 31 and gave back its August gain, with Amazon carrying 346 of the vertical’s 451 lost points. The rest of the category followed, all in the same 21 days:
Home Depot -14.7% (315 to 268), after +27.0% in GIB 23
Wayfair -26.5%
Best Buy -9.4%
Target -5.7%
Walmart +5.9%, the only large retailer up
2/ The August spam update re-sorted the index for one week
The August 2026 spam update ran from August 18 to 21, inside calendar week 34 (August 17 to 23), and trackers logged more volatility after it ended with no announcement.
Week 34 moved 40 of 754 companies with a baseline above 3 by more than 20%, a 5.3% rate, half of week 31’s 11.0%. The weeks on either side were quiet: 2 companies in week 33, none in week 35.
Google stopped enforcing site reputation abuse manual actions in the EEA from August 30 under a European Commission mandate; flagged sections there get separated in ranking rather than suppressed.
One more Google change landed during the same weeks. Google now routes search clicks through google.com/goto redirects at what Nozzle’s Derek Perkins logged as a near-100% rollout after testing that began in July, aimed at scrapers. So now, any rank tracker has to follow the redirect to see the URL; check your tracker’s data continuity from late August before reading its numbers.
