The Typical Pet Website Lost 12% of Its Google Search Visits After the September Spam Update
In the 10 days after Google's September 2026 spam update began, the typical pet and animal website in Diib's data lost about 12% of its visits from Google search. That's roughly double the drop for the typical website across all industries.
Pet businesses didn't just see a few sites wiped out. The typical pet website lost a noticeable slice of its Google search traffic, about twice the drop of the typical site overall. If your search visits are down 10 to 20% since late September, that's in line with similar sites and doesn't by itself mean Google penalized you.
Google began rolling out its September 2026 spam update on September 24 and said it could take up to two weeks. Diib’s industry breakdown counted how many sites in each industry lost half or more of their search traffic. This Insight asks a different question: how much did the typical website lose? On that measure, pet and animal websites fell the furthest of any industry.
What Diib measured
Using aggregated Diib website data, we compared each site’s visits from unpaid Google search over September 24–October 3 with the same days of the week two weeks earlier, September 10–19. The group: 28,247 websites with connected Google Analytics, at least 100 search visits in each window and no missing days of data. That includes 173 pet and animal websites. As a baseline, we ran the same comparison over a stretch with no spam update (August 27–September 5 vs. September 10–19).
What we found
| Group | Sites | Typical change after update | Typical change, baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pets & Animals | 173 | −12% | −3% |
| All industries | 28,247 | −6% | −1% |
“Typical” here means the median site: half did better, half did worse. Seven in 10 pet websites lost at least some search traffic after the update began, compared with 56% in the baseline period. Websites focused on dogs (30 sites) had the steepest typical drop, about 17%.
What this data can’t tell you
The timing lines up with the update, but this data can’t show which sites Google actually flagged for spam. Some of the decline may come from seasonal shifts, site changes or other ranking movement. As of October 5, Google had not marked the rollout complete, so these numbers could still change.
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