Google August 2023 Core Update (22 August 2023): What Changed and How to Recover

The Google August 2023 core update was announced on 22 August 2023 and completed on 7 September 2023, a rollout of 16 days and 3 hours. It was a broad core update with no specific target, and it began an unusually busy few months: the September 2023 helpful content update started just a week after it finished, and two more core updates followed in October and November. If your traffic fell in late summer 2023, the first job is to work out which of these updates actually caused it.

For the dates of all of them, see my full list of Google algorithm updates.

What the August 2023 core update changed

Like every broad core update, this was a reassessment of overall quality and relevance across Google’s results. Google gave no specific target and published no update-specific guidance. It did repeat an important line: “A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.”

That sentence is worth taking seriously. A core update changes how Google weighs many signals at once. Your page may be exactly as good as it was in July 2023, but if Google now judges other pages to be a better answer, you move down. That is different from a spam update, where there is a concrete violation to find.

Early industry chatter described the August 2023 update as fairly impactful compared with previous core updates. I have not seen reliable published measurements for it, so I will not put a number on that.

Timeline

August 2023 was the first of three core updates in about three months. For anyone diagnosing a drop from this period, that sequence is the main complication.

Who was affected

Google named no site types. Reports at the time were general rather than specific. Because the September 2023 helpful content update followed so closely, many site owners who lost traffic in September later attributed it to one update or the other without checking the dates. That has made it harder to say who the August update itself affected.

How to tell if the August 2023 core update hit your site

The diagnosis for this update is mainly a dating exercise. You need to place your drop in one of four windows.

How to find the start date

1. In Search Console, set the date range to 1 August to 31 December 2023 and switch the chart to daily clicks.
2. Mark the start of each update on the chart. Look for the first day where clicks clearly break from their normal weekly pattern.
3. Compare 8 to 21 August 2023 with 8 to 13 September 2023. That second window is short, because the helpful content update began on 14 September, but it is the only clean “after” window you get.
4. Check whether pages that lost in August lost again in September or October. A site hit by several updates in a row usually has a broad quality problem, not one specific issue.
5. Remember that late August is a holiday period in many countries, and school terms start in early September. Compare with the same weeks in 2022.

What the pattern means

If the drop started in the August window and was spread across many page types, treat it as a core update and work through the steps below. If it started on or after 14 September and hit the whole site, read about the September 2023 helpful content update instead, because the recovery approach differs.

How to recover from the August 2023 core update

Google’s position is that there is no specific fix. What helps is broad, sustained improvement, assessed at a later core update. This is the process I use with clients.

1. Pick the pages that matter

List the 30 to 50 pages that lost the most clicks between the before and after windows. Ignore small fluctuations.

2. Compare each with the page that replaced it

For the main query of each losing page, open the results and note what the new top three do better. Common answers: they are more specific, more up to date, written by someone with obvious experience, or they answer the question faster.

3. Score each page against Google’s self-assessment questions

Google’s helpful, reliable, people-first content questions are the closest thing to a checklist Google provides. Score each page honestly and note what is missing.

4. Make substantial changes, not cosmetic ones

5. Check the site as a whole

Core updates assess the site as well as individual pages. Large volumes of thin or off-topic content can drag down how Google sees the rest. Prune or consolidate where it makes sense.

6. Keep technical health in order

Technical fixes rarely reverse a core update on their own, but crawl waste, slow templates and indexing problems make everything else harder. A technical SEO review is worth doing alongside the content work.

7. Measure at the next core update

The next core update came quickly, in October 2023. Changes made in September may not have been reassessed that soon. Keep going rather than judging the work on one update.

Is it still relevant today?

Only as part of the history. The August 2023 update matters mainly because it started a run of updates that reshaped many sites’ traffic in late 2023. If you are still trying to explain a drop from that period, getting the date right is the most useful thing you can do, because it tells you whether you are dealing with core quality issues or the helpful content system.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Google Search Status Dashboard
• Google Search Central: core updates
• Search Engine Journal: Google algorithm history
• Keywords Everywhere

If your traffic dropped in late August or September 2023 and you are not sure which update caused it, request a free audit. My SEO audit service starts by dating your losses against each update so the fixes match the cause.