The Google August 2023 Broad Core update finished rolling out yesterday afternoon at about 4:03 PM ET. It took just over 16 days to roll out, kicking off on August 22, 2023, at about 1:30 pm ET and completing on September 7, 2023, at about 4:00 PM ET.
Here is a screenshot of the status page showing when this update started and ended:
It took Google 30+ minutes to tweet about the update being done:
The rollout is now complete as of September 7, 2023.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 7, 2023
Here is the volatility we documented and wrote about specific to this latest confirmed core update.
The Google August 2023 core update was announced on August 22nd. We didn’t really see much movement until August 25th. Then we saw another wave of movement around the 30th through the 1st. We saw a final wave of volatility over the past couple of days, right before it ended last yesterday afternoon.
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
Name: Google August 2023 Broad Core Update
Launched: August 22, 2023 at around 1:30 pm ET
Rollout: Completed September 7, 2023 at around 4:03 PM ET
Targets: It looks at all types of content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
Here is what the automated tracking tools show for this August 2023 Broad Core update over the two-week or so period.
Here is a list of the most recent core updates we’ve seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.
August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019
I hope you all did well with this update and only saw positive changes.
Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.