Rajan Patel, Google’s VP of engineering for search, told a critic on X that the company’s spam team remains “well resourced,” a one-word reply to a question about staffing rather than a disclosure about results. The exchange followed the August 2026 spam update, which SEO practitioners had watched closely after months of visible scaled-content spam in results.
The stakes are narrow but real for site owners. Google confirming headcount says nothing about which sites recovered, which stayed suppressed, or how much of the visible spam problem the update actually resolved.
The criticism Patel answered came from search marketer Gagan Ghotra, who posted that the August update’s visible impact made him question whether Google had quietly shifted spam-fighting resources toward Gemini development. Patel’s reply, “Yes it is,” addressed only the staffing question. He did not respond to the resourcing-versus-Gemini tradeoff Ghotra raised, and he offered no figures on team size, algorithm changes shipped, or spam volume removed.
A statement about resourcing is not a statement about outcome. Google has confirmed people are working on the problem. It has not published what share of queries the August update actually touched, how many previously ranking spam domains lost visibility permanently versus temporarily, or whether affected sites will see any recovery path.
Third-party data suggests the update hit harder than typical spam actions. SE Ranking’s Mordy Oberstein reported an 82 percent increase in URLs dropping out of Google’s top 100 results compared with recent spam updates, a comparison Oberstein made explicitly against prior spam actions rather than core updates. Independent SEO consultant Glenn Gabe documented individual case studies on his blog, including one site with roughly 1.3 million scaled URLs that saw a steep ranking drop and another indexed site of close to 250,000 URLs he described as heavily programmatic.
Those figures come from third parties measuring visible ranking churn, not from Google. Google has not published its own data on what share of queries or affected domains the August update moved, and Patel’s confirmation of team resourcing does not fill that gap. The distinction matters: a well-staffed team can still ship an update that under- or over-corrects, and staffing alone does not tell publishers whether a ranking drop reflects a permanent spam classification or a temporary volatility spike that self-corrects in coming weeks.
Google made a similar public assurance about content-quality enforcement following its 2023 helpful content updates, and recovery data for penalized sites was not disclosed in the twelve months that followed. That precedent is worth keeping in mind before treating “well resourced” as evidence the spam problem is close to solved.
Sites that saw traffic drops around the August 24 to 25 window should isolate whether the pages affected match the programmatic, scaled-content pattern Gabe documented, since that is the profile Google’s own commentary suggests the update targeted. Publishers relying on high-volume templated content should treat this confirmation as a signal to audit thin, auto-generated pages now, not as confirmation that ranking losses will reverse.
Search Engine Roundtable, via Barry Schwartz, reported the exchange between Rajan Patel and Gagan Ghotra on X.
