May 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Here we go, will anything improve after a very poor April for many or will traffic continue to be hoovered-up by the G ad machine? No prizes for guessing correctly!

[RedBar]

Oh dear, what's happened, my traffic has died, ok it's a holiday in many places however coming up to 13 hours of my Googleday I am AT 12% of my old daily average ... in fact all sites are way, way down.

[ichthyous]

Since this weekend I am seeing traffic is higher from everywhere except USA, which starts the day down 40%+ and seems to make up the rest in the later part of the day, if at all.

Europe was riding high, but now Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, etc are all down 60-70%. Canada traffic is at zero for two days and has been low for a year. UK is at par, Australia up 167%, and UAE was down but now is normalizing...probably due to Ramadan.

Dutch traffic appeared to be soaring until I realized it was all from one source IP Volume Inc. Had to block their ASN and IP ranges and also had to block the Seychelles completely. Not sure what IP Volume Inc is but it's requesting files systematically so appears to be bots.

Foreign traffic is always welcome but with my USA traffic down so much and no sign of recovery there, sales are nil. I am preparing for a difficult rest of 2023.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:29 pm (utc) on May 1, 2023]
[edit reason] splice cleanup [/edit]

[RedBar]

Europe was riding high, but now Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, etc are all down

1st May and major protests especially in France.

[RedBar]

I've just been going through my April metrics and they are semi-depressing.

The first week, 1-7, was ok, traffic +29.9%
8-30 hit and delivered -37.5%

How does this compare?

April 23 v April 22 at -14.3%
April 23 v April 21 at -37.8%

In comparison the hotel venue site was +3.56% v March 2023

April 23 v April 22 at +49.8%
April 23 v April 21 at +88.3% coming out of lockdowns?

Global site = garbage for me, local site seems to be doing ok at the moment.

[BigKat]

A prominent artificial intelligence researcher known as the “Godfather of AI” has quit his job at Google – and says he now partly regrets his work advancing the burgeoning technology because of the risks it poses to society.

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is a renowned computer scientist who is widely credited with laying the AI groundwork that eventually led to the creation of popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other advanced systems.

The 75-year-old told the New York Times that he left Google so that he can speak openly about the risks of unrestrained AI development – including the spread of misinformation, upheaval in the jobs market and other, more nefarious possibilities.

Story at: [nypost.com...]

SERPS are nothing but Chinese goods ads for us. We're getting no traffic, and I wonder if this is Google's AI taking the wheel or more control over it. Even the fake/bot traffic from Google is gone.

[edited by: BigKat at 7:16 pm (utc) on May 1, 2023]

nypost.com ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google — and says he regrets life’s work due to risks to humanity Dr. Geoffrey Hinton said he quit Google so he could speak more freely about the risks of AI.

[Rlilly]

the SERPs are so congested with Ads and Images and then More ads.. and then on the left side its like a amazon bazaar with Google scraping content trying to create a Filtered Shopping experience, so you choose from Brand Names...

If you in top 10 but bottom half of organic listings you have no chance anymore.. it is like being on the second or third page.

Unless you in a specialty niche business, I cannot see anyone doing well with these SERPS unless you big Brands..

[EditorialGuy]

I've just been going through my April metrics and they are semi-depressing.

Ditto here. Compared to the same months in 2022, our Google traffic was up 16 percent in January, about even in February, down 11 percent in March, and down 26 percent in April. The biggest contributor to the drop, as far as I can see, was the latest Reviews Update from Google (never mind that our site has very few reviews).

Mind you, it's possible that user demand has simply gone into a slump lately. We're in the editorial travel niche, and some re\ports in the travel trade media suggest that 2023 may end up being worse for the industry than 2022 was. But the fact that our Google traffic was down significantly in April, while our traffic from nearly all other sources was up by double digits, suggests that Google is the culprit.

[Micha]

Is Google playing around again? I've had a massive increase in visitors since yesterday.

[Shepherd]

Paid and organic results indistinguishable at the moment. The word "Sponsored" at the top of the page, no delineation as to where sponsored begins or ends. Ad and organic listings identical.

[ichthyous]

I wonder if this is Google's AI taking the wheel or more control over it

Yes, I have been thinking the same thing. The reason being that the current situation is radically different in that you can still rank the same but literally have lost 70%, 80% or 90% of your traffic for a set of related terms. Like this:
[ibb.co ]

My ranking is not much changed, the ads are the same pre-Easter but I have lost almost all of the traffic in one very short period of time with no fluctuation from day to day...it's just gone. In the old days this would have indicated a penalty...but there is no penalty now, it's just some new disaster Google is unleashing on us, and it is so precise that I suspect AI is involved.

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2023-05-01-at-10-47-21-PM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2023-05-01-at-10-47-21-PM hosted in ImgBB

[yollo03]

Maybe the serps looked messy after clearing cookies, incognito / vpn because there is no data for dynamic ranking. I am confident it is used or a similar technique, which is a way to control traditional rankings.

[anubitez]

Traffic down here start of May is interesting. Only from Google, Bing, and DDG increasing, my niche is popular on those search engines compared to others.
DDG should overtake google soon, bing probably 6 to 12 months.

[RedBar]

After 17 hours of my Googleday I see zero improvement in traffic whatsoever, at a guess I may reach 50% of my "old" average ... I write "old" since wnat do I do now, expect my "new" average to be the norm at 40% of 2021 ?

[ichthyous]

It seems to be very slowly improving since Sunday night. The 90% drops are now 66% drops...other landing pages seem to regain traffic one day, only to drop again the next. Inquiries are minimal, of poor quality and for lower-priced items. Of course, a 500+ point drop in the stock market and a potential US banking crisis can put a damper on things.

[ichthyous]

Paid and organic results indistinguishable at the moment. The word "Sponsored" at the top of the page, no delineation as to where sponsored begins or ends. Ad and organic listings identical.

I am seeing that too...4 sponsored links at top which look exactly like organic results. Google has adopted tricking people into clicking ads as their business model.

[Athedian]

I have a feeling it's the GA4 that they're finalizing which forced some of these updates in the background. My traffic remains relatively the same but my god the conversions just died, completely. And the whole migration from Universal to GA4 has been nothing but a pain in the butt.

[BigKat]

Bing, and DDG increasing, my niche is popular on those search engines compared to others.
DDG should overtake google soon, bing probably 6 to 12 months.

This is our experience as well. However, I think it will take much longer for another search engine to overtake Google in terms of gross traffic. Though if we look at net traffic from Google, by excluding the large percentage of fake/bot/scraper traffic (host/vpn/cloud) they have been sending, it may occur sooner then I expect. We are in ecommerce, and Google has buried us under mostly Amazon ads as with others in the outer boundaries of our industry. I think shoppers are slowly learning to use a different search engine or source to avoid Google's excessive amount of ads which promote (spam) products in marketplaces they've already browsed.

[RareBit]

I think your average user just uses whatever search engine is on their phone/device. Google still accounts for 94% of our Organic traffic despite us having good rankings on other search engines. Looking at the past 12 months YoY it has dropped 1%..but the other search engines are still miles off, so unless something drastic happens it's going to be a very long time before we see another search engine dominate our organic traffic...Then in 2057 we will be complaining that DDG/Bing are destroying the SERPs :)

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today! ((Here We Go Again)) :-|

[RedBar]

At the moment no extra drop me simply consistently lower traffic.

@EG

Mind you, it's possible that user demand has simply gone into a slump lately.

I've been thinking along that line for awhile now especially insofar as retail demand is concerned, certainly I see bulk / project demand in the West significantly lower.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop here too...it's 10am and my USA traffic is -60%. Uk is -22%. Search is -29%. This is not due to a global slump, you don't lose 90% of the traffic to some pages on your site due to the economy. My ranking hasn't changed much either...in fact it went up today.

This is simply Google trying to break the necks of the remaining chickens so it can show Wall Street that it's still cooking up some good soup. Perhaps it's Google's attempt to quickly incorporate AI into search, or the fact that the 4 sponsored posts at top look exactly like organic results now, or the fact that the same few corporate sites are totally dominating every search once again. Whatever it is, it's been awful since Easter and perhaps isn't going to revert.

[EditorialGuy]

We've seen a very slight uptick since May began. Nothing worth getting excited about, but better than continued erosion.

[yollo03]

A quick question to all. I believe many users block tracking, which will not reflect analytics. Is anyone using both analytics and other tools and can say the difference between analytics data to other tools they are using?

[RedBar]

I believe many users block tracking, which will not reflect analytics.

External trackers such as Statcounter usually honour the do not track however your own log files show everything ... well, mine do! I use Plesk not CPanel.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is all over the place these days...yesterday a huge drop in USA traffic, but by the evening it had mostly recovered and USA ended -4% on the day, while the UK had dropped 40% on the day. This morning again the USA starts the day at -59% and search is -35% at 10am. Every day now some major drop or disappearing act for traffic is sure to occur. I am seeing the top three spots reverting to showing the same few sites over and over...a repeat of 2022.

Is anyone using both analytics and other tools and can say the difference between analytics data to other tools they are using?

Stopped using GA long ago and don't miss it. If they aren't sending me traffic, I'm not sending them data about my site or my business. There are third party tracking options that allow you to configure this as a setting. The user may have do not track set on their browser but they'll get counted anyway. If they don't want me knowing about their visit or what they are looking at on my site then don't visit. For example last night I had 93 visits from cities all over China in a short span of time...that happens from time to time, and my traffic from China is almost nil otherwise. It's some kind of academic (read: government) network set up so that you can't block all of the IP's...I would have to block the entire country. At this point I might...about 50% of all traffic is this type of unwanted guest.

[edited by: ichthyous at 2:20 pm (utc) on May 4, 2023]

[not2easy]

Most common browser defaults are blocking most cross site tracking now. People don't need to take any action in that respect. A second option is also on by default: Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness which is described as "Let advertisers measure how they’re doing without associating ad activity with you."

I don't think that very many users ever look at those settings or know they are available. This may be a good thing because otherwise some might opt to "block all cookies" which would make for a lot of misery on both ends. In most browsers, mobile users have to look a lot harder to find those options.

[EditorialGuy]

@not2easy: That's useful information. Thanks for educating us!

[Dooku]

@Ichthyous, put your website on the free plan of Cloudlare, much easier to block entire countries. I block China and the Russian Federation by default on all my websites. I also block Linode, Amazon AWS and a few other ASN network numbers that are known hacker nests.

@Yollo03, Why would anyone in this day and age still use GA(4)? This is the same as handing over your most valuable business information to your largest competitor, it's just insane. For most people Statcounter is more than enough, but if you are a stats junkie than install Matomo on a cheap VPS to monitor all of your websites.

I also do not use ANY sitemaps on ANY of my websites and google bot crawls and indexes way more pages than if I do use a sitemap.....tested this many times. Must be a coincidence huhhh.......I guess without any upfront handed over info on a teller than google is afraid they might miss "important" info, so come crawling the websites like crazy.

[shadowlight]

in 2057 we will be complaining that DDG/Bing are destroying the SERPs :)

I am not a fan of how G spams the SERPS to try and keep users on their own system and clicking on ADS, I also think the term 'Sponsored' is misleading but at least its in bold and stands out. G may bury organics under a load of *cough* 'SERP Features' but at least the number of organics still outweigh the number of Ads at least in my niche.

For a popular search term in my niche G shows 10 organic results and 7 ads labelled as 'Sponsored' in bold type along with PAA.

Bing show only 4 organics and 8 ads labelled as 'Ad' in small grey text within the description of the ad which is a blatant attempt to try and hide the fact it is an ad at all, along with PAA.