December 2024 Google Search Observations

[Whitey]

Huge 48 hrs of overall site traffic doubling on only 3 url's, then back to zero. Top slot's since replaced with G overviews. For a moment I got excited. Looks like an AI smash and grab raid to me.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:38 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[ichthyous]

First day I have seen relatively normal traffic patterns, but not great. Some categories still -80%. But it seems to be recovering very slowly. If this sh!t happens once a month now we are looking at half the month with poor traffic and no customers...

[christianz]

According to Google, this should have improved search quality. Seriously though, can you see an improvement? I can only see the opposite.

Search quality is obviously worse after this update. But Google needs to be careful. Their market share among younger generations has never been this weak. Loading SERPs with spam and half dozen big mainstream sites that everyone already knows about, won't make "googling" cool.

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop this morning... Here we go....

[ichthyous]

I am seeing the same patterns during this entire span of the update starting on 11/13 and intensifying through November:

1) Lower average position of terms, a moderate drop in impressions, and a small drop in CTR from 11/13 onward. This has started to improve this week slightly.
2) Sharp drop in traffic from Canada, Australia, the UAE and Germany. The same countries every day. Drops of up to 80% of traffic and wide intraday swings. Australia is back to normal this morn, so perhaps the others will follow
3) A big drop in traffic to my articles, more than to my item category pages. While the category pages have recovered, the article traffic has not...
4) Very low USA morning traffic, made up during the later part of the day...again. This was happening a lot earlier this year
5) A rise in the same cookie-cutter sites up to spots 1-3 across many terms and territories again

Some of this is definitely reversing and improving, but perhaps not in as good position as before. Still, I think there is room for some optimism that it might improve if your site was hit by this latest update.

[christianz]

Nothing is reversing or improving. There was miraculous spurt of traffic yesterday for just couple of hours but it was gone quickly and today is awful as usual for this November update.

[RedBar]

Daft question?

Is there an accurate statistics programme that's also easy to use?

How accurate are Awstats and Webalizer?

I reverted to the free Statcounter since it does not seem to bear any resemblance to the above two.

I have tried a couple of other log programmes but they were simply horrible to use.

[Micha]

Have you tried goAccess yet? It reads the log files and if you set it up right, it's pretty accurate.

[RedBar]

Have you tried goAccess yet?

Nope, just checking it out, thanks.

[EditorialGuy]

Plausible Analytics is the closest thing to the old Google Analytics that I've found at a reasonable price. It isn't quite as versatile as GA Universal Analytics, but it comes close and is good for day-to-day (including same day and real time) monitoring.

[Dooku]

@EditorialGuy, is the Live Demo of Plausible Analytics on their website what you get as a paid version? Or is the paid version considerably more detailed, especially in details of the visitors IP/Host ...etc...etc...?

[EditorialGuy]

@Dooku: Yes, the live (and interactive) demo is a perfect example of how Plausible Analytics works.

[christianz]

Traffic is very weak. Especially US traffic.

[renatovieira]

Here too. Everything was very slow this morning...

[Micha]

Well, what can I say, unfortunately here too

[RedBar]

I've halted all new widget work on our global bulk B2B site and will watch how the remainder of December pans out, however this looks terminal insofar as our public exposure / availability to the www is concerned since I am now seeing incorrect AI information for some of my exclusive widgets crediting other companies / scam sites scraping us.

Our UK hotel venue site traffic is about where we hoped and barring any last minute disasters is looking pretty good for the month.

My immediate conclusion, well, for a long time now, is that localisation rules, internation B2B has been hung-out to fester!

[ichthyous]

Big drop this morning again, after a decent Saturday. I'm seeing the same pattern since this last update started...low traffic from USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, and other EU countries.

Oddly before it was my articles that got hammered, and today they are normal, but some of the main category pages and home page have been hit.

[Samsam1978]

Is my adsense revenue less than a quater of last year: Yes
Am I bothered: Yes.
I am done with stressing out: Yes.
Does this mean Google makes less money: Yes
Is AI suited to my niche: No
Do I get why people would want to read AI in my niche: No
Are most of my competitors gone? Yes
Am I still seeing SPAM outrank me: Yes

I am too old for this. I am in my 40s.
Whatever happens happens.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 7:34 pm (utc) on Dec 8, 2024]

[cooler29]

@Samsam1978 : Nice said, same here! :)

[Samsam1978]

@coller29, lets hope they realize they are making less money. I can't see how AI is more profitable, unless it is the CEO's dream to just be an AI machine.

[Micha]

@But Google needs a capable CEO for this, not Sundar. He has already announced that there will be “big” changes in January. Which for him probably means: more AI and small websites will be swept off the web.

[RedBar]

I am too old for this. I am in my 40s.

I started with the www when I was 41, I am now 72, I'm definitely cutting back come January 2025 with web "stuff".

[EditorialGuy]

For me, Google traffic is a "good news, bad news" scenario. It's good because our daily traffic is up substantially over the equivalent days in November, but it's bad because we're still down about 75 percent from the same time last year.

I don't have any realistic hope of getting back to where we were a year or two ago, because organic results now appear to be afterthoughts in Google's SERPs. Users are being trained to read AI mini-essays, "People Also Ask," etc. It's like they're showing up at a university library and being told, "Never mind the books and treatises in the stacks--all you need is this excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica."

[RedBar]

but it's bad because we're still down about 75 percent from the same time last year.

We both have specialist evergreen sites dating back to the 90s, just WTF is going on at The Plex?

Why are they seemingly so determined to destroy the sites that built all this genuine and vald information?

I like conspiracy theories these days, most of them seem to be coming true!

[christianz]

just WTF is going on at The Plex?

Why are they seemingly so determined to destroy the sites that built all this genuine and vald information?

Incredible levels of greed, incompetence and lack of moral compass.

[Samsam1978]

indeed, wonder what is in store for Jan 2025

[headspace]

Here's is an interesting observation. I read on here that some webmasters are beginning to block the AI bots from their website. I'm doing the exact opposite and I have already noticed some improvement in my rankings.
By the exact opposite I mean engaging with the AI. I spent 2 1/2 hours some time ago querying, challenging, interrogating and correcting chatGPT about what it knew and understood about the unique service on my website. Where chatGPT was negative or sceptical, I produced evidence that it could verify to turn that around. By the end of the 2 1/2 hour session chatGPT was agreeing with me that my website was a valuable legitimate resource for users looking for my service. This seems to now be
translating into improved rankings on Bing.

Could it be that AI are now evermore integrated into the serps and are performing a gatekeeper role?

If your traffic has crashed and you don't know why, try having an extensive interrogation with the AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, Bard etc. Ask it what it knows about your website,
challenge and more importantly correct any misconceptions it may have. These AI's need to be trained to produce accurate and meaningful information for users, why leave the training up to big tech. I believe webmasters have the opportunity to engage in that training themselves particularly if AI is being integrated into serps.

[christianz]

If my site was online store or business card website for a law firm, I would encourage all kinds of AI for whatever little traffic I could get, because my content would have no value and exchange of my content vs their vague promise of references (traffic) would be positive one for me - nothing to lose.

But my site is full of valuable up-to-date information and AI can ONLY rob me of traffic. It is a non-starter.

Having said that, due to technical reasons, I have so far only blocked them via robots.txt which is almost equivalent to not blocking them at all. I am getting millions of hits from various AI bots/scrapers.

[saladtosser]

It seems Sundar might be signalling a major shift—potentially moving all organic results to a separate, less prominent tab, while fully embracing AI-driven content and ads. Rather than the gradual "boiling the frog" strategy we’ve seen each quarter, this could be a decisive overhaul. If they do go this route, I suspect they could immediately boost revenue by a trillion per quarter by monopolising visibility. However, this approach could lead to gradual degradation over time. Still, I don’t think they’re focused on long-term sustainability—this feels more like a short-term profit grab and hope to destroy the web before anyone else can popup.

[Micha]

However, this approach could lead to gradual degradation over time. Still, I don’t think they’re focused on long-term sustainability—this feels more like a short-term profit grab and hope to destroy the web before anyone else can popup.

I think you're right about that. There's no other way to explain the current situation. I don't think Google is deliberately making its results worse, but rather that it wants to encourage users to stay on the platform. So it wouldn't surprise me if there was a change like the one you describe. I think that in 2025, all websites that rely solely on Google will no longer have a great chance, unless they are based in the EU, where we are currently being spared the AI nonsense and are dealing with other problems that Google is causing us.

Unfortunately, there is simply no real way to diversify traffic. For a blog, it might be easy to use YouTube and other platforms as a strategy, but for news sites or shops, it's a damn difficult environment.

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop this morning...

[christianz]

I don't think Google is deliberately making its results worse, but rather that it wants to encourage users to stay on the platform.

Aha. "Their platform". Which is actually all our content, our work, scraped and spun illegally.

[ichthyous]

For me, Google traffic is a "good news, bad news" scenario. It's good because our daily traffic is up substantially over the equivalent days in November, but it's bad because we're still down about 75 percent from the same time last year.

I don't have any realistic hope of getting back to where we were a year or two ago, because organic results now appear to be afterthoughts in Google's SERPs. Users are being trained to read AI mini-essays, "People Also Ask," etc. It's like they're showing up at a university library and being told, "Never mind the books and treatises in the stacks--all you need is this excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica."

Ouch...I will stop complaining about my traffic. My traffic is double what it was one year ago, but I spent a lot of time writing and adding new content in the form of articles. Most of the articles are relatively low traffic, but a few get a ton of search traffic and I haven't been able to find why the disparity between the articles. It's like Google strongly favors some and ignores the others.

The article traffic is nice, but it doesn't convert to sales of products it just gets you visibility. Meanwhile many of the old searches for physical products that I was getting until end of 2023 have dropped off completely. If you don't have an e-commerce enabled site (public pricing options, return policy, product ratings) you will now show up for these types of searches anymore. So, much higher traffic has resulted in lower sales than 2023. I would spend the time to rectify that, but if Google is going to unleash more hell in January again I will spend my time on more productive things.

[Micha]

Aha. "Their platform". Which is actually all our content, our work, scraped and spun illegally.

Google isn't interested in that, for them we are practically just suppliers who work for free. They don't care how we are doing.
By the way, here is the interview with Saint Sundar about what awaits us. Which, by the way, shows that Google regards our content as its own.

[seroundtable.com ]

[headspace]

Interesting interview. I think Sundar acknowledges that G is scraping sites and not rewarding the creators apart from those like reddit, new york times et al. big enough to command a license. But he sort of justified G's actions by stating that there will be productivity tools further along the line spawned by AI which will make businesses much more productive. Its difficult to disagree, but it doesn't provide much comfort for those seeing their sites and livelihood disppear.

[renatovieira]

Another huge drop today. Has anyone else noticed a big impact after the last update?

[Micha]

Yes, the traffic has been decreasing over the last few days. Today there is a lot of traffic from Discover again, but I suspect that this will remain an exception.

[universenet]

Watch Google CEO Sundar Pichai Interview On Search To Profoundly Change In 2025

Sundar is just obsesive with AI and with way how AI will make more money to gogle owners

[morpheus83]

Apparently there is an indexing issue from yesterday -
[status.search.google.com...]

[Dooku]

Incredible levels of greed, incompetence and lack of moral compass

That has just become very dangerous, it seems that people are not going to lie down and take it any more......see what happened to UnitedHealthCare CEO....and other corpo's have become very nervous now.

The latest article from Ed Zitron is about the current state of AI fraud, $70K nVidia cpu's they can not cool enough, running out of training data(already happening/happened), stalling of AI development and investors becoming wise of this useless hype.
At some point the novelty will be gone, there aren't ANY useful products from AI and there won't be any, despite the tech companies screaming in ever more desperation.......yes, 2025 will be very interesting.

[RedBar]

Seemingly an almost total collapse today, 66% of my Googleday gone and traffic at 19% according to Statcounter however Awstats (A) and Webalizer (W) are telling me a completely different story therefore are A and W solely seeing bots etc?

Well. checking my actual logs Statcounter does not seem to be seeing many pages being viewed by a colossal amount.

Am I the only one experiencing this since this discrepancy is massive with some of my sites with one of them showing 20X the traffic that Statcounter does !

[Dooku]

@Redbar, Statcounter does a pretty decent job of displaying actual traffic from human visitors. They weed out the 0.5 second hits, most bot's and script/hack attempts.
I regularly compare the raw server Nginx log files of my websites to the cloudflare and the Statcounter statistics. And sofar I can say is that at least 95% of "traffic" that is there in the raw server log files but NOT displayed in Statcounter is just junk, containing anything from semrush bots, hacking attempts, scrapers...etc..etc...

[EditorialGuy]

Another huge drop today. Has anyone else noticed a big impact after the last update?

It's hard to tell, because this is always our worst time of year. For more than two decades, we've invariably had a low point in early to mid-December or thereabouts, so it's no surprise that the graph is currently heading downward despite our gains from the November Core Update. (This annual low point is always followed by a jump after Christmas or New Year's, with the curve heading upward until its peak in mid- or late summer.)

On the brighter side, even with our week-over-week erosion of Google traffic in recent days, we're ahead of where we were a month ago before the November core update began. That's unprecedented for this time of year. Unfortunately, our gains from the update are a drop in the bucket compared to our losses in Google traffic over the last two years.

[RedBar]

@Dooku

hacking attempts

It never ceases to amaze me the sheer volume of Wordpress hacking attempts that generate 404s. Do any of these hacks actually work, I haven't a clue since I don't use it ?

[ichthyous]

Another huge drop today.

Very big drop today...search is -30% at 1pm. Seems across the board...all locations and content type affected.

Has anyone else noticed a big impact after the last update?

Traffic has been slowly recovering and even going higher in the last week. I am up 2% on search. But if I check the last two weeks -13%, and last 28 days -7%. So there was definitely a quite large negative impact but it seems to have been fading...except for days like today. What is interesting is that the only real customer inquiries I have gotten were clustered from 11/19-11/21. After than, almost nothing. No holiday boost, no last minute orders and no inquiries.

[Micha]

The ranking is now a complete mess. My most important keywords (normally in 1st or 2nd place) are now somewhere in 90th place. Without the Discover traffic, the page would be dead today. Today in the top spots: stock market news...

Sales in the shop have plummeted today, which is no wonder given the statistics, because, amazingly, the Google visitor today is 2). Other shop owners are reporting a similar picture to me today.
And this in the run-up to Christmas, which puts even more livelihoods at risk.

[headspace]

@Dooku the first two lines are inappropriate comment. Nothing condones that behaviour.

[cooler29]

@Micha: "The ranking is now a complete mess. My most important keywords (normally in 1st or 2nd place) are now somewhere in 90th place. Without the Discover traffic, the page would be dead today. Today in the top spots: stock market news...

Sales in the shop have plummeted today, which is no wonder given the statistics, because, amazingly, the Google visitor today is 2). Other shop owners are reporting a similar picture to me today.
And this in the run-up to Christmas, which puts even more livelihoods at risk."


SAme here, in different niches :)

I done experiment, maybe it will be usable to somebody, maybe have some connection to thing we are talking here: drop in rankings and many Ai, or bad, or just spam results....

Useed ChatGPT, Bing Copilot and one very popular app that has more than 1.000.000 downloads with user rating almost 5 to talk about small few tourist places around a world where I have been and know (when I travel I stay for month or two at least, and literally I know and picture every hotel, bar, restaurant etc, eve have a lot friends on such places)

Anycase I asked AI to give me plan trip, and answers were very generally. And with a lot of false information. Whan I say "this is not true, you are ling or You don't know, why You just don't say that You don't know answer" I was getting something like:

"I apologize for the confusion. I'm programmed to be helpful and informative, but sometimes I don't always have all the information or I make mistakes. In this case, I made an error in suggesting a spa that doesn't seem to exist. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. I'll strive to be more careful in the future."

What is most impressive to me, is that a lot of people really uses those AI things.

So maybe fellow webmasters like everybody here need to change mindset: maybe we just need to lower quality of content, get back 25 years back, maybe today users don't want to read, maybe the just trust any answer provided by Ai as "authority"....

Just my 2 cents I wanted to share with other :)

[EditorialGuy]

So maybe fellow webmasters like everybody here need to change mindset: maybe we just need to lower quality of content, get back 25 years back, maybe today users don't want to read, maybe the just trust any answer provided by Ai as "authority"....

What surprises me about AI Overviews and the like are how old-school they are. They're simple blocks of text and are a lot less engaging than, say, a Web page with photos and an easy-to-read layout with white space and the like. An AI Overview is like a post from CompuServe or GEnie back in the 1980s. If today's users don't like to read, why is Google shoving blocks of plain text down their throats?

[cooler29]

@EditorialGuy "What surprises me about AI Overviews and the like are how old-school they are. They're simple blocks of text and are a lot less engaging than, say, a Web page with photos and an easy-to-read layout with white space and the like. An AI Overview is like a post from CompuServe or GEnie back in the 1980s. If today's users don't like to read, why is Google shoving blocks of plain text down their throats?"


Lol, that is what I mean on... :)I mean You hit the point...

That is why I drop idea that we maybe need to just got back where we been 25 years ago...

Ok, You say Compuserve, that is let say 40 years back, but maybe, just maybe, new generations need to "grow up" just like we did... :)

Again this is just my silly explanation for this, since I still don't have a better one :)

[Mark_A]

How much will SEO for example for Google become obsolete once AI becomes the norm. How much will it now become "AIO" (AI Optimisation) and possibly bear no resemblance to the SEO people have been doing up till now.

Could your current and future SEO plans become simply obsolete / a waste of time and money, because of the arrival of AI?