January 2025 Google Search Observations

[engine]

The end of 2024 was one of the busiest for Google's changes and updates. No doubt it'll be settling to a particular status in 2025.

Let's keep an eye on traffic and conversions, and the impact of the AI-based responses in SERPs.

Previous thread December 2024 Google Search Observations [webmasterworld.com]

[universenet]

and there it is:
[techcrunch.com...

Javascript need for AdSense load properly

[Fluff_Nutz]

Javascript? That is a name I haven't heard in a while. Doesn't that have an impact on Mediavine ads? I know my site doesn't currently run Javascript. I assume it will be a requirement soon then. Will it stop site traffic drops too? I'll do anything for the bleeding to stop. Another -40% drop yesterday. A much bigger decline this time compared to previous days WTF?!

[haramamba]

Javascript? That is a name I haven't heard in a while. Doesn't that have an impact on Mediavine ads?

Ha! G just wants to ensure people are really seeing their ads, ai overviews, PASF blocks, all this $%^&, and do not try to hide them with the adblock or other cosmetic filters.
They tell us: "It is anti-bot protection".
But how much bot traffic (comparing to the amount of human requests per second) do you have, G?

[edited by: haramamba at 2:14 pm (utc) on Jan 18, 2025]

[not2easy]

The techcrunch article was posted here yesterday (post # 5116855), but it now has its own thread to discuss the js implications: [webmasterworld.com...]

[gatormark]

Today is a federal holiday in the USA so things are a little slow for my niche.

[christianz]

Traffic is terrible. Possibly a new en#*$!ification update delivered under the cover of inauguration.

[mosxu]

What now they want small businesses to have a voice?

[ichthyous]

My traffic was astronomical yesterday and higher than normal today, although the US and Canada are lagging. If anyone had hopes of any kind of regulatory action against Google in the US you can just forget that, not now with all of them falling all over themselves to pander to this new admin in order to gain influence. For the next two years at a minimum there will be no action. I see the rest of the world beginning to see these American tech platforms as hostile and parasitic and you might start to see many more limits placed on them outside the US. I for one canceled my Amazon prime account and deleted X. Next stop, delete my Facebook business page. The latter two were completely useless anyway, but I will certainly miss my prime account.

[Micha]

The traffic has been terrible since Monday. Especially in the shop, despite advertising (Google) 0 sales only cost.

@ichthyous is probably also the best thing to do, also for your mental state, with all the garbage on X and FB. By the way, you won't miss Prime for long, I cancelled it months ago and to be honest I don't miss it at all.

[sk7411]

Sure something hit us last Friday or so .

[ichthyous]

@ichthyous is probably also the best thing to do, also for your mental state, with all the garbage on X and FB. By the way, you won't miss Prime for long, I cancelled it months ago and to be honest I don't miss it at all.

I hope so...I forgot that I also canceled Meta verified. $15 a month for what? It provided no benefit whatsoever. I am worried about deleting a 14 year old Twitter account with thousands of followers will do to my ranking in Google though. Each time I tried to delete my FB business page it immediately hit my Google rank.

[Treud]

@ichthyous Yes same here, traffic was quite high these 2 days, today I'm still waiting for the feedback, I received some emails too for products inquiries, but as it is the Chinese holidays, we can't ship now. So have to wait anyway for after the 8th
This week I had more leads than the last month.... hope they will convert!

[sanjeevk89]

Lots of fluctuations. Some of my projects lost 20 to 30 percent of traffic within this week.

[saladtosser]

puckparches, I’ve tried every version of ChatGPT (premium user) , hoping it would simplify coding tasks, but it often requires so much back-and-forth prompting that it ends up being inefficient if you already know how to code. Sometimes it solves issues instantly, but other times you can end up arguing with it for hours. While it can eventually get there (x amount of times), it requires significant effort. It has also made me a bit lazier with simple problems, though for complex challenges, it’s a useful tool if you already have the expertise to guide it. If the problem is truly novel, however, it can be pretty useless.

For example, today I asked it to visit a specific website and write a description of the business. Instead, it described a different company in another country with the same name, so it clearly didn’t visit the provided link even though I asked it to visit 2/4 times! Overall, it’s hit-or-miss. If you already know the answer, you’ll spot its mistakes more easily; if not, you risk accepting incorrect information. It’s still too unreliable to fully depend on, it remains a helpful tool for brainstorming ideas in its current iteration, i wouldn't dismantle the serps for it yet if I were google for sure!.Use us a little longer as you train chatGBT/Google before putting us our for pastor, your not fully there yet in terms of stealing and repackaging our shizzel in a fool proof way!

[gatormark]

If anyone had hopes of any kind of regulatory action against Google in the US you can just forget that,

Thank goodness!

[tienanhhung]

Something seems off with Google right now. Normally, my site traffic increases a lot after the holidays, but this time it feels unstable in terms of keyword positions. The main keywords are holding steady, but overall traffic is down 20-30% year over year

[Martin Ice Web]

Def A/B testing with two sets of results. A is new and looks a much better than B.
While B is on we get rubbish traffic from all over the world and lots of robots. Nearly no real visitors.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Seriously Google. You are never happy until you drop my traffic right back down to August 2024 levels. The same traffic figure that I'm tired of seeing and yet you are, for some reason, obsessed with me having. I should not be seeing the same traffic figures all the time. I have been posting articles daily for months now. None of them mean anything. I got great growth over the festive period. Yes I expected to drop after the holiday was over but not all the way back to August.

I have now lost a writer and my motivation is at its lowest. Creating a business in a niche I have been a fan of for decades was too much to ask for! Dreams don't come true!

[mosxu]

What do we do about these zombies? New administration seems to be busy with “Stargate” while we get charged for traffic that can not be proven it is real!

[Martin Ice Web]

They switched to B set. Very, very, very worse traffic. Amazon & ebay are now our main selling channels. Before all this updates started it was google.
I don´t know if, in long sight google, hurts itself while presenting rubbish results to the users.

[ichthyous]

What do we do about these zombies? New administration seems to be busy with “Stargate” while we get charged for traffic that can not be proven it is real!

This 'administration' went from endlessly whining about how Google, Meta and all the others were persecuting them to being owned top to bottom by them. Even the supposed direct threat from China vaporized overnight and TikTok is still here as it's a useful tool for spreading disinformation to GenZ. There won't be any action against any of these companies in any real sense for the next 4 years. USA government is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Tech now. Any action will have to come from EU, UK, AU, etc and perhaps they will all act in concert against USA big tech. I do think that the public on average is now becoming much more suspicious of the power of these companies though...they were all sitting there at the inauguration like the old Soviet Politburo.

[ichthyous]

They switched to B set. Very, very, very worse traffic. Amazon & ebay are now our main selling channels. Before all this updates started it was google.

I am not seeing massive fluctuations...in fact since the beginning of January traffic has become much more stable and at a much higher level. Most of that is seasonal, but the number of actual inquiries and sales has increased quite a bit from the end of Dec to now. But we all know that that doesn't last for any of us very long. Google will decide to launch five updates in a row lasting 4-6 weeks where there is poor traffic and no inquiries at all.

[Martin Ice Web]

We are seeing the complete opposite. Massiv drops in traffic. Today started with 37% of "normal traffic". Most of the traffic single page views ( no robots ). Traffic seems to be 100% mismatched,
Pattern with flowing traffic change with long times with no traffic at all. A pattern that we didn´t see for two years.

[ichthyous]

@Martin One thing I have seen for months now is a perpetually low amount of traffic from Germany. One day it seems normal, and the next day it drops like a stone. Are you referring to DE traffic, or is this all of your traffic? My DE traffic was stable for many years, but now it vanishes every other day. Canada is also very low all the time these days.

[Micha]

I have to agree with Martin again, there is only one difference: the traffic is high (only from Germany), but zero sales from what comes from Google.
The news page is also running strangely, today a bit better again, but the last few days have been terrible.

[christianz]

Have to agree with Martin Ice Web regarding A/B-like testing of two versions of results or SERP layouts. Yesterday the non-junk version was enabled for about half a day. During the night they switched back to junk version and today it stays that way (low traffic).

Micha, maybe you are getting so much non-converting traffic because Google assumes that you have super duper "authority" since you are a shop/ecomm site with street address and entity (business name), and it is sending some of the purely informational traffic to you instead of some random AI generated spam sites (because Google can't recognize legitimate info sites anymore).

[Micha]

@christianz I think you're right about that, because actually 0 sales are illogical with this amount of traffic.

[KaseyM]

Kind of at a loss.

In my niche, the sites grabbing the most amount of traffic right now are deliberate clickbait and turning a single sentence of value into a 700 word article.

[mosxu]

I would not put my money on EU, UK, AU they know what is happening but sit and watch their small business being suffocated!

Only hope is Big Tech to start eat each other!

[Dooku]

they were all sitting there at the inauguration like the old Soviet Politburo

A comment I read online yesterday:
" I was recently discussing this with a fellow Eastern European friend—the difference between us and our Western cousins is that we absolutely LOATHE our oligarchs, while many in the West don’t even seem to realize they have them!"

So I agree that we should not expect much, if anything, from governments, even in Europe.

[Micha]

And while we are fighting for survival, the champagne corks are popping on Google. [cnbc.com ]

[EditorialGuy]

So I agree that we should not expect much, if anything, from governments, even in Europe.

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

[mosxu]

“ Alphabet shares close above $200 for first time on split-adjusted basis”

Also a crypto meme goes up in value without intrinsic value!

I am having a hard time to believe that “people” click more on ads these days considering how time wasting it is to find something better than amazon!

[universenet]

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

Yes, correct, this is one from list of ways how EU will make revenge, very easy

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop today!

[ichthyous]

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

US has proven to be an unreliable ally when Trump is in office...I think it will be more than just the EU. The UK is pretty fed up with US meddling in their domestic politics, and this admin does everything in its power to insult Latin America at every turn. A lot of these countries are already suspicious about the pervasiveness of US tech and can turn up the heat considerably.

[ichthyous]

@ renatovieira. Yes, huge drop here too...started at 8am sharp. Traffic was actually deteriorating the entire day yesterday from 11am, but today is a steeper drop.

[sk7411]

DROP , here we go!

But i am sure they are cooking January or Feb Core update nothing else . The Goog engineers gotta prove themselves by making search better every day, isn't it.

[Micha]

Here, too: drop. It seems impossible to grow. On Google, there is only one direction left: down. @sj7411 Since Google just updated its search Quality Rater Guidelines, an update should actually come now, it always has when it has been updated.

[Treud]

Impressions are really really low too. Let’s see what will bring the next update. !

[ichthyous]

USA and Canada traffic are **very** low today...-35% and -85% at 1pm. Everyplace else seems to have recovered from the slump of the last two days

[mosxu]

Thanks God I still have the pause button on my ads!

That may go soon without any regulators noticing it!

[renatovieira]

Massive drop continuing through today.

[RedBar]

Bizarre, my Sunday ended up with my best day of the year at 194.6% of my 2025 average so far and my highest day since 26th October 2024. All traffic was what I woud describe as "normal".

[sk7411]

Still dropping . Great going Goole , just rank whatever you didn't in 2024 just for the sake of freshness . They will all indeed be high quality SERPS, trust me !

[mosxu]

deepseek.com is it checkmate to G?

A few search engines and how soon?

[BigKat]

deepseek.com is it checkmate to G?

Open source AI from China already has been bench marked and is more accurate then the best the US has to offer. Google's downfall will be continuing to invest billions of dollars in their AI only to be repeatedly one-upped by open source AI from China built at 1/10000 of the cost. Google ruined their search engine, and I doubt they will ever see any success in AI because they have lost all focus and are concerned only about making money - not the people who rely on and who they expect to use their terrible products. IMO, Google greatest days are in the rear-view mirror.

[not2easy]

There is an article here about the DeepSeek app release: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Whitey]

This is just the start of major SEO and Google disrupters. In fact a large proportion of websites will not be required and distribution strategies will be turned on their heads.

Implications on SEO thread with OpenAI’s “Operator” here: [webmasterworld.com...]

The game’s shifting big big time. Hold on, learn and innovate.

[sk7411]

February core update is going to be brutal given the trends we are seeing . Absolute win for the spammers though.