February 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

Bros,

In the news G unveils quantum chip that confirms the existence of parallel universes…

Who is that stupid to buy their stock?

[edited by: not2easy at 5:28 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[universenet]

In the news G unveils quantum chip that confirms the existence of parallel universes…

Who is that stupid to buy their stock?

some things are not completely clear in the understanding of physics and, especially quantum physics, without that knowledge there would never be a quantum computer, so phrases about the parallel universe to normal people seem stupid, neither are these things completely clear to scientists, nor is quantum entanglement, but there is one good thing, and that is that new artificial intelligence sprouts like mushrooms after rain and they are still very good, this will shake up the monopolists and put them in a different position

[ichthyous]

The terrible traffic continues...today USA is -38% at 4pm compared to an average Monday, that's a huge drop. It seems that it's mostly USA lagging today. This might mean that by tomorrow things snap back to normal...at least that has been the pattern so far in 2025

[gatormark]

@universanet

I watch reruns of SG1, so I am very knowledgeable about parallel universes and quantum physics. :-)

[universenet]

I watch reruns of SG1, so I am very knowledgeable about parallel universes and quantum physics. :-)

Good for you, you can give them some advice because they still do not know how make quantum computers stable, it is still in developing mode
I think they need some help, I can not help them
I hope they will not finnish like a CERN

[Micha]

Traffic remains underground. I'm beginning to fear that Google now wants to wipe out all the other small sites that weren't caught by the HCU update back then.

[renatovieira]

SERPs and Semrush are going up, traffic is going downhill. Either Google is broke, or no one uses Google anymore...

[KaseyM]

Why do Indian newspapers and clickbait farms have such dominance in Search?

[universenet]

Why do Indian newspapers and clickbait farms have such dominance in Search?

It is help from google CEO to his home country news?

[RedBar]

This is a brief analysis I presented to my company board and IT dept this morning for their digestion to help them try and comprehend all the current inconsistent search engines, yes, engines.

From week 1 2024 my global traffic was pretty consistent until the end of week 43 2024.

Week 44 2024 saw my first substantial drop and this continued at a new much lower level through until the end of week 2 2025.

Weeks 3, 4, 5 and 6 2025 saw traffic back to weeks 1 to 43 2024.

We are now in week 7 and I am back to the traffic levels of week 44 2024 though to week 2 2025.

What on earth is going on with G, has it lost complete control of its algo to its supposed AI?

I have decades of data and have never seen such sharp fluctuations over an extended period, a few days yes but not only weeks but turning into months for it to seemingly rectify itself for 4 weeks and then reverse itself again.

This manipulation is not only frustrating and bizarre but it will start to lose G users since it becomes very evident that it cannot be relied upon for information.

Lastly, BTW I am not saying that any other SE is any better and my old favourite DDG is so out-of-date, and many-a-time so slow, that it is becoming even worse than G.

[ichthyous]

US traffic ended up -17% yesterday, and UK was -3%. India was down 30%. Today USA traffic is still suppressed...-60% so far to start the day. Yet my site is gaining ground in the SERPS!

Higher ranking, but much lower traffic...where have we seen this movie before? Google is squeezing us all for revenue again. I have had zero new inquires since this started again ~ five days ago.

[RedBar]

five days ago.

Many of us seem to be experiening a similar pattern, this is a grift on a global scale.

Yesterday my trraffic was at 60%, after 15 hours today my traffic is 50% of yesterday so far ... Gordon Bennett!

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[Micha]

I'm hearing from all sides that it's horror at the moment. Even shops that invest a lot in Google advertising are practically at a standstill today, despite good rankings. this is really no longer normal ...

[gatormark]

I'm hearing from all sides that it's horror at the moment. Even shops that invest a lot in Google advertising are practically at a standstill today, despite good rankings. this is really no longer normal ...

I wonder if people’s shopping habits have changed. I’m sure that is part of it because of the way I’ve changed my shopping.

For instance, I may go to a website to get authoritative information on the product I am purchasing, however, I rarely purchase from that website even if they are selling the product.

I will immediately go to the big retailers like Amazon or Walmart, here in the USA, and look for the lowest price.

I typically won’t have to pay for shipping with Amazon, so that’s a huge savings.

I have never focused on selling a tangible product on my websites, so my behavior and the behavior of the people I know are the only frame of reference I have.

[Micha]

@gatomark The German market ticks a little differently. Sure, many people do the same, but here many people still store in small stores. We have other problems, political uncertainty, inflation etc. Today, however, it's down to the slump in traffic in most of the stores I looked at today. They all show the same pattern. So it's clearly down to Google.

[BigKat]

I will immediately go to the big retailers like Amazon or Walmart, here in the USA, and look for the lowest price.

Amazon tends to have the highest prices for the items I shop for, and unfortunately Google is mostly Amazon ads. As an example, I had to buy a snow shovel. I found the one I wanted on Amazon after digging well beyond the sponsored product results, Prime offers and everything else Amazon wanted me to buy. I tried to find this shovel in Google, which was all ads with the lowest price being Amazon. Then I tried the alternative AI engines to find that specific shovel/brand, which was a big fail. Finally I found the manufacturer's site and bought it from them for $8 less than Amazon after paying for shipping. It's a lot of work to save $8, but I avoided the marketplace trap which made it worthwhile. Looking beyond the price, Amazon isn't cheap when you consider how much of our tax dollars they're subsidized with. Looks like the number nearly doubled from last I checked $6.7 billion to now $11.6 billion [goodjobsfirst.org...] though much of that is for data centers. Small mom & pops can't compete against that, and neither will independent hosts who don't have their data centers subsidized like Amazon, Google, etc.

[edited by: not2easy at 6:18 pm (utc) on Feb 13, 2025]
[edit reason] swapped code/quote for readability [/edit]

[nuthin]

Google undertake a quarterly update already or have we decided to adjust this regular cycle which has set everyone in good stride since the time your software engineers engaged on "wow hey guys what do you think of our algorithm, have we killed altavista yet? yay.. we are #1 , now lets pretend a search engine isnt' delivering results for many who relies on knowing .

unknown and uncertainty makes for high stress levels.

[Martin Ice Web]

@bigKat,

we have in germany "idealo" a pricecompare machine. amazon mostly ranks in the last 3 third of the results. But this machine does not show the best price every time because it is very expensive to be part of it. This costs a going directly into the items.
There are plenty "smaller" very good shops that don´t advertise or beeing part of pricecompare sites and they can offer the product cheaper than the others.

I wish goverments would force google to show the best/lowest price and forbid the highest click-price auction system. Would be very good for every user.

[Micha]

2 days, 0 sales, less and less traffic via Google. There has already been a nasty slump in sales since February 1. Strangely enough, there were a lot of orders and traffic from Google on Monday, before that it collapsed, and then again. These can't be natural fluctuations.

[gatormark]

I wish goverments would force google to show the best/lowest price and forbid the highest click-price auction system.

Why would you want the government to have that kind of control?

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

monday and tuesday were astonishing good. I would say like a "normal" day. But today sales are down again.

[BigKat]

I wish goverments would force google to show the best/lowest price and forbid the highest click-price auction system.

Why would you want the government to have that kind of control?

In the USA, Government controls the market with subsidies that elevate the chosen (Amazon) and drive competitors out of business. I'm sure those subsidies Amazon received played a big role in the bankruptcies of some long running brands (Sears, JCPenney, etc.) and also the downsizing of other well-known retailers (eg. Kohls closing 25 stores in 2025, Macy's closing 100 stores in 2025+, etc.). The big lure for these subsidies are all the jobs Amazon will bring, or so we are told, but in reality Amazon is destroying more jobs then they create. Consumers will only consume so much, and subsidizing any retailer offers no great value to society IMO. In the ecommerce space, Google's SERPS are mostly Amazon ads filling the screen. Can any retailer compete against Amazon for ad placement, to just be seen in Google, if they aren't heavily supported by taxpayers? Probably not, and that's why we independents are going the way of the dinosaur (extinct).

[gatormark]

In the ecommerce space, Google's SERPS are mostly Amazon ads filling the screen. Can any retailer compete against Amazon for ad placement,

@BigKat

I have not seen that here in the USA for the things I search. Amazon might be one of the ads that are at the top of the page. Frankly, I see many more Temu ads than I do Amazon. Amazon is typically one result from the big players like Walmart, Temu, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Etsy, etc.

You are right about what that does to small businesses. Of course, that has been going on since the industrial revolution.

[mosxu]

In Davos last month, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, urged the EU not just to stick to its guns, but to insist that tech platforms open up their algorithms to ensure they are not breaking the law, and to hold tech executives accountable for any rule-breaking.

Lawless…

[nuthin]

LOL

Google just pays bribes in the sum of many millions every few years to shut them up from ever dare questioning Google's insidious practices when it comes to control of paid advertising revenue.

If Google wasn't EVIL they would open themselves up to being more transparent with associated costs and practices used on the mass advertisers who simply do not and can not for the life of me understand "why would Google deliver you automated suggestions based on actual low cost per click for high returns" when the bottom line is fundamentally what they care about ..........

Mass Google ads campaigns running auto pilot based on Google's own formula of success for them to make you feel like you matter when every so often a government of the day starts again with mumbles, chitter chatter ALL TO BE SILENCED by Google's $$$$$ to stop this behaviour , no go away and come back again another day.

This is WHY we must demand Google come back to the fold and communicate with the SEO community again..., surely someone in is listening and wants to speak up but lets be honest, those people probably have come and gone from their residency and now Google is only a #*$! robot / crawler........

I for one have ALWAYS loved Inktomi, Slurp -- right now Googlebot can continue on scraping bottom of the sea... why else would websites be making a return 10 years later -- HOWEVER , Google should be aware they no longer operate due to company liquidation back ~yrs ago, why must they rise from the ashes when you've got legititmate small business websites and online stores awaiting for efforts being rewarded /;/

[nuthin]

Don't get me wrong I love playing on websites that have enough authority to simply meet and exceed curret thresholds being placed on the SERP's -- however it's these triggers that aren't very friendly when it comes to up and coming small business websites and online stores which have invested time and effort over past 180~ days+ etc for not even a small taste , in fact right now the filtering and triggers are having a reverse effect.

YOU CAN'T KILL EVERYONE FROM ESTABLISHING THEMSELVES AS A LEADING AUTHORITY.

We are here before Google and will continue to be here after Google, rest assured... on that.

[Micha]

This is WHY we must demand Google come back to the fold and communicate with the SEO community again.

And why should Google listen? They haven't been in the “seo community” for years, but the community has always followed them.

[Martin Ice Web]

@gatormark

Why would you want the government to have that kind of control?

Because poeple tend to believe that google will allways the best results and google does everything to make poeple think so.
And a goverment has the assigment to protect their citizen for harm in whatever form. And if poeple pay to much because google is filling up its pocket harms all inhabitants.

French governement, as an example, has released a law against shrinkflation. And i think that is a good thing.

[gatormark]

@Martin Ice Web

So, basically, you want the end of capitalism.

[RedBar]

Damn ! I just checked my stats and the first impression was that I had more or less returned to my 2024 average but, alas, a quick analysis of this traffic increase was that darned Huawei Cloud bot from Singapore that I have been unable to block and has been 14% of my traffic so far today.

January 2024 was the last time I had a big hit from this bot, nonetheless it's still annoying since it appears to ignore all rules.

[Martin Ice Web]

@gatormark,

you don´t want to understand me, or?

[Dooku]

So, basically, you want the end of capitalism

NO Gatormark, that is NOT what Martin Ice Web said, I really wonder why you seem to make conclusions pointing that way.
But seeing your remark about you not liking governments to have any control, I can understand it.

This is a train of thought I see with friends in the USA. But they simply fail to see that having some control over the market has nothing to do with capitalism itself. It's a form of control that is simply necessary to protect consumers from large corporations acting in a predatory way.
We have institutions in place in the EU to avoid corporations becoming a "type of Google" monopoly with robber barons at the top screwing everyone and everything that comes in their way.

If you let the reins loose within ANY system, then the results are ALWAYS the same(countless research has already proven this).
No person, company, corporation, institution will check and balance itself if it becomes all powerful, and many will suffer.

Without the risk of getting into politics, I would suggest watching The Humanist Report on youtube. It's a good example of "it's alright when I can profit UNTIL the sh|t happens to MYSELF and now I suffer also because I voted like a dumbass"

Google will do whatever they like and how they see fit because of the lack of control which actually SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY if they were acting just half decent in the first place.

Did you know that the US economy is actually the MOST ANTI COMPETITIVE economy in the world?(yes, that's a FACT). I like capitalism just as much as the next guy, but I don't like corporations trying to rule my life under "the guise of it's just capitalism" while in fact they are just robber barons squeezing us to the max.

[ichthyous]

This is a train of thought I see with friends in the USA. But they simply fail to see that having some control over the market has nothing to do with capitalism itself. It's a form of control that is simply necessary to protect consumers from large corporations acting in a predatory way.
We have institutions in place in the EU to avoid corporations becoming a "type of Google" monopoly with robber barons at the top screwing everyone and everything that comes in their way.

If you let the reins loose within ANY system, then the results are ALWAYS the same(countless research has already proven this).
No person, company, corporation, institution will check and balance itself if it becomes all powerful, and many will suffer.

Plenty of Americans know this already. The problem in the USA is that our Constitution and federal system was designed from the beginning to give a lot of power to smaller states with less population. The representatives from these states have grown more and more right wing and the only way to hold on to power is to 1) gerrymander the hell out of districts. 2) suppress the vote, 3) place lunatics on the Supreme Court that allow any amount of dark money to flow into the political system and corrupt it. Half our legislature is bought and paid for by corporate and oligarchical interests and has no interest in doing anything for the people they represent. 4) Use propaganda and perpetual disinformation, aided by corporate donor class $$$ and by Putin $$$, to keep their constituents perpetually enraged about pointless social issues rather than to hold them accountable for providing nothing year after year. The voters in these states are angry and fed up, but blinded by their own prejudice and stupidity. That's the USA in a nutshell. More than half the country wants regulation of Oligarchs and monopolies, but they are too busy trying to survive and make money to worry about it. Now you see why Musk, Bezos, Zuck, and the others did a pivot and stood by smirking at the inauguration. They were quietly gaining power all along and now the mask is off...they run the show and don't care what the people want.

Did you know that the US economy is actually the MOST ANTI COMPETITIVE economy in the world?(yes, that's a FACT). I like capitalism just as much as the next guy, but I don't like corporations trying to rule my life under "the guise of it's just capitalism" while in fact they are just robber barons squeezing us to the max.

Not quite the most, but less competitive than many other countries. USA form of uncontrolled capitalism is now devouring the country...it was easy to see this coming all along. The working and middles classes have been ignored here since the day Reagan got elected. Now under this current 'government' it's going to become much much worse. No oversight whatsoever...total graft and rampant corruption in plain sight. Just today it is revealed that the State Dept. budget has an order in for $400,000,000 worth of tesla cyber trucks! You know, the ones nobody is buying and which are defective in 50 different ways?

[not2easy]

Mods note

This forum is where we discuss Google Serps and SEO. We do not discuss politics in any of our forums. No one comes here for the latest in politics.

Please stay on topic, it is getting a little close to needing moderation.

---

[mosxu]

Anyone noticed that auto suggestions on money terms are to do with how high advertisers bids are, especially broad match triggers?

These guys do not allow you to type anymore for some reason!

[nuthin]

I'll just 301 redirect some authority websites -> onto those I want see moving on up and Google can't seem to take a hint, so we might have to be more forceful and psychotic.

Nah surely I don't need be a menance .. haha

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is clearly being highly suppressed since ~ Feb 6th or so. My USA search traffic is -12% over the previous week, and USA direct traffic is -24%. It is showing no signs of recovering at all.

That's a very big drop, and the flow of new inquiries is back to a trickle. What is reaching me is once again the low level, low budget useless leads which I delete as they come in. No update was announced this time, but the effect is worse than an update for me...and this happened literally overnight, so it is worrisome.

[BigKat]

USA traffic is clearly being highly suppressed since ~ Feb 6th or so. My USA search traffic is -12% over the previous week, and USA direct traffic is -24%. It is showing no signs of recovering at all.

I'm seeing a similar reduction in our traffic and also beginning on February 6. Each day that passes it worsens.

What is reaching me is once again the low level, low budget useless leads which I delete as they come in.

For us, the persistently poor leads/customers coming from Google is also getting worse. I don't blame the users as much as I do Google, who has cluttered the SERPS with so many ads and other Googlespam that confuses users. I read a story on SEJ where Everett Sizemore, of eSizemore search marketing consultancy, was quoted as saying:

Remember those bloated Yahoo Search pages from the late ’90s? The ones Google originally disrupted with its clean, white background and ten blue links? Well, we’ve come full circle—back to the chaotic, overstuffed experience we were trying to escape in the first place. Frankly, it looks like someone puked up a bunch of widgets onto the page.

It's almost as if Google employed a team of scatter brains to choose the layout and features put in the SERPS. Google's SERPS are so disgustingly unhelpful that we see the end result - poor traffic and poor lead/customer quality.

[goodoldweb]

@BigKat

Spot on. We're getting nothing but zoombies since this "update" started. Good ranking for many keywords, unique live products. Zero sales.

What a mess.

[christianz]

Last few days rankings and traffic tanking rapidly. February in general has been nothing but declines.

[gatormark]

SERP traffic is inching up at a snails pace. Adsense revenue however is up 24%.

[Juniya]

So I was checking my traffic for the month and for sure the drop also started exactly on February 6th. So something happened. It can't be a coincidence. If the likes of Apple etc can be found guilty of manipulating their products, from batteries to whatever, and Google being found guilty of favoring their own companies and allies in the EU, we can for sure say that Google is STILL manipulating their search engine results(traffic) in favor of whom or whatever greedy partners they are aligned with.

[Micha]

Less and less traffic (Discover is down to 0 again), but lots of spam trying to sell me AI as the hot #*$!. The store isn't recovering either. Instead, I now see X profiles in my Discover feed (not even text) and more and more sites publishing AI-generated articles.
Oh, and more and more English language sites for German search terms. No wonder traffic has reached an extremely low level.

[Chris travel 30]

There is def something cooking in german serps. Our site was doing well since after christmas holidays were over. Today on saturdays, when we normaly have like 25-40 users per 30 min, it is only 5! What the h.ll

[Micha]

@chris travel has the number of indexed pages in the search console dropped for you by any chance? For my store, they have dropped from 17,000 in January to 6,000 now and my other website is showing similar results.

[universenet]

@chris travel has the number of indexed pages in the search console dropped for you by any chance? For my store, they have dropped from 17,000 in January to 6,000 now and my other website is showing similar results.

For me it was not dropped in GSC but I see it is dropped in google search live, GSC still ok
I think google all time doing that, it is like will put minimum number of pages of websites search in google in favor to using resources for AI

[Chris travel 30]

@micha yes - since the beginning of Feb we noticed that somehow 7-8 % of our indexed pages went to "crawled, not indexed". The strange thing is, they are indexed. I find the with "site: url" an in the serps for my keywords.
Besides: Google Core Web Vitals failed for mobile around that date. Might be coincident, maybe not.

On your side this sounds like bigger thing. How are you going to handle this?
Let the sitemaps be crawled again? Or manually submit an index request? That would be a years work :D ... just kidding.
But srsly, what are you going to do about it?

[Micha]

The question is rather whether the measures will achieve anything at all. I'm still thinking about it at the moment as I have no idea what the cause could be.

[RedBar]

An utterly bizarre Saturday for me with 95.4% of my global traffic from Hetzner Online, Germany, coming in as single page visits from thousands of completely different IP addresses and user agents etc.

Any helpful suggestions at all ?

[RubicCubed]

We're not international, so we block all Hetzner traffic because they are nothing but scraper bots. Same goes for Digital Ocean and the other junk networks that host spammers, scrapers and scammers. When traffic from Google drops, as it has, traffic from smaller networks with Hetzner type values become more apparent so we deal with those in the same way.

[Micha]

I host my servers at Hetzner, so don't be so hard on the company. But seriously, I'm getting tons of problem messages from my servers today, so something seems to be going on at Hetzner.