March 2025 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

and the next heavy drop. The shop and news page are virtually down today, the ranking has plummeted, and Google traffic is 0 so far... So it goes on...

[edited by: not2easy at 11:16 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2025]
[edit reason] new month, new thread, split [/edit]

[gatormark]

This week, my traffic has decreased every single day. I wonder where the bottom is, if there is a bottom. Next week should be much worse since spring break begins in many places. This old guy has to start looking for a job again. What a crazy world we live in.

[mosxu]

2 days full of zombies

[ichthyous]

Certain types of photography will always have a place. For instance, wedding photography. However, I can see even things such as product photography being replaced by AI ( I used to art direct). I can see even portrait photography being replaced by AI.

It's already widespread. I attended a panel discussion about this recently and I was shocked how good the photos and the video were. It was a former photographer that switched to using AI and he shot mostly food. The images and video would have taken a huge amount of effort to produce using a camera and props. You literally could not tell it wasn't real. This is already here and it's going to wipe out a lot of production for tv commercials, print ads, online ads, still life photography, product photography and modeling. Why pay models, actors, and agency royalties if you can just cook up the talent in AI? These only ones left will be celebrities that people will be willing to pay for brand endorsement and who can sue over infringements of the likeness.

Fine art is still holding up as gen ai cannot produce huge images yet and customers want a name and reputation behind the artist, but it's creeping in everywhere and artists are coopting AI tools quickly to get ahead of the curve.

As for the legal, financial, medical, and other professions AI is going to tear through them and get rid of a lot of lower level jobs. Banks won't have hardly any employees...paralegals won't be needed as much. Those docs in India reading your x-rays? Replaced soon enough.

[EditorialGuy]

As this update finished we saw a sharp drop in traffic again.

So far, we're doing okay. We had a fairly strong improvement in the November Core Update, and a year-over-year comparison suggests that--for us--this March Core Update produced modest gains.

We're still way down from 2022 and 2023, but it's hard to know how much of our slippage over the past couple of years has been from Google updates and how much is the result of AI overviews, "people also ask," stacked YouTube thumbnails, and other distractions from organic Web search results.

I do think the Web is too important a resource to shrivel up and die, but Google doesn't seem to be doing much to keep it alive these days.

[ichthyous]

As this update finished we saw a sharp drop in traffic again.

I always seem to have drops continue past the updates...traffic has been dropping steadily since around February 12th so the update isn't the only cause. I think people are pulling in spending hard due to all the chaos caused by this band of nutters in DC.

[goodoldweb]

Good article on the topic.

The World's Largest Search Engine Doesn't Want You to Search
[honest-broker.com...]

[richinberlin]

My main project is an international directory + 40 local directories in the same niche. The main, large directory was doing 4000 visits a day up until December, when it was crushed down to 200 a day. The 50 small sites which had been penalised for thin content back in March 2024, recovered, (thin content had been removed 3 months before).

The difference was scaled AI content. The big site had it. The small ones did not. So, I added scaled AI content to 5 of the local directories. Initially, traffic doubled quickly as the content was richer and covered more keywords, but then the hammer was dropped, and the 5 sites tanked. Objectively, they were better with the AI content, which provided a two-sentence summary of the business. But apparently, not according to Google. I believe it was an 'unedited AI content' penalty. The content was good, and not repetitive. My prompts to write the content, was 3 pages long with lots of checks to ensure no repetition of language or even writing style. No fluffy irrelevant words. Just useful, very descriptive, accurate business summaries.

So I removed the AI content from them and my large site, and today, three weeks after the fix, they are back at December traffic levels—perhaps slightly higher, as other sites doing similar things are still dead in the water.

I am annoyed by this. Oh, I'm happy with the recovery.... but my sites are objectively by any measure, no longer as good, as I've had to lower the user experience to rank. This goes against all principles of SEO that I have followed in the last 20 years, that if you make the best site, it will be resilient to Google algorithm changes.

[Conro]

@richinberlin It may also be that the AI content is not the culprit. Just the other day the GOOGLE update ended and the cause of the recovery could be this. It must be said, however, that it has now become impossible to understand whether a change made is good or bad. It's no longer worth wasting time, you might as well go to the casino to try your luck

[Micha]

What the heck is going on now? The update is over and on the same day: Discover traffic is back. Increase in visitors to the news page by 280%...
Shop: Yesterday at 5 p.m., orders suddenly started coming in. Result: Best day in weeks; we almost reached our target monthly turnover (previously we were still 48% away from it).

I give up, there really is no logic to be seen here.

[Conro]

@Micha Keep us updated on how things are going

[Micha]

@conro i can tell you now: just one more day, then it will be business as usual. Traffic and sales will drop back to a minimum ...

[Conro]

@Micha It would be nice to hear you say the opposite

[No5needinput]

@richinberlin Yet Google can plaster unedited AI content on practically every web search page and have the audacity to penalize us for using a relevant useful sentence or 2 on our page(s). Greedy Hypocrites.

[Dooku]

@Goodoldweb, thanks for that article link, that was a really good read!
It's clear that the google club is living inside their own bubble and are prone to their self created tunnel vision as they have no clue of what is happening outside.
They are headed towards the edge of the cliff and I see no sign of any rescue.......they should take Boeing as an example to see what happens if you take the wrong decisions regarding your business operations.

[universenet]

when google will have just 30-50 percent of market and when AI will not be part of "search" all things will be automatic ok, if that will be ever?

[richinberlin]

@Conro, no it's 100% an AI issue. 50 sites A/B tested. Even 2 sentences of unedited AI text, is being penalised as auto scaling. It's designed to catch people making websites out of data (think celebrity pages, where you can auto-create a whole written page using data you can find, age, number of movies, birthday, most successful movie, partner etc

Seriously. My NON AI sites in the A/B test have cracked on, whilst the useful, brief, unedited sites with AI content have all been crushed.

My main site which went from down by 95% in December, which i removed the scaled AI content from, has totally recovered. I say totally as its down, as its got less content, and less keywords, but on the content it has, its recovered 100%

[RubicCubed]

photography is unaffected by AI, unless you make your living from selling generic stock photos or something.

AI has affected photographers who showcase their creative capabilities online and watermark their photos. There are plenty of videos out there [youtu.be...] training people how to remove watermarks with Gemini. There also are new sites popping up online featuring easy drag & drop AI watermark removal features. It probably won't be long before AI can scrape an entire site, spin the content and remove the watermarks of all images in just seconds to create competing websites that siphon off traffic from the original sites.

[haramamba]

Even 2 sentences of unedited AI text, is being penalised as auto scaling.

I wonder how many sites are destroyed due to false alarms in their "AI detector" ...

[goodoldweb]

@Dooku

Good article indeed. What a sad state of affairs.

We now add "Find us on DuckDuckGo or Bing" at the bottom of all comunication with customers.

I've been warning about Google since their release of the Spybar (2006?). "Tin hat foil" and "conspiracy theorists" they called us.

[saladtosser]

I see an argument circulating on social media that U.S. tech bros should be exempt from global IP theft to protect us from China. If that's true, could the West simply hire two individuals working out of a basement to track down these Chinese companies online, add them to a Western IP blacklist, and launch DOS attacks to keep them offline?

If a Chinese company were to create a Studio Ghibli-inspired image generator or something similar, how significant would that threat really be? Does U.S. tech bros doing it first improve our security against China?

If DeepSeek was trained by ChatGPT and we don't want the Chinese to obtain these tools because of national security concerns, should they be in the public domain, online and and training Chinese systems?

Couldn’t the West secure exclusive rights to use global IP data strictly for in-house national defense—and even for in-house meme generation—without exposing these tools to the public? Do we really need to monetize this technology in the public domain and use it to compete with or even undermine creatives? Is that part of the protection plan we need against China?

Is outsourcing the world's manufacturing to China and enriching them to build and buy arms a bigger risk than them simply generating another content spinner already out there?

Will these proprietary text and image spinners held by tech bros in the USA really safeguard our sovereign borders from China? If so, how? To me, it appears to be a very thin argument for yet another massive transfer of wealth and assets to an already insanely rich group—nothing more.

[Conro]

I only understood that these ai chatbots can become a national danger, in my opinion once the masses start using them those who have more users will be able to manipulate the information. For example, for Deepseek there is no dictatorship in China, but in the meantime everyone must be loyal to the Communist Party. Now think about how much information can be manipulated, think that each of us will have a vertical profile with which we can rebuild our lives. All this seems like the stuff of bad guys of the Marvel

[Micha]

Ki-bots are already a danger. There is so much misinformation and fraud on social media, and AI bots give the perpetrators a tool that makes it increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is not. In my opinion, ChatGPT and the like should never have been released to the general public.

[ichthyous]

Atrocious traffic...it just keeps dragging along and seems that there is no improvement since mid February...some days huge drops in usa, Canada and Australia traffic. Yesterday a sudden big drop in UK traffic...there is never a good strong flow it seems:

Country:
The United States
-28%
The United Kingdom
+40%
Italy
+137%
Australia
-35%
Spain
+85%
Germany
-33%
Canada
-65%
Czech Republic
+146%
France
-34%
Poland
+196%
Singapore
+122%
Republic Of Korea
-48%

[Micha]

Google has changed News, interesting, you no longer see the subscribers in the Publisher Center.

So, about the traffic: Discover traffic is continuing, so visitor numbers remain very good. I'm a bit surprised, because it's usually there one day and then it's gone the next.
Shop: Here, too, traffic and sales remain high, and today the monthly target has been reached. I have no idea what Google is doing, but it's welcome to stay that way.

[System]

New month, new thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 11:40 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]