April 2025 Google Search Observations

[Martin Ice Web]

worst ever update. Even worse than panda. Down to 25%.
And this update removed ALL converting traffic and hit 100% of our main selling sites.

Search Console is full of not existing errors. google is not able to recrawl the sites since month.


@Micha, i hope it stays this way for you.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:38 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

Here is another link.
[bbc.com ]

And what does google say (please don't laugh)

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half. The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President, Regulatory Affairs

[x.com ]

www.bbc.com Google has illegal advertising monopoly, judge rules It is the second major case Google has lost in a year, after it was found to have a monopoly on online search.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Announce the update already Google. We can all sense it. We can also see it too. -20% drop yesterday and still terrible today. Traffic was stable for a good few weeks, until now...

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing a drop at all, my traffic is improving after a solid month of crap traffic. The last update made a noticeable dent in traffic and that is not usually the case for my site.

I have noticed that one or two categories that seemed to get demoted from top three rank down to 12-14 just will not recover. It's amazing how Google can just peg your site and it won't budge

[Treud]

Traffic increase according the WPEngine backend (likely bots), but search console show a drop of like 20%, but the bandwidth plummeted by like 75% since 2 days, hence they just stop at one page or 2?
But the analytics is showing at the same time on-site.
Weird, as usual !

[Micha]

I see exactly the same thing in the shop. Traffic is increasing, but nothing else is happening. Sales are way down, which is unusual for Easter. Adwords is particularly funny: lots of clicks, but still 0 conversions.

Traffic on the news site is also up slightly, even Discover traffic today. But Easter is actually rather quiet. A rather strange traffic pattern at the moment.

[goodoldweb]

@Micha

Yep. Nothing but window shoppers. I don't recall ever seeing such bad non converting traffic.

Some traction on our ebay store, quite anemic though, not even close to what we're used to getting normally.

[ichthyous]

I venture to say that some of you may be younger and newer at this. You may not have experienced a recession before as the last one was 2008-2009. If not then prepare yourselves...it too me almost 7 years to get back to consistent sales after the last recession, and that was when it was much, much, much easier to get good traffic from Google. I doubt that this recession will be that severe, unless there is a dollar crisis, which I am hearing a lot of chatter about in the business news and media. If there is a steep drop in the dollar and the US goes into some sort of debt crisis it will drag the entire world (including China) down with it. I believe that's why people are not spending as much already. They want to see how this plays out.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:56 pm (utc) on Apr 23, 2025]
[edit reason] user complaint [/edit]

[ichthyous]

Just saw that cloudflare is now performing AI audits to see which AI bots are hitting your site. I was surprised that Gemini didn't come once in the last 30 days, but Open AI's 'Ai Assistant' bot is dwarfing all the others. I checked this and it seems that it's a bot third parties pay Open Ai to have access to. In other words, unknown third parties using this bot to download my content. I do not have this blocked...has anybody blocked this and what was the result?

[imgur.com ]

[EditorialGuy]

I believe that's why people are not spending as much already. They want to see how this plays out.

On the other hand, maybe the people who do have loads of money are adopting a "Spend it while you can" mindset. Our travel-planning site's traffic has been trending upward lately, which seems counterintuitive in the current political and economic climate. Then again, maybe people are just fantasizing about international travel even if they don't plan to actually go anywhere. (Sometimes people need a break from the depressing news headlines!)

[delorean]

What a nice day Google. my top performing pages were completely wiped out from search, while my ancient pages now surfaced on top. What a roller coaster ride. Hope this will be fixed. just hoping. You know guys, Google is pretty dead and dumb nowadays.

[gatormark]

I can’t even look at my Adsense income any more. Every single day my Adsense income goes down since the introduction of AIO.

What’s Google’s end game? Seems like AIO would hurt them too?

[Conro]

@gatormark In fact, Google should have huge losses because there are no clicks from banner Adsense in websites, AIO has no ads and many forums and brand sites in first page do not have Adsense. It stinks a lot

[richinberlin]

sigh In the last month one of my sites has gone from totally destroyed to 600 a day to 4500 a day and then back down to 900 a day. Google is becoming like a Trump Tarif policy. It can't be that one moment my site is worth of hundreds of No.1 positions, and the next, its not worthy of top 100.

No major changes, no link building, no AI.

[EditorialGuy]

In fact, Google should have huge losses because there are no clicks from banner Adsense in websites

Don't conflate branding ads with direct-response ads. The effectiveness of "Drink Coke" or "Vote for John Doe" isn't measured the same way as "Order now and save 10%."

[Micha]

The EU is now looking closely at whether Google's AI search complies with copyright law. BUT according to the report, the Commission is also looking at whether AI search meet the requirements for the protection of media pluralism in the EU 's European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). According to this, people must, among other things, “have access to a wide range of editorially independent media content”. Platform operators must ensure this.

Well, we all know that's not the case with the AI overview.
That's really good news for us website operators. (Unfortunately, I only have one source in German for you.

[heise.de ]

www.heise.de Weniger Klicks im Web? EU-Kommission untersucht Googles KI-Übersichten Die AI-Overviews von Google zeigen mehr Inhalte direkt in der Suche an, was zu weniger Traffic und Werbeeinnahmen für Publisher führt. Die EU-Kommission prüft.

[universenet]

I can’t even look at my Adsense income any more. Every single day my Adsense income goes down since the introduction of AIO.

@gatormark
Adsense will be better when google will have only 30-50 % of market

[Micha]

@universenet
Do you really think that? I honestly can't imagine that. Google will certainly come up with something to prevent websites from earning more money.

@gatromark
I'm really glad that I have an agency that takes care of the marketing of the advertising space on my news site, there's actually a lot coming in at the moment. Do you only use Adsense or do you also have Amazon Ads, for example?

[universenet]

Only a smaller percentage of the market could push google to make any changes
When will that happen? Whether that will happen, I really don't know.

[gatormark]

@Micha
I only use AdSense

I wasn't aware Amazon had CPC or CPM ads that could be placed on a website.

[Micha]

As far as I know, this is only possible via an Adtech partner. In general, you shouldn't commit to one or two providers because there can always be gaps in your income. Have you ever considered whether an adtech agency could be a good option? Especially in the current situation where Google is spinning its wheels so much, it's safer to diversify the advertising on your website. I looked around for a small agency last October and am now pulling in a lot more than I did with Adsense alone.

[gatormark]

Another 25% drop to start this week. Wow!

[ichthyous]

Huge drop today...USA is -40% at noon. Search is -24% at noon. This is not a holiday in the USA but are people taking the day off after Easter? The stock market is tanking today too...

[Micha]

My news site has had record numbers every day since Friday thanks to constant traffic via Discover (this will certainly be over again tomorrow). The store also has a lot of visitors, but no sales, which is getting really weird. Other store owners have experienced the same thing since Friday. Well, the Easter business is completely ruined. Thank you, Google.

[gatormark]

This month has been horrendous. Book sales, zero. Paid memberships, low. Adsense, lowest ever for April. Guest posts, normal. Most page 1 results, gone. It’s a brave new world.

[delorean]

Google SEARCH will never be the same anymore. For 2025 and future, these sites will only matter. Agree, guys?
local news outlets
reddit
linkedin
quora
fb, ig, x, youtube, pinterest, tiktok
indian sites
"authoritative" niche sites
unnoticed spam sites
human edited AI websites
old forums with user inputs/or probably gossips/rumors
sites with pdf files
virus/spam hacked government sites

[Conro]

Google manages to do worse and worse, Google pages are increasingly distant from the query, a useless and frustrating search engine to use to find anything. Now that I'm shutting down my activity because of Google's illegal monopoly, at least I can stop using Google since I don't need to check the changes in the serps anymore, I used it only for that

[Martin Ice Web]

Today -50%. It is not google serps anymore its google spam.

[gatormark]

I guess the death of the small business man was inevitable. Here in United States, the same thing happened to small business men who owned brick and mortar shops. They were supplanted by the Walmarts of the world. The same thing is now happening on the Internet.

[saladtosser]

For some reason some of my sites pages THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN CREATED, 404s are ranking out of nowhere, of course when you click the link there's no page there so doesn't make sense. i'm not sure where they are pulling the title and description from for that page to display in the serps from a page that's a 404 (without even a custom 404)! Been going on for a couple weeks now, can't work it out and there's no links to these pages either so very very odd !

[Micha]

This is similar to the “pages found but not indexed” complete nonsense, all my pages are indexed. Google likes to fantasize.

As expected: Newsseite traffic collapsed again and store, well that's exactly how Martin just described it.