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]

[cooler29]

@Conro : Maybe You are right maybe You are not...Maybe Google doesn't need content creators, especially text (post/articles/etc), because everything is already written a thousand times and their AI have all possible opinions and angles about any topic in this world, so can mix it and always gave more or less quality answers. If people that accept, and I am sure they are already accepting that , then there is no end of Google that is end of webmasters.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Conro

same here. We improved our descriptions, images, titles .... But we are outranked by very old websites from the early 2000s. Even websites with "no image available" image are ranking higher.
So the last updated was for sure not a quality updated.

[RubicCubed]

What about bot traffic? It's up. The only thing that is up.

I notice bot traffic is way up too. These bots are hitting urls with Google's srsltid parameter, suggesting they have scraped Google's search results to find our urls. I think maybe Google turns off their bot security as a scammy way to make us think we are getting more traffic. I just don't think the Google can be trusted anymore.

[Micha]

“Ki overviews generate more clicks” is just as much a lie as ‘We at Google care about website owners’. Only SEOs who want to fool their customers still believe that.
Has Google changed something again today? The shop has suddenly come to a standstill, AdWords shows that ad delivery has dropped dramatically – great, just great.

[ichthyous]

@Micha I am seeing the same thing...USA traffic is totally frozen this morning. It's -49% at 10:30am. This is becoming more common now, where traffic just suddenly vanishes for half a day, then, just as suddenly, snaps back as if nothing happened.

Despite all the higher traffic since April 21st, I am still seeing clicks trending downward at GSC since February 10th. At this point the level of clicks is dropping below this time last year, while impressions are far higher. The CTR has dropped to the lowest point in a year as well.

Some searches now have almost an entire page of AIO info at top...who will read all of that? Sometimes I have to scan the page twice to find my own page one result.

[Martin Ice Web]

This is becoming more common now, where traffic just suddenly vanishes for half a day, then, just as suddenly, snaps back as if nothing happened.

100% confirmed. While traffic in the evening is down and remains there till next morning.

[mosxu]

“allegedly, the AI overviews bring them more clicks on ads. That what Pichai said on last quarter report.”

That is beyond funny Pichai needs to be very careful with this kind of jokes!

[christianz]

“Ki overviews generate more clicks” is just as much a lie as ‘We at Google care about website owners’. Only SEOs who want to fool their customers still believe that.

AI Overviews generate 10 clicks/visitors per every 1000 clicks/visitors they take away from the creators.

So the end result is 100 times worse for the publishers and totally unsustainable. But Google is not lying - AI overviews generate clicks!

[londrum]

According to GSC my impressions are way up over this time last year, my average positions are also up, but CTR and clicks are both down, presumably because of AIOs. Ranking in the top 2 means nothing these days because most of the time they're not even on the first screen

[BigKat]

IMO Pichai's comment about AIO producing more clicks, and Elizabeth Reid's comment about those clicks being higher quality, are both jokes and just corporate talk to pump up an AI project that nobody but they want. The quality of traffic from Google is absolutely miserable, and almost on par with Amazon, with people who are so confused they buy one of everything and return what they don't want. It's ridiculous and will get worse now that Meta released their standalone AI app. Everyone in Big Tech is rushing to maximize the monetization of users by making it as difficult as possible for these users to find anything they are looking for.

[Conro]

Maybe I missed something, but in the ai overview I saw a tiktok video among the sources

[azlinda]

AdSense is completely dead for me. I no longer have an alternative other than to remove it from my sites.

[Whitey]

@Whitey How many visits do you get from ai citations? Is it comparable with Google traffic?

@Conro Good call — and yeah, I understand your response was rhetorical. The post wasn’t about traffic per se. It was more to help folks get ahead by understanding how LLMs interpret structure.

We’re in a strange limbo — traffic from AI is small and hard to track, and we still don’t know how search habits or gatekeepers will evolve. But if we want to future-proof content, making it easier for machines to read, extract, and cite seems like a no-brainer.

It’s less about instant wins, more about building long-term visibility on shifting ground.

Are you experimenting with anything yet?

[Conro]

@Whitey But it's useless to facilitate the work of AI if you don't get traffic, in fact that's exactly what they want. On Perplexity, chatgpt, Bing, my site is mentioned and yet the traffic is less and less probably because only I click on those links since the artificial intelligence response is sufficient. Google never mentions my site because it's not big enough and continues to deindex keywords, while to the sites that pay the keywords have increased, in this way they manage not to lose traffic. I won't waste any more time working on websites, it's a dead business for me now.

[Micha]

@Whitey There is no reason to adapt your content, your brand, etc. to AI. Google's “Loop” shows that the company has no interest in giving us traffic, and other companies are not interested either. So why should we process our data for this system? Conro put it well. And this development will inevitably lead to a web populated only by the big players. The diversity of the internet will be destroyed by Google, ChatGPT, and the like because the authorities responsible have no interest in regulating it.

[Treud]

The ultimate goal of Google is none is leaving Google unless you buy something from Google shopping !

[edited by: not2easy at 11:30 am (utc) on May 5, 2025]
[edit reason] unchecked notification box [/edit]

[ichthyous]

Traffic is definitely weakening this week. It seems that Monday was the peak. I'm back to starting my days with -50%+ usa traffic and struggling all day to hit even. Search is -10% today at 3:30

[Micha]

Well, it's the same with my two websites, although yesterday the news site was still getting decent traffic. Today it has dropped dramatically. Google seems to be suffering from the holiday blues in Germany again... hopefully it will pick up again on Friday, as the shop can't afford another slump like this.

[gatormark]

Today’s Adsense RPM is the lowest of the year, by far. Hopefully it’s an error that will resolve itself before the end of the day.

[UpOnOne]

I thought I had made it through the last few rounds of Google updates but it looks like I was finally hit last Sunday night. Traffic has grown steadily over the last 5 years. It's a 20-year-old site with over a million US visitors coming from Google every month. 75% of the traffic disappeared overnight and each day it is dropping by an additional 10%. Pages are being deindexed at an astonishing rate. At first, I thought there must be a problem with the servers, code, DNS, etc. I couldn't find anything. GSC, Log files, etc show nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps I received a penalty or maybe I lost some links but I can't seem to find anything that would indicate that. I thought maybe AI overviews had finally hit this space but haven't been able to find any examples. At the exact same time, AdSense reduced my Page RPM by almost 50%. I have been through traffic fluctuations in the past but RPM always stayed somewhat consistent on this particular site. Hopefully, I am just missing something but this is wild! The only strange thing I could find is that my GSC data no longer lines up with Analytics or AdSense. Analytics and AdSense show the drop in traffic but GSC is showing the same amount of referrals/clicks to the site as usual. I thought perhaps my AdSense or Analytics code had been hijacked but I don't see any changes to the code and none of the files have been edited. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?

[Whitey]

I thought I had made it through the last few rounds of Google updates but it looks like I was finally hit last Sunday night. Traffic has grown steadily over the last 5 years. It's a 20-year-old site with over a million US visitors coming from Google every month. 75% of the traffic disappeared overnight and each day it is dropping by an additional 10%

@UpOnOne - that’s painful and with that amount of visits it’s certainly a major and significant site that’s been hit. Manual action or algorithmic? Did something change on your site? Did you loose a major link? Are your pages on topic ( see the the thread about GeektoGeek.com)?

[UpOnOne]

@Whitey It is painful! Nothing has changed with the site and all new content is on topic as usual. No Manual Action notifications in GSC and I haven't found any lost links using the usual tools. I am guessing I have been hit with an algorithmic penalty but I have no idea for what. Also, I still can't explain the discrepancy between GSC referrals and Analytics. I know scrapers and bots can still trigger GSC referrals but it seems so weird that the numbers are consistent for months. The only "hack" I can think of would be maybe a browser extension that modifies the Adsense Pub ID and the Analytics code. That would leave the GSC data intact but change the others. But what are the odds that 75% of my visitors would have the same extension?

[Whitey]

@OneOnOne - is your site page content consistently and tightly on topic? There’s been a lot of off topic targeting by G over the last 12 months or so.

Do you have brand recognition in your stats? (That said, I’ve seen “brands” hit that relied on content generation as a central pillar).

[System]

New thread for May 2025: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 11:25 am (utc) on May 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]