May 2025 Google Search Observations

[goodoldweb]

Google is not a search engine. It's an ad engine.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:28 am (utc) on May 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Dooku]

creating standards that benefit only them and at great harm to everyone else

It's the stupid fault of the EU by not developing their own SE and cloud platforms.
And the EU is NOT as strong as China to just kick google out like they did......and G couldn't do a thing about that.
This situation is actually so bizarre beyond belief, a company sucking economies dry because of robber baron and rent seeking behavior.
Every webmaster should actually add a one page EXTRA SEPARATE domain and website to their hosting account with a tar pit software and link to that from their NORMAL website. G can not deindex the normal websites if enough webmasters would do that.

[gatormark]

The ONLY way we can make a difference is if we move away from G to Bing(for now until a better SE comes along) and make a serious dent in G's earnings.

@Dooku

The thing is this, it doesn’t matter what “we” do. You are talking about changing the thinking and user habits of the general populous. Frankly, we don’t have that kind of power nor influence as Webmasters to do that.

We are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I have been using social media more to move traffic to my website since I took a 35% traffic decrease since AI.

However, it seems as though Google is throttling my ads based on the traffic, so it doesn’t matter where the traffic originates.

[Micha]

The problem runs even deeper in the EU. We have a bunch of politicians who cling to old values. They prefer the good old steel industry and the automotive industry to new media. They simply don't recognize the full extent of the problem. There are a few voices warning us, but their warnings often go unheard. And as a bonus, I'll throw Germany into the mix, where politics is so outdated that nothing will ever change in this regard. (I just realized that I'm doubly screwed.)

By the way, Bing is not an alternative, at least not for my news site. It only favors big media outlets; as a small player, you don't even make it into the newssection. What's more, Bing has been getting worse for months. What we need is a new player that has the Mony and the capabilities to take on Google.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic has just been atrocious day after day now. We had one brief bump up and back down it went. I am not sure that this is all the product of AIO being rolled out, but the combination of AIO and the page being so bogged down with crap that searches just don't yield traffic anymore. The number of sales inquiries has ground to a halt now for weeks. Like, zero. Time will tell if it's 100% Google, or partly a recession-like scenario, seasonal, or a combo of all of the above.

[Chris travel 30]

My observation for the past week:

Traffic: Big intraday swings from monday to thursday, best day on wednesday, yesterday on friday traffic collapsed to a bare minimum.
Affiliate Sales: Monday started okay, wednesday best day, friday nearly dead.
Avg. position: remains under the past weeks level.
CTR: Collapsed from beginning of may, not getting way better.
Comparism YTD: Traffic is nearly minus 40 % compared to the month may last year.
Vola: Still high with big swings from day to day.

Conclusion: To my opinion G is turning things on and off. One day they try one thing, next the other. To me it seems like they are completly aware of the mess but fear the loss in profit due to other ways of search. So they try to switch things on and off until they have the best config to max profit.

Any ideas / observations on your side guys?

[Treud]

for me the impressions are bouncing a lot, they are going down but not as much as the actual visits.
Position really tanked a lot and the CTR as well, has totally been pushed down. I'll check in detail later what KW moved, but the main driving pages for sales lost around 80% of traffic since last year. I'm an E-commerce, so I don't really on traffic for ads.

But what I see is people are staying longer on the website, BUT, fewer orders, and inquiries than before, probably has a reason with China-US tariff wars but I'm selling to Europe as well.

I agree that Google is trying things, as my traffic seems to be on/off, especially for the US. My littles sales volume at the moment are from Duck Duck Go or Bing!

[Micha]

The week was very strange: Google definitely rolled out an update on Sunday, and traffic to the shop and news page dropped.
Traffic to the news page started to rise again on Thursday, and today there is extremely high traffic from Google again. The shop started to recover yesterday.
Unfortunately, this rollercoaster ride will probably never end.

@chris: It seems to me that Google is trying to combat spam, but the methods aren't working. That would explain these extreme fluctuations. What they did on Sunday also cost some large websites in Germany a lot of traffic. Google is usually very cautious in this regard.

[ichthyous]

Today I am seeing a massive 35% drop in search. USA is -60% at 11am. I checked and hundreds of links from real, high ranking sites have vanished from my GSC panel. My visibility also dropped at SEM across a number of terms all at the same time, so I suspect that this is an update rolling out, and it isn't pretty...

[azlinda]

RPM at 0.66 this morning!

[mosxu]

[reuters.com...]

Can we also buy zombies free ads from Apple?

At the moment it is a case of over paying for zombies

[Conro]

I don't want to alarm anyone even more, but yesterday I did some tests as a pure user, I used several queries and between ai overview, people also ask, videos, featured snippets and description in the snippet of the few sites on the first page, I never had the need to click on websites. All businesses are destined to close, how can this thing be legal? It's like living in a ferocious virtual dictatorship where one company takes everything, makes you happy few friends and returns nothing to those who produce

[Micha]

@conro Why are all companies destined to close? There are some that are unfortunately extremely dependent on Google because that's how the ecosystem is structured, but there are other sources of traffic besides Google, and the worse Google's results become, the more these sources grow. Incidentally, the fact that you didn't feel the need to click is due to your user behavior. Of course, Google tries to keep users on its site, but it can't force them to stay; it also depends on their own behavior.

[Conro]

@Micha, I see it very badly. Once Google has turned its interface into a prompt with answers, the only way for ecommerce to gain visibility will be by paying (in my opinion some are already doing it, like Amazon which is recommended by some llm, leading to sales). The information sites will be useless, the news could still exist but only for the big ones and would be summarized by the LLMs. It's a nightmare that will lead to the same bankruptcy as Google, we are witnessing the destructive and self-destructive capitalism that I had only heard about

[Treud]

Google is now « Pay to win »
You can have crappy or good content, only way to work is advertising

[Micha]

@conro I agree with you, but criticism should not be directed solely at Google. If users do not change their behavior, they bear some of the blame.

[Dooku]

If users do not change their behavior, they bear some of the blame.

Obviously.....as they have been carefully "trained" by G. Nothing is by coincidence.

But I see this "conditioning" at different levels in societies that are not very skilled in critical thinking......you can fill in which one.
It's also the reason why people think "we can not change anything"........the Canadians just proved they can!
So it's up to us now to analyze what is going on right now in the SE and make an educated guess on what will happen in a year from now.
And start working on methods to get your information(more difficult) and or your products(easier) in front of the eyeballs of visitors and/or potential customers.

People get discouraged easily, I get it. But start making a list of anything that comes to mind from alternative SE's to platforms to marketing methods.
Even if you think "nahh this is not going to work" try it! Even if one method might have just a little result, it all ads up if you are able to combine multiple methods.

Ooh....and don't forget to place some links in your emails, invoices, pages to some utterly negative info about G :-)

[mosxu]

[osnews.com...]

This pop up is the most annoying thing a website is forced to do to users for SEs sake

[gatormark]

Obviously.....as they have been carefully "trained" by G. Nothing is by coincidence.

I don’t think if I’d say this is training by Google. Today, people are inherently lazy and refuse to research anything. I think Google just took advantage of today’s human nature.

We see this laziness everywhere on social media and in politics. People REFUSE to fact check.

This is a perfect storm of laziness in which we are the Andrea Gail.

[Whitey]

Things are volatile per the tracking tools @rustybrick is citing;
[seroundtable.com...]

[christianz]

Traffic is awful since Saturday. The revenue per mile is even worse than awful since Easter.

[Micha]

@Whitey But only on the US market; in Germany, for example, the fluctuations have calmed down again, and on Saturday it wasn't so bad either.

And as for Google, I agree with @gatormark: People are lazy by nature. However, it has gotten worse since the pandemic, and part of the blame lies with the media, which is exaggerating the “we want clicks at any cost” game.

[RubicCubed]

Things are volatile per the tracking tools

These tools track ranks, but organic results are out of view and don't get seen much anymore (USA). I think Google is just dead for us in the USA.

[Dooku]

I wonder if even Statcounter is accurate any more? I have people placing orders for which they clicked dozen's of product pages......yet nothing in Statcounter. That should not be possible?

On another note about the seo tracking tools.....looks like they became useless now? If there is NO correlation between rankings and traffic.....what's the use?

[BigKat]

@Dooku

I wonder if even Statcounter is accurate any more? I have people placing orders for which they clicked dozen's of product pages......yet nothing in Statcounter. That should not be possible?

Ad blockers, browsers and VPNs with active tracking protection block Javascript trackers including Statcounter and GA. This is the big downside to Javascript based analytics because the analytics data they generate is incomplete.

On another note about the seo tracking tools.....looks like they became useless now? If there is NO correlation between rankings and traffic.....what's the use?

Tracking tools aren't entirely useless. As others have said, Google has demoted organic results down 1-2 page scrolls because of AI Overviews and other froth. Monitoring ranks, which most users don't see, is a waste of time IMO. Being cited in AIO is the new ranking system some should be monitoring, but unfortunately being cited doesn't produce much traffic anyway. Are citations worth monitoring? For me the answer is no. But I do see some talking about a big jump in AIO this week. For most of the last year AIO has increased 1-2% in the SERPS each week. But from May 12 to May 19, Google has increased AIO almost 8% according to AWR ( [advancedwebranking.com...] ). This is a historical big weekly increase in AIO. Obviously AIO consumes organic results and traffic. Maybe in less than a year SEO tools, hosting, domain names, etc. won't be of much use because Google will have completely wiped out organic traffic by then.

[Dooku]

unfortunately being cited doesn't produce much traffic anyway

Monitoring citings in AIO boxes is a complete waste of time. The real estate in those boxes is tiny compared to a normal page.
And G is preferring only the "trusted" big boys to appear there. I think that this will not even be a priority with SEO companies so optimization for that will be dropped because the ROI is REALLY bad.
I notice in my log files a lot more product pages being found and clicked by visitors these days. This leads me to believe that people are actively searching for those products and maybe are fed up with page 1 of the SERP.......well at least some percentage of people are?

[Conro]

Create useful content, you will see that by December 31st someone will recover... But no! [medium.com...]

[Fluff_Nutz]

I almost made it back to my 2022 levels of traffic. Before last week I was only 50% away from reaching my peak traffic, which was back in 2022. When Google first struck my site by -90%, only a year old and already felt the wrath of Google and their terrible ''updates''. Tried to fight to get that traffic back ever since. My efforts was showing and, as said, before last week I was only 50% away from reaching it and claiming it back.

However, these past few days have been terrible. A lot of ranking changes. Drops from both Google and Bing. Though, I'm hoping the latter of which has, now, calmed down. Google drops still seem to be ever present. Between them both I have lost -40% compared to the previous week. A lot of ranking changes and probably lost keywords. Was doing do well, this month even saw a +90% traffic increase over the previous month. Why? Because there was no ''update'' last month. We can grow so nicely when ''updates'' do not occur. Now ever since Tuesday 13th there have been traffic drops every day.

I don't know why Google haven't announced this current ''update'' there clearly is one. Yet they remain silent..

[RubicCubed]

I don't know why Google haven't announced this current ''update'' there clearly is one. Yet they remain silent..

Google I/O [io.google...] begins today. Maybe they are saving major announcements for this and will also elaborate on the big increase in AI O that has taken more traffic away from us? In the USA visitors from Google are rare and an endangered species soon to be extinct.

[mosxu]

[instagram.com...]

Reposition now ?

[Micha]

It was an interesting event. Google introduced Gemini as the universal assistant, without mentioning what this means for websites or content creators. In reality, Gemini will be imposed on everyone everywhere, without users or website owners having any meaningful choice. For independent websites, this means one thing above all else: we need to find new ways to reach people, because traditional traffic sources are becoming increasingly scarce. What Google unveiled yesterday may look like innovation, but in terms of data privacy and the independence of the internet, it's a disaster.