August 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

AI Mode doesn’t seem to cut it either the business model is cooked:

No clicks no money!

[EditorialGuy]

But at least Google Search's AI response will be alongside links. Bob at least has a shot at getting traffic when users use Google AI, whereas he has zero shot if users use ChatGPT.

I get traffic from ChatGPT every day. Not a lot, but it isn't inconsequential.

Side note: To borrow your example of Bob having a site on car transmissions, "How to change your transmission fluid" may lend itself to an AI response, but "How to change your transmission" probably doesn't. Not every query is satisfied by a simple answer. Different people search for different things with different desires and expectations.

[foxyalicia]

Why should users download Chatgpt when Google offers Gemini everywhere?

That's part of my point. google's bread and butter comes from answering queries. It used to answer the queries solely by displaying search results. To compete with ChatGPT, Google offers clear, succinct AI answers, as well.

I would understand the presence of AIO and AI mode if Google had a traffic slump, but it seems to be all stable, with some traffic switching to Bing.

I understand. I assume Google implemented AI in order to prevent that from happening.

AI search is here, it’s growing, and you can’t miss article after article about the death of SEO, organic search, Google search traffic, etc. It’s a little out of control right now… Sure, AI Search traffic from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc., will continue to grow, but if you look at the actual data, organic search (and Google Search in particular) still drives a majority of traffic to most websites.

Isn't that partly because AI search is new? I'm not sure what search engines are using it, apart from my knowledge that Google is starting to implement it in its Search algorithm. I've used ChatGPT and only rarely seen a link (only when ChatGPT presumably is having trouble answering the query).

The traffic from all ai to websites is extremely low and you can also ignore it. I recommend you reading this article,It will probably improve for ecommerce, as chatbots recommend sites where certain products or services are discussed and are asked for information.

I understand you to mean that ChatGPT et al will be better for search when it comes to ecommerce sites. I don't have an ecommerce site but as a shopper, I'd agree that using Google's Shopping tab results is annoying. I also would think that if ChatGPT et al don't implement brand/site authority as a metric, which killed so many sites as it dominated HCU two years ago, that factor will benefit many sites. But I'm unclear which search engines rely solely on AI?

I accept as true the article's statement that AI drives only a tiny percentage of search. But I assume this is because ChatGPT et al don't operate to offer search results; they offer answers. So I can see where asking ChatGPT where to get good BBQ in Atlanta might be useful, but Google is always going to win with that question because Google can link to online reviews and Google Maps. Whatever the case, the article is about AI not taking over from Google Search, a related topic but not the topic at hand.

I was describing why Google would offer AI answers to queries. My point was that most people who query "the price of tea in China" don't want to read a thesis on the history of the Chinese tea trade; they want that succinct AI answer or snippet with the answer. A general query like this is very different from "USB search protector" because with the first search, users are hoping they won't have to click further; whereas with the second search, they're expecting to click because they want to buy.

LOL Google is looking out for Google. I'm not Google's paid spokesperson. I'm simply saying, as things currently stand, I'd rather have a user use Google Search rather than ChatGPT, because at least with Search, there's a chance of a click-through.

[Conro]

@foxyalicia A fresh fresh post. Honestly, I don't trust Google anymore, I don't want to work on something that can disappear at any moment. Every time I read something from them I see it as a joke or a half-truth. Better to devote yourself to something else than a "casino-style" business Where you can lose it all in a moment if you're not kissed by luck. I talk about luck because by now it is not clear what Google likes or dislikes, simply rankings increase or collapse without knowing why (I am talking about honest sites, not spam or artificially pumped up with links). [searchengineland.com...]

[Chris travel 30]

I actually wanted to share my observations again last week, in a fit of euphoria. But then I thought to myself: Let's wait and see what happens next.
And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened.
During the update, traffic and affiliate sales remained roughly unchanged. Towards the end and after completion of the last update, both rose sharply, almost to the previous year's level.
As some others here have also reported, since the evening of August 5, we have seen a massive decline in user quality, ranking shifts, and a drop in sales.
This is even the case on several sites that are not related to each other thematically. This leads me to conclude that parts of the update will probably be revised again, probably even overshooting the mark once more, before taking another step forward.
All in all, it's the same frustrating pattern again. First, you're thrown a bone and you get your hopes up, then comes the next blow.

[Martin Ice Web]

Todays traffic is - ignoring the low traffic - completly useless.
I wonder why poeple still use google. It is so frustrating as a user to look for something and have to dig pages deep to find what i was looking for.
Years ago i would have find tons of good websites within the first 10 results. Nowadays i find myself looking on page 4 or 5 to find something usefull.
Never did that before.

[shadowlight]

Reading the entire court document from 2019 ( justice.gov... [justice.gov] ) will put it into perspective

"We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page). If we, as a company, want to go there we should discuss that. It is possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking. But I will say that I am deeply deeply uncomfortable with this, and I'd be surprised if the ads team wants this. The nature of how you would easily increase queries is a key reason I don't like queries as an end metric. The easy ways are almost all bad. Having queries as a metric will, in my opinion, have a subtly bad effect as a launch metric even if we ' decide not to do the bad things'."

IMO the document rubiccubed posted says its all, here are a few more excerpts from the document.

Short term revenue has always taken precedence.

We can improve *engagement* in the short term. I know ways we could do this. This is the *equivalent of rpm heroics*, but that does not heIp you! But we don't have the levers (or muscle) to increase queries in the code yellow way.

- we have spun up efforts with your team to look at
- desktop (by porting over mobile UI)
- UI tweaks to improve access points (0 query suggest, query box size etc). suggest ranking etc.
- latency efforts which are a high priority already but will get more attention.
- the explore team is working with the goal of increasing user journey length.
- Aside from latency, we have historically not been able to move queries in the very short term in a meaningful
way. Some suggest changes do so, and some system changes do so

Here are some quote’s from another post:

Anyone else with solid technical foundations (CWVs, accessibility/usability, TOCs, breadcrumbs and matching rich schema) seeing drops?

I still think this update is punishing technical SEO, treating strong implementations as “over-optimization.”

This could fit in with their ‘latency efforts’ to help ‘improve *engagement*’ in an effort to ‘increase queries in the code yellow way’. We all know that sites with bad CWV's can have a negative impact in regards to bounce rate, especially on mobile.

I don't buy this theory. Penalizing sites for good speed optimization and some honestly implemented technical SEO would be too stupid even for Google.

I would say that it is pretty stupid to implement in a more aggressive and widespread way the very things that this document suggest and clearly states are ‘bad things’ after they lost the case. A case they are also going to appeal Reuters [reuters.com].

They are either safe in the knowledge that the outcome of the whole case won’t affect them in any meaningful way or they are indeed ‘too stupid’ and short term revenue is their one & only concern.

[Micha]

Google is once again claiming that clicks from their AI-powered search are better, and of course every metric showing fewer clicks must be wrong. Has anyone here actually found these so-called “high-quality clicks”? I’m still looking, personally.

[blog.google ]

[BigKat]

Google is once again claiming that clicks from their AI-powered search are better, and of course every metric showing fewer clicks must be wrong. Has anyone here actually found these so-called “high-quality clicks”?

Google's poor reputation for being honest, along with their numerous antitrust convictions in court, can't compare to Pew Research Center's many years of unbiased studies and solid reputation. There's no question Google should not be trusted.

Being in ecommerce, our conversion rate from total Google traffic has improved slightly. This is not because Google's AI has improved matching users to the products we sell but is instead because Google stole our info page content and traffic. What Google traffic remains is scant visitors to our product pages. Isolating traffic to product pages, Google's conversion rate has fallen dramatically (over a third) as compared to previous years when AIO and all those ads and refinement boxes weren't present. Summed up, we have much less traffic and what little traffic Google is sending to our product pages converts much worse. It's a huge net loss for us, but at least Google's profits are soaring. And that's the point of Google's circus act - to make us believe Google is better when actually it's much worse.

[Conro]

We have all dreamed of it, Google has not taken away traffic, on the contrary it sends more quality clicks, which is then one click a day and only if the answer to aio sucks we don't say it. Yet another Google gaslighting. [seroundtable.com...]

[ichthyous]

USA search traffic is frozen in time again this morning...insane. Overall search is -12% but USA is -40% at almost 11:30! This is becoming a regular pattern now...for hours on end the USA traffic just stops cold, usually in the morning. Canada is also -55% this morning, but Canada traffic has been demolished since last year, so hard to tell.

[Martin Ice Web]

Today we got run over by bots. All from singapure. All with referrer goolge.com. Coudl be faked or just from google free PS. I can not figure it out.
But it clearly has something to do with google updating its system and the so called "quality clicks". google just doesn´t filter out bots right now.

Meanwhile i would say that google lost so much traffic due to AI ( own and others ) that they have to fake search volume.

[Dooku]

Google Says Clicks To Websites Relatively Stable With AI Overviews

Reminds me of that song by Shaggy, "It wasn't me" :-)

Even in light of overwhelming evidence of the contrary G has a different view of reality (and morality).
Monty Python's got nothing on them, G is far more ridiculously funny!

[Micha]

It's starting to get frustrating: the shop is once again generating zero revenue from Google traffic. This is slowly but surely becoming a problem. Sure, it's summer vacation in Germany, but I've never seen a summer slump like this. On top of that, there's endless bot traffic, and according to Semrush, extreme index fluctuations at Google are still ongoing. That means you can't even try to adjust things because everything keeps changing. The news site is amusing at the moment. Yesterday was a record day thanks to Discover traffic, and today isn't going badly either. But I'm starting to get worried that Discover is becoming the main traffic source...

Overall, I'm really starting to wonder why there's still no stability after the core update, at least according to the tools, and what exactly Google is doing.

@Dooku There are good jokes and bad jokes. Google is the latter.

[saladtosser]

@Micha they are trying to figure out what went wrong, 2 many HCU sites got traffic (ad filled to the ti...ts sites) and showing when they are meant to be buried (not all HCU victims but the ones I see back in the SERPS crash my phone with ads, no scroll).

They forgot to overlay the CWV/UX/technical side of the algo from what I see. Seem to have working on it a bit, things are reverting a bit back towards good UX and less invasive video ads that hijack your device and download the entire p #*$!hub library in the background or whatever they do!

[gatormark]

Google isn't punishing technical SEO, but are pulling rabbits out of their hat to make users search more by presenting them with low quality content and refinements. Reading the entire court document from 2019 ( [justice.gov...] ) will put it into perspective since they discuss turning off ranking improvements and placing refinements all over the page - both of which they have done to reduce quality to force users to search more.

I have a hard time believing this because their focus on AI overviews undermines this theory. What I do know after working for a Fortune 500 company for well over a decade is that people feel the need to change things that are working well to add continued relevance to their job.

[Chris travel 30]

@ Micha: "That means you can't even try to adjust things because everything keeps changing." - Thats one of the main reasons why we have actually stopped to (re-)adjust content for SEO purposes. Now we have more time for other stuff. Our new motto is: If it performs well, good. If not, fair enough. Bc with these constant fluctuactions it does not make sense for us to abjust content any more.

[Conro]

Soon on Google I look for information on dogs but I receive sites that talk about cats. AIO, however, hits the nail on the head with my question. Google would say that users like to visit sites about cats when looking for information about dogs, but begs for a quick response from AIO about dogs. Obviously it's all the fault of the websites :D

[Whitey]

The last 2-3 days have been volatile with a decline in clicks of around 30%. Hmm ….,

[Micha]

@Chris I see it the same way you do. Apart from basic SEO, i.e., the article structure, I don't care about SEO on the news page either. But the situation is slowly becoming critical for the shop, so something has to happen.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Chris @Micha,

the main problem is, that google setup guidelines and says do this and do that.
U follow the instructions make a clean, compelling website and see that your site gets dumped in favor of an outdated bad UX, not compelling website that someone setup in a day.

I have a competitor who setup the same ! website on two domains. Both are ranking #1 and #2. Not for 2 weeks but month right now. Both are ranking for a lot of terms.

So google get your things right and go back to your roots.

[longjohnbronze]

This was Tuesday:

Today (as of right now) we're seeing a drop of ca. 40% compared to both yesterday and one week ago. Traffic is globally diversified, so this can't be a local effect like "school holidays just started". Doesn't seem to be anything technical on our end, server responds normally. If this persists, this would be the largest sudden shift we've seen in about a decade.

...and after a recovery in the second half of the day, it finished at ca. 15% below the previous week.

Today we're seeing ca. the same (about -40% compared to last Friday). A lot of people here have been describing this tap-on-off behaviour in the past, it's not something we've noticed before. Can't say it's entertaining.

It's also so weird because of the diversity of our traffic. Our largest source country represents ca. 10% of traffic on average, and the top 10 countries only represent ca. 50%.

[christianz]

So google get your things right and go back to your roots.

They need to start with basics. Ability to tell a useless fake website from useful real website. There are very few real websites left. And there are millions of fake ones. Rolling out core update that is substantially worse at making this distinction was bad idea. Especially when there are countless new fake websites created every day at speed much greater than before LLMs.

[ichthyous]

A huge drop in traffic again this morning... Search is -19% and direct is -33%. All of it concentrated in USA and UK traffic, -30% and -39% respectively compared to an average Friday.

This has been a recurring pattern in the last 7-10 days. Yesterday the drop had mostly recovered by day's end but search is definitely way down from the previous week-long surge. It's either feast or famine with Google, and either way it's not resulting in any new customers this entire summer.

Also noticing that my backlinks are rapidly disappearing in GSC counts...I've lost thousands in the last month and the links are all still live and in place. Google is just not reporting them anymore. It's mostly links from sites that include large numbers of backlinks to my site. Either Google is changing how it's counting links or deciding to hide the true count. Either way, my ranking has not dropped (for what that's worth these days).

[Fluff_Nutz]

Rankings over here remain stable but looking at GSC the traffic is all over the place. So I was bored and managed to find Google's favourite musical track. The Lyrics fit them perfectly..

[youtu.be ]

[Gotcha]

Google, social media = poor quality traffic Bing, Yahoo, DDG, ChatGTP, Reddit, forums = high quality traffic
screenhot bing my tech blog

[iili.io...]

[mosxu]

Zombie traffic again :))

Boy competition changed the game in big ways!

For the first time I use zero G and when I give it shot it gets on my freaking nerves!

[haramamba]

G-bot is lazy at crawling last 3 days. They are doing or undoing something.

[shadowlight]

Seeing new 'search feature' or rather a feature containing different title, additional text & different size.

Titled 'Find related products and services'.

Containing a list of keyword refinements, like they all do, that send you to SERP's for the keyword clicked.

With small text at the bottom 'These searches were selected to connect you with relevant products and services from advertisers'. This is what they are all designed to do.

This and PASF, PAA etc are bigger than usual, showing more keyword refinements & taking up more screen real estate.

[mosxu]

“EX-GOOGLE OFFICER PREDICTS THAT A.I. WILL FULLY ERASE THE MIDDLE CLASS BY 2027“

So will the search itself. :))

[christianz]

Big drop again and record low traffic levels.

[RedBar]

Main global site traffic reduction started my Friday afternoon and all day Saturday resulting in a 60% reduction with it continuing today, Sunday. mid-afternoon and at 25%

Meanwhile ... Local UK hotel venue had its highest day of 2025 yesterday with today already above average.

Massive bot hit yesterday from France on one of my smaller specialist global sites.

[fearlessrick]

My traffic and revenue from Adsense has been improving steadily since late April, partly due to my own efforts, and, I'm guessing, partly due to Google.

After having a banner day yesterday, today's traffic is beyond disappointing and Sundays are usually my best days. It's still early, but I'm thinking I fell for the trap again, seeing improvements and then the rug pull.

My sites are not huge, but I notice trends. My solution to G traffic variations is better use of social media, primarily X, Gab, and truthsocial (though that one sucks a lot). AI will continue to be a PITA until it all eventually fails, which it is currently in the process of doing.

[christianz]

Just additional observation - as I am seeing record low human traffic and record bad Google rankings, I am seeing extremely aroused, salivating ChatGPT banging on my door, ignoring robots.txt and getting stopped with 403 Forbidden code over and over.

It has tried downloading my pages 102 thousand times so far today.

This is complete disregard for law or decency by the so called "AI Companies".

[Whitey]

The traffic drop continues, back to pre core update levels and trending down further. What's going on?

[Conro]

Google is very good at giving you the answer with the query if it appears aio, but the sites in the serp talk about something else. Thank goodness Google cares about the web, what if it wanted to destroy it.

Did you know that the DOJ decided to dismantle Google? I never heard of it again and I knew that the judge would rule in August

[Martin Ice Web]

After a good weekend today started with -70%.
The pages that now get traffic are itmes didn´t sell for years or just low price items.
All our main pages didn´t get one visit from google users the last 12 hours.
( bing still brings users in ).

[Treud]

Was away for a week, and everything is down as well for me.
I saw an increase, a real one, not bots, and right after the huge dip right after and it’s stable, bottom, but stable… (4 days as for today).

[Micha]

That's really an up and down at the moment. Yesterday things went well, today they're bad; yesterday the ranking was good, today it's bad. Nobody can keep up with that anymore. The only thing I notice is that more and more very old articles are being accessed, some of which haven’t been visited in years.

[gatormark]

I hadn't checked the numbers before, but the percentage of my organic traffic has dropped significantly, from 83% of my total traffic in 2024 to 29% currently. That's crazy! When will it hit zero? :-(

[christianz]

@gatormark

But Google spokesperson said clicks are stable!?

[zimka]

I've completely lost motivation for SEO and don’t know what to do next. My polished and dedicated content has hit rock bottom, and I'm not seeing any positive signals from Google.

[Dooku]

My polished and dedicated content has hit rock bottom

If you are doing content than it's pretty much over. If you are doing e-commerce or services......it will happen a bit later.

Just watched the youtube video from Barry Schwartz "The trush about G search traffic......."
G is walking a very fine line, they tried all kinds of different side businesses/products.....those went all bust.
So they are now all out on advertising in their SE and milking it to the max......they don't have anything else.

Once companies think and feel that their advertising ROI is bad because they see more and more people leaving G.....then it's over REALLY QUICK for G.
We just need to wait for that tipping point, that's all.

[RedBar]

Question: An observation from recent bot and spam activity on my sites.

Is Paris, France, becoming one of the major global activity centres?

I've always had loads of garbage from there however the past couple of months has seen a massive increase of 500+%

[gatormark]

Bot traffic is currently the norm. I had been getting about a 400% increase in traffic because of bots from Singapore. I blocked all of the IP addresses in Singapore and it did not impact Singapore bot traffic at all. However, it looks like Google has filtered out that traffic and it is not showing up in my analytics, finally.

[Bill_H]

We have gone from volatile, to simply crashing with the July update. Traffic off 25-40%, dropping further every day. No stale content, lots of fresh or refreshed content. Core vitals are green all the way, search console green all the way. Been doing this for more than a decade, never seen anything like it.

Oddly, seeing GA4 listing some js and images as pages. Checked the source code, it is clean. No idea what G is doing.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@Dooku

Leave Google and go where exactly? Its not like there is any good alternative right now. Every search seems to have the same motive and agenda. Content scrape and refuse to give traffic. We need a search with publishers in mind. Alas, there is none.

I think this is why a lot of sites haven't already left Google. Just like with Youtube, there is no alternative platform to go to. They also have the highest marketshare right now too. Still.. Which means that searchers still prefer their platform. Its rough but there is no where to go to and no alternative.

But AI search is a stupid invention. Once a proper LLM blocker is released people will use it and then what happens? LLMs can no longer scrape every site out there. There are blocks for Youtube ads, site ads and, mark my words, there will be one for LLMs too. Its too early for a proper release but its likely in the works. So if sites don't see traffic soon there will be blocks until something, more, agreeable, is made. At present there is no blocking them, so companies are taking full advantage of this right now. But we are still the search fuel.

They still need us otherwise we wouldn't be getting scrapped. Meaning they should have more respect for the ''internet fuel''. It literally feels like children own these companies now. I have low regard for America in general. Terrible laws, authorities and kids with toys in high positions.

@gatormark
Yup, I had a huge increase of traffic from German bots, starting last month. I managed to block them but they still try. They refuse to give up but I, also, refuse to unblock. So their attempts are futile.

Also, why are Google removing referral links? You expect me to just rely on you alone? Not going to happen!

[Dooku]

@Redbar, most of that traffic is routed through OVHCloud from Paris France. In the server log files or in Cloudflare it's either listed as OVHCloud directly or from seo bots, ai bots and all types of hacking crap from hosting companies whose IP addresses are from OVHCloud even though they are listed with different host names.
OVHCloud is just one big cesspool of shady traffic......I have them blocked on all ASN network numbers in Cloudflare.

[RedBar]

@Dooku ... Yep, my conclusion too ... Just what do they derive from doing this?

[Gotcha]

My solution for now to survive is Bing. I got 80k sessions and page views from me while Google hates my tech site.

[Treud]

I hear here and there that the solution is Bing. For me it’s the same, there is no strategy for this or this search engine.
I just prioritize the UX now. I put some Q&A because some engine like them and tbh, it also serve my customers. !

I don’t need traffic as an e-commerce for the sake of seeing numbers, I need engaging visits.

For one of the website (that will be the e-commerce of a wholesale), strategy is to print hard copy of catalog ans mail to the professionals !

The 100% full digital is long gone, we need to back to real shops and target directly our customers ! Plus I can’t and don’t want to fight against huge companies like Amazon.