August 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

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

No clicks no money!

[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!?