August 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

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

No clicks no money!

[Fluff_Nutz]

I suppose, for me, Google is still my highest ranking search engine. With a +244% traffic increase over last month. I was one of those that saw benefits from the last ''update''. Alas, as they murdered my other top performing search sources. Including referral links. I still have the same amount of traffic I had 5 months ago.

Despite myself and my team's best efforts to stay consistent we haven't seen any growth for 5 months now. It's just 'stable'. Like the traffic tap has been turned and switched off. We used to live on trending articles but none of that seems to matter now.

I'm also reading elsewhere that trending articles no longer bring in much traffic any more. So clearly I'm not alone in this situation

[Markedd]

I don't know what you guys are seeing, but I recently returned to check on the stats of an old tech blog that I pretty much abandoned. Weirdly enough, I am back at the top of the SERPS... And I mean I am currently outperforming pretty much all of my competitors for almost all the articles. I am almost always in the top three, even above youtube links and anything similar. But now riddle me this. Why hasn't the traffic increase that much. Before 2024, it was about 200k searches a month. Now it's barely 1.5K. And while it made sense before after the articles were thrown out of the first page completely, now they're back. And I only see a 0.2-0.3K increase in traffic per month. Yeah, I'll continue to grow my other (offline) businesses..

[Markedd]

@Fluff_Nutz No, you are not.

[christianz]

@Markedd What method did you use for checking your rankings? If it was just by googling from a computer that has any connection with you (your cookies) your site will show up much higher and more often.

[Micha]

Today is another day of death... Visitor numbers are down everywhere. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to make any money with an online shop via Google...

@christanz You could try Proton VPN, for example. It's free and sufficient for checking your ranking.

[Markedd]

@christianz No, the rankings are pretty much the same whether I search using my own credentials or using a VPN.

[Markedd]

Oh, I figured it out. Google suppressed the Discover traffic to 0, so it balances the traffic out, keeping the same amount of people. My advice remains as it was years ago to anyone still in this business. GET OUT NOW!

[nordland]

Here it's going up as usual, record levels every week, record levels even on Adsense, but rpm has gone down a bit in the last week.

[RedBar]

GET OUT NOW!

Ok, I've done my fair share of whingeing however it will all depend on one's point of view and necessity for a site.

Me, 57 years in business with 32 years Net involvement.

Mine are brochureware sites, specialist information for global bulk trade promotion. I have not created a glossy company brochure in 20 years. It has been and still is MY most cost-effective promotional medium. For sure general traffic is way down BUT real-world orders and new enquiries are still being generated.

Honestly, in the 90s I thought that trade fairs would die however , forgetting Covid, the last 10 years they have seen nothing but successful growth.

However if one is trying to promote one's own SEO business to potential national / international customers then I would definitely re-consider that as a great idea.

[Micha]

Great, for over a week now, the shop has had endless visitors via Google, but not a single one of them has made a purchase. The owner is now thinking about giving up... After 20 years, that's really tough.

And the news site is down again. Today is another good example of how the mass media is favored. It's one of those days when you finally wish there was a decent alternative to Google.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

today is very bad. Zero user engagement so far.
But this has become normal for a wednesday.

[fearlessrick]

Yesterday was the worst day of the month, by far. Just two days prior, my traffic was booming. Straight into the toilet since then. Today, stats are stuck right where they were at 5:30 am ET. It's now 9:47 am ET. No visits, no impressions, no page views for more than four hours? Who turned off the internet.

Honestly, I should not have let my hopes get too high. Google, like the government, Fs up everything it touches. Really fed up with the manner in which the oligarchs rule the world. There must be a better way. It should all just be nuked from outer space. Giant meteor, anybody?

[gatormark]

One of my pages, which is ranked #1 in Google's search results, has received 50% fewer clicks over the past 90 days...and decreasing. This is crazy!

[gatormark]

“...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” - Alfred Pennyworth

[saladtosser]

Wow, now i'm seeing non https sites taking the number one spots. So I was looking at unrelated search terms to mine today trying to figure out whats ranking at the top as of today in niches nothing to do with me and its still the non technical sites taking precedence (backlink profiles are all bad or non existent) The sites at the top (1/2 spot) only mention the search term in the title and description, its literally not on the page once (I went through source code).

As I go further down the results the sites below mention the term more frequent as you go along and the UX and backlink profiles also get better. Just my observations, test for yourselves in unrelated searches! Relevance, UX and backlinks have been dialed down to minus points since the July update I swear! They must have forgot to apply some filters with this update? And its not "Brand" winning, none of these sites have a brand (think service + area).

Is it possible older untouched content is getting a boost because if it hasn't been touched for years (going on the results/design/UX they haven't been refreshed in donkeys) to counter AI slop?

[Martin Ice Web]

They must have forgot to apply some filters with this update?

I see it in another way.
With AI Overview they lost a lot of additional clicks on adds.
To keep the same amount of add clicks you have to search for new sources or push users to click on adds.
And don´t forget that amazon pulled out of PSA. And that the economy is not runing very well.


Ways to do so:
-poeple also ask/search box
-make serps as worse as users a willing to live with, without moving to another SE

I like to compare it with superstores.
The big ones research the purchasing behavior of their customers. Like what they are buying most and frequent. What way did they take a.s.o.
They will place the best selling items way off the entrance/checkout as they want you to go through the whole store and buy things you didn´t want to buy at first.
Some stores will route you through the whole store with no shortcut to the checkout.

Same with search. Put the best performing websites down and poeple will tend to click on adds even they didn´t want to.

If you realy think google is interested in giving users the possible best and fastest answer/serps, especially when it comes to transactional queries, then i have to disappoint you. I am sorry.

[ichthyous]

Scanning some of the posts above regarding traffic suddenly vanishing, top ranking pages not pulling in half the traffic they used to, etc...is any of this something new? It seems that Google is endlessly cooking up ways to siphon off traffic and demote the organic results. My "ranking" has been stable all year, and has been improving...but my USA traffic is slowly deflating for weeks now.

I just noticed that AIO is now active even for the most specific searches. For example, I just searched for the unique catalog ID# of one of the items I sell on my site. What came up was an AI snippit of text scraped from my page, with a link to the item on the right. So in other words, Google is now returning AI overviews for even single product pages.

While it is still obvious which link to click to get to the page, why does google need to intervene at all? It's simply a ploy to try and stop users from visiting that website in the first place, and it's going to result in a big loss in traffic. What happens when Google decides to shrink down the image, or just drop the image entirely from the AIO? Nobody will click through at all.

On top of that, any search that might be interpreted as informational in nature only returns an endless number of how to articles and videos...as if they are absolutely certain that nobody in the world might be interested in anything but the same dumb cookie cutter articles. One would think that a trillion dollar company could use its own AI to predict that certain searches are more nuanced and people might be searching for different things, some info articles and others e-comm sites. But Google apparently doesn't have that capacity yet.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous,

i, too, saw the first time today that AI is online for items especially if you search for brand + item number.
But beware of believing all that AI is showing. AI is just scrapped info from websites. If items have changed AI will not catch that up very fast.
I think websites that get daily updates are much better information sources then AI.


Today traffic is back but it is all window lurckers.

[Micha]

Fun is when you laugh anyway, but this is really sad. Shop: There is traffic, but no sales. I'm slowly losing hope that anything will happen.
News page: Sharp decline, the page no longer ranks even for my main keywords. But my niche is currently full of news that all the major media outlets are reporting on (agency reports). And fake news from Bild. As a small magazine, we don't stand a chance against that, of course.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Another problem too is the amount of changes that both the Search and Youtube are currently going through. There has been so many over the, short, few years that we are, simply, not allowed to grow. We are not even given the chance to. I mean over the past few years both platforms have been seriously beat to death...

SEARCH
1) Mass de-indexing (De-indexing is still on-going. Hence the random traffic drops. Articles are de-indexed to, then, be placed in to the company AI. All search models are doing this right now. Including both Google and Bing. Yet we are not giving any credit for this. We are not paid or given any traffic)
2) SERP-de-shuffle. The search has been moved around. Articles that were on page 1 are no longer seen. Instead, garbage has been placed one page 1. Along with a ton of unnecessary Google ads and sponsors. This is, overall, making the G search a very toxic and confusing place to be in. Many are no longer finding answers to their search
3) AI Summaries. AIO has, now, been implemented. This replaces the, original, short snippets that we are used to seeing at the top of searches. Except that, instead of being a snippet, it copies the entire content from other articles. Literally all of it. Essentially becoming, itself, an article. It is NOT written or created by Google themselves. It is stolen. Stolen from sites that no longer see traffic or given any credit for this. Its also very inaccurate a lot of the time
4) AI Mode. This is also just as useless as the AIO. I have used it once and don't plan to go back to it. You do not get instant answers. You are, instead, led on a wild goose chase. Google want you to stay on that platform and lead you on a ''merry-go-round''. Forever asking the same question in all kinds of different ways and never getting an answer. Why? Because it will, soon, be filled with ads and a paywall.
5) Age ID Verification. Some users have seen this, some have yet to. But those that have seen it are, now, forced to show ID in order to access age related content. Is this really to protect users? Or another way to obtain personal information?

YOUTUBE
1) SERP-de-Shuffle. Youtube has also, recently, seen its fair share of ''serp-de-shuffle''. Where the platform, now, seems to prioritise Youtube Shorts over longform videos. Most of the videos at the top of each search. Just like with Google search. Often, now, looking like a spammy mess. Each new query only responds with top performing videos. Videos that are, already, generating thousands of views. Where is the help for smaller creators? They won't stop promoting big players because they generate more revenue for the platform. Searching for anything, also, just like G Search, sometimes doesn't even give you the videos you wanted. Also, stop fantasizing over Mr Beast!
2) AI. As with search itself Youtube has also been hit with AI. A lot of content is being used to train for AI. A lot of content is also being stolen. AI videos also floods the search
3) Age ID Verification. There is currently a Youtube boycotting going on right now. Don't think its really working. According to a post on Reddit the Youtube site is still getting millions of views per day. But its definitely a cause for concern, just like with search.
4) Increased Ads. Videos are, now, getting increased and longer ads in them. Often putting viewers off. Rightly so. Even the Youtube Premium, a service that was not meant to feature ads. Now has them. Where exactly are you getting your money's worth?

All of this has been happening over the past, albeit short, few years. Making it impossible to maintain any consistent traffic growth. I'm likely, also, missing a few other pointers too. But long story short, there is a lot going on right now. Too much, maybe? All, if not most of which, seems pointless in my eyes. But it does show that G are only in it for the money. Particularly with the state of the search and the use of the AI Mode. Also their ''love affair'' with bigger Youtubers and increased ads. As a content creator my revenue has not increased due to increased ads. In fact, if anything, Youtube are taking revenue off their creators. We do not see any benefits.

I have posted 3 videos on to Youtube these past few days. Forever questioning myself if I should or not. A lot of those who are, currently, boycotting are refusing to post videos at present. So I have thought about joining them. Perhaps I should as these recent videos of mine have not seen any traction at all. In fact some of them still have only a few single digit views. My channel was doing well until I began posting again, after a few days break. So I'll likely go back to continuing that break.

But all of those issues have impacted both platforms. Some of which are still on-going. All of which have a negative impact on traffic. We have never, if ever, had a good long respite. Its so tiring. This is, arguably, the worst time to be a content creator. Just let us grow and leave us alone! Why so many frustrating changes?

Also, as of yesterday, my revenue provider. Who is ''partnered'' with Google has initiated a petition against AI. Seeking to give credit for our work. Unfortunately, although I am sure they will reach the amount of signatures needed.

I thought, me trying to create a website slap bang on the release of AI was bad enough. Yes, my site is only a year or 2 old. Already regret my life choices...

[edited by: not2easy at 11:27 am (utc) on Aug 17, 2025]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[RedBar]

Insofar as my Awstats and Webalizer are concerned everything looks to be "norrmal" however Statcounter has just rendered itself as pointless.

I have the Singaporean Huawei bot blocked yet Statcounter is totally incapable of doing so. My first 12 hours today initially looked old-school normal until I delved into them and found 61.5% of it was Huawei's bot ... Yes, 61.5% !

[mosxu]

Today zombies was AI not supposed to send quality clicks?

[fearlessrick]

My stats magically bounced back Thursday and I ended up with the best day of the month. This happened in a rush, around 4-5 pm ET after I once again chastised Google - via the feedback link on my Adsense dashboard - for being an evil monopoly. I said, to wit, "what's the use in having a monopoly if you can't share some of the profits with the people whose data you stole?"

I suppose the irony made a staffer or two - or maybe even an AI bot - chuckle. It's all very tiring, unnecessary, and frustrating for anybody trying to create a business on the web. The analogy of having an elephant sitting on your chest is appropriate here, I believe.

Things are somewhat back to normal for now, but I'm dead certain that Google will find means to make us all crazy again soon enough.

[edited by: fearlessrick at 3:47 pm (utc) on Aug 15, 2025]

[fearlessrick]

@Fluff_Nutz, Excellent post. You made many good points which resonate. I might add that at some point, Google realizes that it is cannibalizing the business that makes them oodles of dough. They probably don't want to do that. Clicks on their search or AI pages are small compared to the views they get from ads on participant's websites.

[RedBar]

Good grief!

98.2% of my Statcounter traffic today is from Hetzner, Germany.

I'll be checking my server logs shortly.

[chuviie]

@RedBar happened to my server yesterday. Just black list all their network IPs helps.

[RedBar]

@chuviie ... I thought I had already done most of them however every visit is individual with a completely different IP address plus I am talking about thousands of pages.

I'm very hesitant to block even more since I do a lot of business in Gemany. Fortunately many clients there already use VPNs.

Is there any other resolution?

[christianz]

New record lows since Friday.

[not2easy]

@RedBar -

Is there any other resolution?

Even the free CloudFlare account can help to slow down bot traffic with a single 'click to verify' link, a non-"click on all the bicycles" captcha. You can use network numbers like AS132203 rather than IPs.

[RedBar]

@ not2easy... Thanks, I've had a quick look at CloudFlare and whilst it's interesting I'm seriously beginning to wonder about yet even more financial expense but for what?

I have an excellent and affordable server plan and never get even halfway to my monthly allowances, am I being a bit self-obsessed with attempting to keep everything squeaky-clean maybe, since with so many bad actors about this will never happen.

Also, at the moment, this activity is only affecting my largest global site, none of the others have been hit ... so far!

[jccsyd1]

Ecommerce Site (3 brands). All did exceptionally well last Tues/ Wed/ Thursday- best 3 days months. Then last Friday, yesterday and today down to almost nothing. No sales for more than 24 hours for all our brands (unheard of). Any ecomm sites experiencing the same?

[ichthyous]

Traffic generally fairly strong this weekend, but UK traffic is far below the norm today. This is following a recent pattern of sudden, very big drops in UK traffic about 2-3x a week. Sometimes it recovers later in the day, sometimes not. Perhaps this is result of AIO being rolled out in the UK? Or summer vaca?

[RedBar]

Perhaps this is result of AIO being rolled out in the UK? Or summer vaca?

I thought the UK already had the AIO?

For various reasons, no I'll not be specific, there is a general malaise in many areas of the UK with an almost flatlining economy yet inflation still very evident in the grocery sector ... It's static / stuck, it's neither good nor bad therefore possibly many are simply holding-back all kinds of purchases.

But, yesterday I uploaded the Christmas menu for our hotel venue, today we have received enquiries:-)

[Martin Ice Web]

So far, august will be the worst month in history.
There was def. a update last weeks. Since then traffic is down 70%, user engagement 0%, google spam 100%

Ecommerce Site (3 brands). All did exceptionally well last Tues/ Wed/ Thursday- best 3 days months. Then last Friday, yesterday and today down to almost nothing. No sales for more than 24 hours for all our brands (unheard of). Any ecomm sites experiencing the same?

confirmed

[Micha]

According to Semrush, things have finally calmed down in Germany. The shop has finally been generating acceptable sales again since Friday, and I hope it stays that way, but I've also taken some measures because Google is just annoying me. As the summer holidays are slowly coming to an end here, I'm hoping for rising sales.

It's strange with the news site, especially when it comes to news and discover, my niche is dominated by large publishers who throw around agency reports. In general, small publishers, regardless of niche, seem to be filtered out by Google. And the AI responses are causing my news site a lot of trouble. So I can forget about traffic from Google at the moment, it's been very low for days.

[mosxu]

AI Mode is full Gemini mode and actually shows live how many websites it scraps to give the answer!

The search business model is done as it seems people prefer no ads competitors like Chat GPT or Grok

And to be fair there is no traffic from the last two but when there is it seems to convert for some reason!

It will be impossible to not compare with ChatGBT and Grok quality of traffic so competition will sort a lot problems in the next 2-3 years!

[gatormark]

There's no rhyme or reason for the traffic fluctuations I am receiving. My traffic on Saturday and Sunday was higher than on Monday. That's ridiculous and never happened in the past. I used to be able to predict which days would have the most traffic, what the increase or decrease would be, but now there is some underlying control or throttling that is manipulating traffic day-to-day.

[Dooku]

@Redbar,

1. Add your website to CloudFlare FREE acount (enough for most of us)

2. Go to [2ip.io...] or go to [tools.iplocation.net...]
and copy paste several of those IP addresses of Hetzner in the above websites.
You will see that almost ALL of those ip addresses have the same ASN number or maybe 2 or 3 at the most.

3. In cloudflare, select your website first, then in left menu click Security->click WAF->click Custom Rules->Click Create Rule and give it a name.
Then in that new rule under "when incoming request match" filed select ASN, in operator field select "Equals", in the Value field type the ASN number you found at step 2 above.

4. Repeat for all other shady "Hetzner" type of traffic like OVHCloud, Amazon, Microsoft Azure......etc....etc.... because NO normal user traffic will come from those networks.

Your hosting server will love you for it :-)
(many good youtube video guides available also)

This is not optional anymore, it's mandatory and will also provide better insight in your actual traffic.

[Micha]

@Alligatormark Does anything Google has done in recent months make any sense at all? It's all just a terrible mess.

[saladtosser]

Pretty sure another core update is about to kick off, seeing the same sort of movements that proceed a core update announcement!

[RubicCubed]

There's no rhyme or reason for the traffic fluctuations I am receiving. My traffic on Saturday and Sunday was higher than on Monday. That's ridiculous and never happened in the past.

I'm a believer in the theory that Google is spreading out traffic among many pages because more than half of all searches result in zero clicks. Some say zero click Google searches have risen to 60% or more and the 40% that remains Google sends out to pages within the rotation. Supporting this theory are the many reporting pages dropping in and out of the index along with highly unnatural traffic patterns. How else would Google entice us to keep creating content for them to take if we didn't get a few good hours of traffic every few days, week, etc.? It's all deliberate and by Google's design IMO.

[gatormark]

What I find even more interesting is that one of my competitors seems to be doing very well. They have increased in traffic significantly in recent months; taking marketshare from many websites in our niche. However, they are not displaying ads on their high ranking pages. So, Google is ranking them high, but Google’s not benefiting from that ranking. Puzzling…

[gatormark]

I do believe, and this may be a hard thing for us long-timers to acknowledge, that searching in a traditional “Google way” is dying. I don’t think the current generation finds information the way that we did 10 years ago. I don’t have any information to support this theory, but with the advent of AI, I know the younger generations have transitioned to AI as their “search engine.“ SEO and traditional search are going the way of the dodo bird.

[Martin Ice Web]

it seems that google penalized shops with large selections.

So searching for an item google shows shops with the item but the shop does not have a selection of this item.
The shop itself doesn´t have much in common with the item. Like looking for an apple and google shows only shops for autoparts or ip cameras that sell this one kind of apple.

[ichthyous]

I do believe, and this may be a hard thing for us long-timers to acknowledge, that searching in a traditional “Google way” is dying. I don’t think the current generation finds information the way that we did 10 years ago.

It depends on what is being searched for. For informational searches, yes. Nobody wants to sit collecting information from ten sites by hand when it can be handed to them. That is not just the current generation, the people I know who are the most avid users of AI search are older...they just love it. Now instead of "Google it" it's "I AI'd it". That is already done and never going back to the way it was...AI is revolutionary in that sense.

With regards to product searches...AI may replace regular product search more over time, but people like to comparison shop and get exactly what they want. They also want a response from a human confirming what they are ordering. At least in my field, which is selling very high priced items. Nobody is going to simply depend on AI to make the purchase...website is still crucial for that.

[BigKat]

I'm a believer in the theory that Google is spreading out traffic

^ This

We sell to commercial customers who browse and shop during normal business hours Monday - Friday. We may, at best, have a half day during the week where Google sends us this type of traffic while the rest of the week Google sends us next to nothing. It's so heavily manipulated by Google they shouldn't even try to pass it off as anything but their own manipulation.

[Micha]

It may be that younger users are shifting their focus, but it is often forgotten that this is only one user group. What about the rest? There are many critical voices calling for a search engine rather than an answer machine, and not without reason. Google is focusing too much on just one user group, looking enviously at TikTok and co., but forgetting that its role is completely different.

[gatormark]

@Micha

There are many critical voices calling for a search engine rather than an answer machine, and not without reason.

Those voices will soon be gone. They are decreasing rapidly. People, inherently, are lazy. They are being trained to be lazy.

[gatormark]

The Singapore bots are back today. They maneuvered around Google's blocks.

[RedBar]

The Singapore bots are back

Yep, on my Statcounter they are now averaging 10% of my daily PVs however I have them blocked in my htaccess and both Awstats and Webalizer hardly register anything from Singapore. At one time Statcounter was ok for deleting these sort of visits however it's been flumoxed with these for at least 18-20 months.