August 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

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

No clicks no money!

[Conro]

Here's why Google should never have destroyed its goose that lays the golden eggs. In the meantime, we are looking at how it will end. I hear creaking on all sides, soon someone will cry a lot. [cnbc.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

I don’t think the current generation finds information the way that we did 10 years ago.

Which current generation? X? Z? Millennial? Boomer? Even within a given generation, different people have different media preferences, educational levels, etc. (For example, some people like to read the New York Times, while others like to watch videos on TikTok.) There's no need for every publisher to chase every audience segment. If I'm publishing a health site for seniors, I won't much care if 18-year-olds are flocking to my content.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I recently read a Reddit post where people were watching an event on Google's latest tech announcements. Apparently they switched off after they, later, realized, it was all just AI. No one is interested

For those that want more to read..

[gizmodo.com ]

[gatormark]

Which current generation?

The current generation of Internet users whether millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, or whatever.

[Micha]

@gatomarkt I think it depends on the country. In the US, AI is really forced on you, so I'm not surprised. That's not the case in Europe, for example, and people in Japan tend to be more critical of AI. In the long term, however, AI search will become increasingly accepted. So it will be interesting to see which comes first: acceptance or the bubble bursting?

[mosxu]

At this point no one wants to spend time clicking on a website including EG’s website!

So search is dead, AI summaries your website and offers the answer, there will be no clicks, no revenue, nothing!

[Fluff_Nutz]

For what is worth. Here is the link to the petition created by my revenue provider, I mentioned a while back. In hopes of generating something for us publishers in this AI farse. Sign it and share it. I'm doing my part in trying to combat this mess. But I'm a bit saddened that this petition is showing signs of slowing down. Last signature was 10 hours ago. We still need 400+ people.

Are people seriously giving up on this and letting these AI companies win? I will be utterly disappointed if this petition doesn't get off the mark and do something. Maybe if people are just going to give up, then they deserve to loose traffic and revenue. Sign it and do your part to fight this mess!

[chng.it ]

[saladtosser]

Great take on everything dropped yesterday [youtu.be...]

[gatormark]

Side note. Interestingly, much of this Singapore BOT traffic is coming from servers in the USA that are owned by Singapore companies. I spent an hour playing firewall whack-a-mole with BOT IP addresses. The BOTs moved from the USA, to France, to Seychelles, back to the USA, to Russia (I thought I had all of Russia blocked), to Argentina, to Canada, to the Netherlands, to Germany, and about five other countries. LOL.

[Micha]

Google’s AI agent works great. Restaurants report that customers are showing up with false information from Google, including made-up discount offers.

[billhartzer.com ]

[RedBar]

Very low traffic across all my sites today. UK sites I can understand with it being our last holiday weekend until Xmas but for my global sites this is not "normal".

Singapore BOT traffic

Mine is all the Huawei Petalbot and it's been generating loads of 403s on Statcounter today. I'm removing that on 31/08.

[ichthyous]

I just used AI Mode and asked about the pricing of my own items. My pricing is not publicly shown on my site, people must inquire. AI mode was shockingly accurate in every regard about the items I sell...the price range, the factors affecting pricing, the options, how to inquire about pricing, etc. Much of that pulled from info pages on my own site, but also from third party sites that either sell my items or used to. I honestly cannot criticize it, I was expecting much worse than what I see.

[Cryogen]

I had somewhat better sales between August 14th and 18th and then my sites were attacked by a very intense DDOS attack so I was forced to switch DNS to cloudflare.


The attack was mitigated and my sites seem to be working now, but since I made the switch to cloudflare I have had no sales whatsoever, even though my traffic even increased (and has now decreased again). I don't understand why switching to cloudflare would kill my sales because my linking codes still seem to be working normally. Or perhaps the drop in sales has nothing to do with me switching to cloudflare and is related to some new Google update?

Overall my current traffic is pretty horrible. It's as if Google gives me a couple of days of good and productive traffic from time to time, and then puts me back to their "#*$!ty traffic" group of sites.

[RubicCubed]

It's as if Google gives me a couple of days of good and productive traffic from time to time, and then puts me back to their "#*$!ty traffic" group of sites.

This is the traffic rotation pattern Google uses as I described a few days back. Because zero click searches in Google have risen so high (estimated at 60% or more), we all get placed in the rotation for the 40% of non-zero click searches that remain. Traffic and sales from Google are blatantly inorganic/unnatural, and many of us with stores see this same rotation pattern. The problem is amplified for us with stores because organic traffic to us is further depleted because of Google's ad spam.

To illustrate how aggressive Google is with traffic rotation, we see pages deindexed for days then they appear again only to be deindexed again. This deindexing must be one of the techniques Google uses to remove us from the SERPS to make way for others in the rotation to get traffic when their pages mysteriously get briefly indexed again.

[ichthyous]

@cryogen Most likely Cloudflare is weeding out the bad bots that you had perceived as being real traffic before. I just had to place a total block on China traffic again as I was getting scraped by a bot from China Unicorn / Beijing. Cloudflare's cutom WAF rules help with that, but I do wish it were automatic when a surge of hits comes in, rather than myself having to turn on the rule manually when I catch the bot surge.

[ichthyous]

To illustrate how aggressive Google is with traffic rotation, we see pages deindexed for days then they appear again only to be deindexed again.

I am not seeing my pages being de-indexed at all, however the rotation of traffic can be extreme at times. Today traffic to my home page is -80% at 12:30pm. That's 80% lower than the norm for the last 4 Saturdays. However, overall traffic is about average for a Saturday. I see this all the time with my home page...traffic will just totally vanish and the traffic gets routed to other pages on the site. That has been going on for years now, but the size of the drops is extreme now.

[RedBar]

Here's an observation for you ... My widget industry's non-USA businesses have 90+% been blown out of the US SERPS for its most popular widgets ... I kid you not.

[goodoldweb]

To illustrate how aggressive Google is with traffic rotation, we see pages deindexed for days then they appear again only to be deindexed again. This deindexing must be one of the techniques Google uses to remove us from the SERPS to make way for others in the rotation to get traffic when their pages mysteriously get briefly indexed again.

Deindexation combined with strong personalization, in my opinion.

[RubicCubed]

I am not seeing my pages being de-indexed at all, however the rotation of traffic can be extreme at times.

Deindexation combined with strong personalization, in my opinion.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google had another Code Yellow and decided to tap all tools in their toolbox for the rotation. The crawled but not indexed issue seemed more like a rushed rotating manual action penalty to me, to distribute what little organic traffic remains after zero clicks, but without the actual penalty notification. This doesn't seem to be much of an issue anymore, and I think Google figured out how to conceal their tracks a little better so it doesn't appear as a crawled but not indexed bug in GSC. However Google is doing it, the rotation is very real. Sad to say we spent decades to offer the best products not sold anywhere else, but most days of the week we can't even be found in Google at all. Being the best requires the most investment of time and money, and there's no way having a good couple of hours a week will allow us to maintain our high level of quality. It will be those with the least investment who win as they have little invested to maintain and lose.

[Cryogen]

@ichthyous Yeah, you are probably right about the decrease of traffic due to cloudflare weeding out bots. The problem is, these attacks are often so strong that I have to use the "I am under attack" option in cloudflare pretty much all the time. And that option gives the visitors the captcha to solve before they can access my site. I wonder how many of them will just give up and leave my site even before they are let in. I suppose at least some percent of legitimate users will be stopped and discouraged with this captcha.

Has anybody else been experiencing an increase in DDOS attacks lately question? My site has been online for more than 20 years and I have never experienced such strong DDOS attacks. This is the very first time that I had to migrate my DNS to cloudflare, otherwise the site would be permanently down.

Of course the other problem is that I constantly have to personally monitor whether my site is under attack or not because, as you said, cloudflare doesn't have an option to turn on this " I am under the attack" setting automatically.

As for WAF, it seems that I as a free user on cloudflare don't have this setting. I've been trying to set up some custom security rules with the help of chat GPT, which would present the visitors with just cloudflare's lite version of the interstitial page (which automatically checks their browser without presenting them with the captcha challenge). But unfortunately, so far I've been unsuccessful with that.

As for blocking entire countries, I would love to have that option to solve the DDOS problem easily, but my hosting told me that, after analysing my traffic, they came to the conclusion that the attacks are not coming from any specific country.

So, I now have DDOS attacks because of which I was forced to introduce cloudflare's most aggressive DDOS protection, and in addition to that, Google is giving me some of the most pathetic traffic that I have ever seen. All in all, it looks as if the time of ordinary small webmasters is fast approaching to its end, with the ample help and push from Google and hackers.

[sarcasm]
Anyway, who still needs independent small websites that give custom and unique view on things when you can have only big corporate sites that are doing that much better now [/sacrasm].

[ichthyous]

@Cryogen...if you are running a business or a critical site then it's probably time to pay the $20/mo and get a paid CF account. You can block bots in any number of ways. CF's automated rules would probably already catch most of the suspicious bots hitting your site. If it really is a DDOS attack it's odd that your site is singled out and that it is constant. I have never had a single one, but I do get mass scraping events where Chinese bots hit my site from servers all over China in a short period of time. I have numerous countries blocked for this same reason, they provide nothing but bots hitting my site endlessly.

[Whitey]

Has anybody else been experiencing an increase in DDOS attacks lately question?

Heaps ..... this thread might help [webmasterworld.com...]

[gatormark]

Has anybody else been experiencing an increase in DDOS attacks lately question?

Have I? I have traveled all over the world, figuratively speaking, blocking IP addresses the past four days. I have done a decent job of minimizing the DDOS attacks and the vulnerability attacks.

[ichthyous]

Wow...an 85% drop in traffic to one of my articles today, while the other top article is perpetually lower at -35%. The articles section of my site has brought in a much higher % of traffic compared to the rest of my content since I introduced them in 2023, but now they are just fading away. Could be that it will snap back after the summer ends, but it has been a slow steady decline since about Jan or Feb 2025. I haven't really changed or freshened them up since they were introduced...

[gatormark]

My active users from Singapore have dropped by 73% following the firewall BOT updates. LOL

[Micha]

If you look at the Semrush Sensor for Germany, it's like a roller coaster. One day of calm, then Google heats up again, and so on.
My news site has recovered, the shop had record sales every day from Friday to Sunday, and yesterday it flattened out again, but at least it wasn't at 0.
What's noticeable now is that the news site is getting more traffic from Bing.

[Martin Ice Web]

It is going down every day.

Meanwhile google prefers amateur or lets sell after work (mom and pop) webshops. I think we are to technical and detailed.
So the last core update was the worst they ever did in regard of content and quality.

[mosxu]

DDOS attacks?

When are the earnings supposed to be announced?

[ichthyous]

Google's stock has been going up this summer nicely, after about 18 months of being flat while all the others zoomed. The markets are apparently not as worried about AI destroying search as they were. And AI isn't delivering the profits yet that everyone expected.

[Micha]

[status.search.google.com ]

And so Google's amusing update game continues, with the spam update rolling out.

[goodoldweb]

And so Google's amusing update game continues, with the spam update rolling out.

Google is the actual spam at this stage.

[Martin Ice Web]

Whatever they are doing with this update it will not reuslt in better search results.

[Micha]

@Martin I think only die-hard Google fans still believe that Google is rolling out an update that will improve search results.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, bingo. i bet this will hurt quality content sites.

google said goodbye to evaluate the website as a whole.
We are outranked by ecoms that professions are way away from our niche but they rank for very competitive terms while they sell some items as accessories for their items.

We have a item that is very IT related.
There is a ecom that sells boats and outranks us because they sell this item as accessories for only this boats.
google: IT not equal boats
Complete silly.
And our complete niche looks like this.

[Micha]

@matin I experience the same thing; the shop specializes in products from one country. No matter what keyword you search for, either a fake shop or a shop with completely different products comes up first.

In the news section of my niche, it's even funnier, as there's a pile of fake news that was clearly written by AI. Sometimes I wonder why I still do research; just making something up obviously works better.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing stronger traffic today after several days of somewhat tepid USA traffic. I do think that these updates kick in a couple of days before they are reported. It's not unusual to see higher traffic as we roll into September...so far this update doesn't seem to be having any major impact yet

I am seeing a big increase in searches coming in from ChatGPT some days...up 325%+. Still, it's a small fraction of my direct traffic and certainly my search traffic. Nice to have but not earth shaking yet.

[BigKat]

Google is the actual spam at this stage.

Exactly. It's all the Googlespam that needs to go.

I am seeing a big increase in searches coming in from ChatGPT some days...up 325%+

I've seen a huge increase in bots/scrapers spoofing ChatGPT as the referrer. IP addresses used by OpenAI can be checked at: [platform.openai.com...]

[gatormark]

Yeah, the BOTS and the DoS attacks are constant. I get DoS attacks on my home network.

As far as my windows web server, I am now spending about an hour a day blocking IP addresses. It has worked like a charm. They are getting easier and easier to identify and block. I don’t feel as though I’m playing wack-a-mole anymore. Right now, Vietnam seems to be the source of bad traffic.

[saladtosser]

@gatormark are u sf?

[gatormark]

@saladtosser

I don’t know what “sf” means. Sorry. San Fran? No.

[saladtosser]

No worries I just had a feeling we were in the same niche and if you were you would know what sf stands for :) Guess not!

[mosxu]

@gatomark

So you cannot access yr website because of DDOS attacks if so fair enough if not you seeing Chinese AI bots grabbing info!

Move on do not confuse zombie traffic with Vietnam traffic your website is fine it is just lack of humans visiting!

[ichthyous]

I've seen a huge increase in bots/scrapers spoofing ChatGPT as the referrer. IP addresses used by OpenAI can be checked at: [platform.openai.com...]

I checked and the IPs are actual users around the world who are clicking links out from GPT searches. At first I thought perhaps more students were using it since back in school, but just as much of the traffic is from outside of the US and from domestic. It's nice to have the traffic, but certainly not a bonanza. It's 4.5% of my current search traffic volume

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:42 pm (utc) on Aug 28, 2025]

[RedBar]

@gatormark

I am now spending about an hour a day blocking IP addresses. It has worked like a charm. They are getting easier and easier to identify and block.

Yep, me too for the last few days I have taken a couple of hours in my early afternoon and have now got it down to under 30 mins.

At its worst one of my small, specialised widget sites bandwith increased tenfold. It wasn't causing a financial issue, simply visually horrible-looking stats and graphs, I don't do ugly :-)

[mosxu]

I like it when in one most censored forums the mods do not move DDOS posts!

They have found this relevant!

[BigKat]

I checked and the IPs are actual users around the world who are clicking links out from GPT searches.

@ichthyous
Interesting you are seeing real users. The last two ChatGPT-User/1.0 user hits I see (seconds ago) are from a Microsoft network (52.230.164.187 and 172.213.21.147). The visits you are getting, are they landing on info or product pages? We've been on OpenAI's product wait list a couple days after it was first announced months ago. I don't see anything in the OpenAI change log [help.openai.com...] that would account for a spike in traffic.

Our traffic from Google is in the gutter, but Google is crawling heavily and repeatedly hitting pages with different IP addresses.

[gatormark]

So you cannot access yr website because of DDOS attacks if so fair enough if not you seeing Chinese AI bots grabbing info!

Move on do not confuse zombie traffic with Vietnam traffic your website is fine it is just lack of humans visiting!

@mosxu
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow the comment. But, I am blocking all nonhuman traffic aside from the big search engines. This includes bots, scrapers, DDoS, vulnerability probers, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, LDAP injection etc.

Based on my log files, I’m down to about 3-4 malicious attempts per hour.

[ichthyous]

nteresting you are seeing real users....The visits you are getting, are they landing on info or product pages? We've been on OpenAI's product wait list a couple days after it was first announced months ago. I don't see anything in the OpenAI change log [help.openai.com...] that would account for a spike in traffic.

@BigKat Rapid user adoption? Many more people are shifting to using it, especially on their phones. Some people live all day with it now. I should mention that I am seeing more searches from AI across the board, but ChatGPT is just the largest number.

I am seeing the traffic hit both info and product pages, but keep in mind that my site shows no public pricing and so I am not very similar to an ecommerce site...clients must inquire as to the cost. In some ways that means that my product pages are also seen as informational. They contain unique content and a unique description about that content which can easily be used for research purposes. I even have people emailing me to correct the text when I have an inaccuracy on the site.

I suspect some of these GPT searches hitting product pages might be coming from people clicking on images embedded in the searches. I would have to run searches myself for what I think might be the topics in order to test that. Unfortunately CHatGPT doesn't pass along any hint of the search performed.

[christianz]

ChatGPT, before I blocked it, gave me 0.00001% of my traffic but was responsible for 10% of the server load. It's basically a DoS attack. The only sensible thing to do with ChatGPT is to block it permanently and forever.

35% of requests to my server end up in 403 response as they are content theft bots of various types and they all, including ChatGPT, completely ignore robots.txt.

[Martin Ice Web]

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

@Saladtosser,

we are seeing the same in our niche.
And the overall approval of the site seems offline. Means a site that is having its profession in fruits and that sells also some technical items like USB Sticks could easily outrank a site that only sells USB Sticks and give more technical inside information.
Our niche is full of examples. Never seen shops that i would never trust just because they look like backyard sales.

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.

@christianz,

i know this sounds kind of stupid. But realize that AI Mode is counterproductive to ads. Users will not click on ads while having the answer in seconds.
What is the closest and simpliest solution?
Make the results as worse as poeple are just confident with.