August 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

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

No clicks no money!

[pramod]

Spam update = Spamers🦁 on top

[christianz]

Steep drop yesterday. I guess the Spam Update is finally starting to "work".

[saladtosser]

@Martin Ice Web agree completely mate! In ecoms I watch I see many ecoms I have never seen before taking the top 10 spots pushing the pervious ones that had held positions for 10 years to page 2. Services I watch one site was offline for 6 weeks since they didn't pay their hosting, the 404s never dropped out of the index or lost positions. Sites at the top are horrid right now!

[ichthyous]

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.

Is that sensible though? You are basically cutting off all future traffic that these AI platforms might send. It may be small, but not having any presence whatsoever might be worse. I can't accurately determine how much of an impact the visibility in AI results has on my business. They don't all need to clickthrough for it to have an impact.

For example, people pay for 'remarketing' ads...basically for the potential customer to be reminded of the brand that they have already visited. The more your brand / site / name pops up in results the more it reinforces your credibility.

AI is already here, and it will impact search results from now on...the lower search traffic is baked in, and probably going even lower from here. So the way I see it, traffic from AI search can somewhat offset that...even if not 100% compensatory. There's not much we can do, we are all being dragged along for the ride.

[christianz]

Is that sensible though

@ichthyous

I should have qualified that my site is purely information, not selling. If my site was selling something it would definitely not be sensible.

In my case ChatGPT is somewhat like a competitor that is using my stuff without permission to compete with me. It's the same for most info sites.

[makintocheplus]

I blocked all AI bots in Cloudflare.

[gatormark]

AI overviews appear to be an extinction-level event for most websites. Sigh...

[christianz]

Traffic drop intensifies. Yesterday new record low.

It looks like I have been classified as Spammer. This is actually a good thing. It gives me hope for future updates, because Spammers have done very well in 2025. Not just that - maybe my newfound status will be relayed to large AI companies and they will stop loading my server with relentless scraping.

[RubicCubed]

It looks like I have been classified as Spammer.

Possibly the opposite of what you think. Your content may be so good Google is stealing it for AI O and must hide the evidence where they stole that content from. Wouldn't be the first time Google did this and won't be the last either.

[ichthyous]

Traffic drop intensifies. Yesterday new record low.

You sure you aren't being de-indexed after blocking Google's AI bots? They've said that if you block their AI bots completely then the site will be dropped from search index as well...

[christianz]

They've said that if you block their AI bots completely then the site will be dropped from search index as well...

As far as I understand, they don't have separate bot for AI scraping. They are using data gathered by Googlebot, which I haven't blocked of course. I have blocked Google-Extended for more than a year so that shouldn't cause any problems.

I will need to investigate after few days where is this steep drop coming from and maybe it is from "snippet ban" or something like that.

Meanwhile, today I have received over 200000 HTTP requests from ChatGPT. This number has been in 6 figures for a while and continues to rise.

I randomly checked some of the IP addresses and they are within OpenAI published range for the ChatGPT-User user-agent. It is now confirmed that they ignore robots.txt and burden websites with millions of requests as they see fit.

And why all this attention to my adjudicated "Spam Site" anyway?

[System]

New month, new thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 3:32 pm (utc) on Sep 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]