September 2025 Google Search Observations

[RubicCubed]

today I have received over 200000 HTTP requests from ChatGPT.

We've been getting hammered with these for over a week. Making matters worse is ChatGPT is accessing URLs they scraped from Google which are appended with different ?srsltid= IDs. We had ChatGPT just hit one of our product pages three times all with a different ?srsltid= appended to the end of the URL. Does ChatGPT actually believe these are different pages? If ChatGPT is going to scrape Google's results, they should at least be smart enough to drop the Google specific ?srsltid= before they visit the URL. Or learn from and respect the canonical versions assigned by us.

[christianz]

@RubicCubed

But I have them blocked by robots.txt and I am returning empty pages with 403. After millions of "Forbidden" responses, it's still trying! And more than ever!

Thankfully at least they are identifying themselves correctly with "ChatGPT-User" user-agent string. There are reports that Perplexity are much worse and "pretend" to be human browsers.

[RubicCubed]

@christianz

It has been reported ChatGPT is scraping [tomsguide.com...] Google's search results to answer some queries. What we may be seeing are hits as the result of users asking ChatGPT a question and our URLs pre-fetched as a result. If ChatGPT were crawling the page, we should see GPTBot/1.1 or OAI-SearchBot/1.0 if our URL is included in a SearchGPT search result.

ChatGPT-User is for user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs. When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent. ChatGPT users may also interact with external applications via GPT Actions. ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion, nor to crawl content for generative AI training.

Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

There are times I will see ChatGPT hit a dozen product pages instaneously, which have Google's srsltid= appended URL, then shortly after a visit with a referral identified as ?utm_source=chatgpt. Sometimes they take the next step and convert into a sale. In my case, I assume a user on ChatGPT is asking to return a list of widgets for sale including the price and URL for each widget.

The above may be how AI agents work - fetching only without any post-fetch analysis. If ChatGPT is scraping Google's results, in a fetch only fashion, that would explain why your 403s keep getting hammered and why my URLs include Google parameters.

I sell products, so I never blocked any AI bots and don't plan to (outside of complete country blocks of China, Russia, etc.). I'm not really sure how these different AI agents work, but there may come a time that many will have no choice to unblock their crawlers if they want traffic. At Google I/O this year, Google introduced Agent Mode which can browse the web automatically and gather information.

[RedBar]

PITA Signaporean bots until the past couple of days have only hit my .coms howeverI I am now seeing them on my.co.uk sites therefore it's copying and pasting updated block lists for me.

[Satyendra]

The best way to make the solution simplify is to blocking Chart GPT by using robots.TXT

You can use the following:-

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

[christianz]

@Satyendra

GPTBot is obeying robots.txt and not bothering me. It's their other bot ChatGPT-User which is causing the problem. Blocking it in robots.txt makes no difference.

[ichthyous]

ChatGPT-User is for user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs. When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent. ChatGPT users may also interact with external applications via GPT Actions. ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion, nor to crawl content for generative AI training.

Yes, and so these are real users, but it's as if they have an army of assistants aiding them with the search. The AI hits multiple sites up for answers and builds the answer in real time. The need for users to search the sites themselves to compare various answers is gone. Instant answer based on synthesized data, nobody leaves ChatGPT, almost no traffic to the websites. This is an extinction level event for sites that only provide articles and analysis and hope to survive from running ads. If you sell physical products then you may be insulated for now...but I am fully anticipating that my products eventually will be heavily impacted by AI copyright theft too. It's inevitable that these AI platforms will try to take it all if they can. They'll have to be slowed down by government, and I don't see that happening here in the US.

[BigKat]

Those getting a lot of visits from ChatGPT User should read ChatGPT's agent page [openai.com...] for more info. Do expect other search (AI) engines to do the same - placing them between us and the user.

A natural evolution of Operator and deep research

Previously, Operator and deep research each brought unique strengths: Operator could scroll, click, and type on the web, while deep research excelled at analyzing and summarizing information. But they worked best in different situations: Operator couldn’t dive deep into analysis or write detailed reports, and deep research couldn’t interact with websites to refine results or access content requiring user authentication. In fact, we saw that many queries users attempted with Operator were actually better suited for deep research, so we brought the best of both together.

By integrating these complementary strengths in ChatGPT and introducing additional tools, we’ve unlocked entirely new capabilities within one model. It can now actively engage websites—clicking, filtering, and gathering more precise, efficient results. You can also naturally transition from a simple conversation to requesting actions directly within the same chat.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I'll just put this here.. I think...

[cnbc.com ]

[mosxu]

“A federal judge ruled that Google can keep its Chrome browser“

That is the worse decision a judge could have ever ruled but in the long run chat bots will defeat the evil. Game is on!

[Martin Ice Web]

Someone something good to say about the current update?

[Micha]

Yes, at the moment, the shop is generating good sales every day, and the news site is regularly appearing in Discover again, and the ranking is improving overall.
(And after I've written this, everything will crash again tomorrow ;) )

[tangor]

Someone something good to say about the current update?

Somebody is making ka-ching!*

_{*It ain't us!}

[haramamba]

Someone something good to say about the current update?

Better position in serps, but no visitors!

[ichthyous]

Someone something good to say about the current update?

My traffic is much higher...despite the fact that I am now at the bottom of page one, or top of page two for my most important searches...after all the AIO, videos, instagram posts, etc. Google has pushed up results for the redundant how-to articles and directory sites to the max too.

I am seeing a lot more inquiries, but the higher traffic and inquiries is normal for me after the summer ends and kids get back to school. I am seeing a trend this entire year of much lower budgets though...which means that the inquiries are basically pointless and do not result in a sale. I personally will only discount pricing so much...below that they can pound sand and keep looking.

[Martin Ice Web]

We had some good days with the start of the update. But since 2 days traffic is cut to 75% again and it is all rubbish traffic.
Since yesterday in the late evening the bos are back. Mainly from the US and Israel right now.

[shadowlight]

Has anyone else noticed that PAA sections are now being populated by AIO's? Not all of them but they are appearing, reducing the visibility of sites even further.

[RedBar]

Wowser, loads of pages, all formerly #1-5 for many years, demoted to pages 4/5, just like that!

Oh yeah, I forgot, it's the September pre-Xmas/Black Friday shake-up.

[mosxu]

Same here last two days only fake traffic

[tangor]

pre-Xmas/Black Friday shake-up

Considering world economies getting shook since April... what's the holiday season going to look like this year? Better? Or Worse?

[Conro]

Beautiful this update, all blatantly spam sites are rising to the surface. All that's missing is that I get a virus by clicking on various shady pop-ups that pop up as soon as you log in. On some sites, anything you click on is sent back to other sites. Well great job Google as usual

[ichthyous]

My traffic remaining much higher... Although I am seeing some reversion to the "oops your home page has vanished" BS this weekend. It's always the same... Traffic to my home page and my top traffic page just drop like a stone. Could be that it suddenly picks up by end of the day who knows.

I am not seeing spam rise to the top of the searches at all... What I am seeing is the same pattern as a few years ago. All of the top ranking sites have reverted to how-to, top-tips, and 'best examples of' articles in my genres. You can have 10 in a row easily...anything commercial in nature totally squeezed out.

I am seeing higher and higher traffic from Gemini results and especially ChatGPT. Soon ChatGPT will replace Bing search results as my highest source of traffic after Google (excluding direct traffic) . It's still pretty miniscule, but add all of the AI referrals together and it's far higher than my referrals from social media.

[gatormark]

In my niche, Google is clearing out all the traditional players from the past 15 years from their search engine rankings. Most of my high ranking high traffic pages have been moved from page 1 to page 3 or 4. Some low traffic pages still remain on page one. Traditionally, this is the time of year that traffic picks up because of school, but the opposite is happening. Traffic is decreasing each day because of no search presence and AI overviews. It’s the end for me…and this happened quickly!

[Treud]

I see the same gatormark, I've a super old list of competitor back in the days, like 15 names, so far now we are only 3 left, and the 1st one is getting huge ups & downs

Me September is terrible... traffic is crap, mostly bots (like 75% are bots),

I start to think Google is killing his own search engine to force people to go to their app and use AIO instead of traditional search. For sure we see a shift on how we search, but it's happening to fast, and the wake up from reality will be hard !

[sk7411]

Something was dialed up or down again 4 hours back . Great going google :)

[Martin Ice Web]

Bots are ruling since 4 days.
we are seeing trange traffic pattern. Traffic comes 5 minutes to a specific kategorie or an item. Next 5 minutes traffic is comming to a different kategorie.
Before this started the traffic was all over the shop not just one kategorie after the other. Very strange.

[seokees]

@Martin Ice Web I have got the same issue (Dutch traffic).

[Chris travel 30]

We are observing very poor quality traffic since about 4-5 days on all our german sites, every site is a different niche. Traffic is less converting by around 75 %. Today was the first day out of six with some more or less good sales but we are far away from the levels of last week of August. Have seen this pattern around the same time last year, also connected to update activities by our well known G.

[seokees]

@Chris travel 30 Yes, quite normal traffic (after the J update, that is) but little to no conversions. Are there bots? And are all the traffic coming from the countries / Germany you normally target? (mine is, but it behaves like a bot army, but isnt recognised as such).

[Chris travel 30]

@seokees yes, countries of traffic are pretty normal (german speaking countries). It's more bots than usual, but not enough to be the pure source of all this. To me it seems like the pattern i have seen some times before: The matching between user intent (search intent) and SERPs has gone nuts. When looking at some snippets from Microsoft Clarity I see that people don't know why they were send to my page. Like "I go to a shop that sells tools but end up in an art gallery." - I have a look around because it looks nice, but I won't buy something. Lets see if this mismatching will continue or will return to normal.
Because the overall traffic is okay. It's quite normal for this season. But as I said, it does not match the expected conversion rates.

What countries are you targeting?