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.

[mosxu]

@christianz

GPT has the best model, Claude is also good rest of them are absolute bunnies!

One company will self destruct because finding keywords model is dead.

Copyright is not an issue as soon as next year no AI will read anything you write!

[christianz]

One company will self destruct because finding keywords model is dead.

Something is dead for sure because whenever try to search something in supposed search engine (it doesn't have to be Google and I don't have Google as default on any device) using keywords (a string of key words that narrow down the specific topic and what kind of text I want to find), I get irrelevant junk.

Search engines are colossally broken and what they search for is very far removed from what you type in.

Copyright is not an issue as soon as next year no AI will read anything you write!

I hope you are right because I am tired of blocking 12 000 requests from ChatGPT / hour (and growing!).

[courier]

Just noticed, not sure if it is local or in more locations. Up till a few days ago, used to be able to do a search and put &num=100 at the end, your search would list 100 results. Results now seem limited to 10 per page, with less results showing than just the standard search. Suspect it could be to stop SERP tracking tools which maybe require top 100 listings?

search?q=search term&num=100 listed 100 results.

[christianz]

@courier

Of ten you can't even get close to 100 results. It truncates them and shows "We omitted X results that may be not relevant" or something like that. And when you click on "show these results" you still hardly get anything.

In combination with record low search result relevance you often end up not being able to find anything at all.

[Brett_Tabke]

> ?srsltid= IDs.

These are coming from Common Crawl. No one has been able to reason out why Common Crawl is Crawling Google Shopping and getting the srsltid.

> It has been reported ChatGPT is scraping Google's search results to answer some queries

And it has been completely misrepresented.

If ChatGPT has no info:
- in it's own db
- answers in it's common crawl index
- has no other references
- it will use a 3rd party known to scrap Google.

That is what an agentic search browser "should" do on your behalf.

There has been no evidence any where on the web that OpenAi is directly search Google.

I've been following this closely since it was first misreported. I even talked with 2 of the very large news outfits that were prepping stories on it and got them axed, as I showed them exactly where everyone had it wrong.
[searchengineworld.com...]

[Micha]

Conclusion after a few days: Bots are becoming increasingly annoying. My servers are constantly reporting overload because there is another flood of them, no matter how much I block them. Ranking tools no longer work, although the ranking fluctuates extremely anyway, and Google is getting on my nerves more and more.

I really hope that a new provider will enter the market soon and give Google a good kick in the butt (unlikely, I know).

[mosxu]

@Micha

Block the hell out of these bots especially out of your country! White list google classes and bing, gpt if there are …

[tangor]

White list google classes and bing, gpt if there are …

My white list is getting smaller everyday.

As some point (not soon) the web in general will swat the bots for burning bandwidth (which is EXPENSIVE). In short, there will become a BOT WAR---on which BOTS survive and which will die. At the current rate of consumption burn it won't take long before available resources (powered by ELECTRICITY) will be overwhelmed.

</observation, not tin-foil>

[Martin Ice Web]

i am giving up on bots. Like Micha said bots are getting overhand. China, Israel, Singapore, Vietnam and US.
Blocking one seems to trigger 3 new bots.

[mosxu]

If you don’t run product ads countries can be blocked otherwise merchant centre will suspend some products!

[mosxu]

Google just introduced the Agent Payments Protocol, a new open framework that enables AI agents to securely make purchases on a user's behalf…

Rest should follow offering the same it seems that Amazon will be very well placed in this new world and GPT could do better job.

Danger is these agents buy directly from China but Deepseek will definitely to that

[Micha]

@mosxu I think there's a greater risk that bots will go haywire and suddenly buy you a super expensive car instead of a pack of colored pencils.

[mosxu]

Well they will have a range in price and quality and manufacturers will not cross them!

But I am thinking retailers will not exist!

[saladtosser]

Ive been doing some searches today on mobile and 25% of the time its showing

ad
ad
ad
ad
G spam
organic
ad
ad
organic
ad
ad
etc etc

2 ads after every single organic....

Hope this is a mistake and not a test on whats coming as standard.....

[Martin Ice Web]

was search for a js problem today. used google because i was in chrome (firefox is bing default). 3 pages of rubbish in google. AI overview was so gerneric that it wasn´t helpfull at all. Refind my query 3 times!
switched to bing. 3rd entry had all infos a was looking for.

google is just a big ad machine and pretends to give answers. but in reality they trie everything to keep you on their sites and click on ads.

[azlinda]

AI bots have gone rogue before. I would NEVER trust something like APP. If AI can go rogue, no one should ever trust that it is secure.

[gatormark]

With AIOs, my traffic is half of what it was last year at this time. Very discouraging.

[chuviie]

First day without conversations in 15 years.

[Martin Ice Web]

OK, since two days something is realy off.
google sends 90% of traffic to only one page. this page is set to noindex. in GSC it is listed as found but currently not crawled.

[Treud]

I received a ton of backling from Germany (.de) last few weeks and most of them seems random generated URL linking to some, hot girls and casino !

I guess they won’t stay long

[gatormark]

These website fluctuations and throttlings are unprecedented. One day, my website is going up, going up, going up and Google says, not so fast! You’re doing too much. Let me bring you back down to Earth. Then, they start going up again and Google says, I need to pull you back some. You need to stay right around here or lower. LOL

[Fluff_Nutz]

@Gatormark

Yup, same. Site has been doing brilliantly for the past month. Now the drops are coming into play. Rankings are at the highest they have ever been but clicks and impressions have both dropped. Alas, an ''update'' is still on-going and has been for almost a month now.

Same over on Youtube too. In fact I have seen a lot of complaints about video views dropping as of late. None of which is normal. Everyone on Youtube is trying to work out why. A lot assume its down to AdBlock but I think otherwise. More manipulation. My own channel was doing well, now is drops back to its usual traffic levels

How does one even grow a business when traffic on both platforms fluctuate so much?

[oldog]

Published a biography article three days ago…ranking on top 10 today for the name.

[Dooku]

As most of you by now will know that google has eliminated the 'num=100' parameter and all seo tools are practically useless for rank tracking.......
G is now clamping down on all data that they think you should not see but is useful for them obviously.

The link below is from a LONG video explaining what google is doing and why AI bots should be blocked. But especially the part about 50 minutes in about how to block AI bots there is info on how "Pre Training" and "Grounding" works. As many studies have now shown that traffic from AI companies like ChatGpt are like 0,000...... and in reality these don't make ANY difference in actual leads or income so the ROI is beyond bad and you basically hand over all of your work and content for free so they can profit off it.
Whatever you do, at least watch the "How to block AI bots section" as there is very interesting info there about more aspects like court cases and methods of operation:
[youtube.com...]

[Micha]

In Germany, a few media outlets have now taken the initiative and formed a large alliance of non-governmental organizations, media associations, and publishers to file an official DSA complaint against Google with the Federal Network Agency. This should be interesting.

[golem.de ]

[Dooku]

@Mischa, I hope they win and see a positive result for the content creators. That would set an important precedent in the EU regarding the use of AI where content is scraped without any compensation and where copyright is not upheld.

It's actually easier than many people think and website owners have far more power than they assume. As the ceo of Cloudflare mentioned (also in that youtube video) when google was under the impression that Cloudflare would block the google bot they were TERRIFIED that search would break completely. Instead Cloudflare was actually talking about their "AI bot blocking" option in their panel........

Somebody only needs to rally webmasters (like they did on Reddit with GameStop) to pick a date and block the google bot starting at the same time.....
Even if 25% would join it would make google search useless and the stock price heading down to the earth's core. G would cave in within hours......

[Conro]

@Dooku, All agreed in the world in the same time we should go to the search console and hide our sites. Who knows what they would do from Google if they only found the answers to aio and no site. Users would switch to other search engines right away

[goodoldweb]

Chrome is now fully AI-driven and that’s where the problem lies.

Watch this video:
[youtu.be...]

[christianz]

Singapore bots in full force today.

[RedBar]

Except for my main and largest .com site, I seem to have stabilised / blocked most of the troublesome bots.

However the main site is now under "attack" again, Saturday saw 300% more traffic than usual with much of it coming from AT&T Kansas!

As such I am sat here at 15.40 UK time contemplating the deletion of this site, apart from a brief, explanatory page.

I shall not be 301ing anything, utterly pointless.

Any comments?

[ichthyous]

Chrome is now fully AI-driven and that’s where the problem lies.

In what sense? Do you mean that searches will no longer be performed @Google because the AI will serve up answers in the browser? This could potentially be catastrophic depending on how quickly people start using it. It will definitely reduce traffic to informational sites, but not sure how even e-comm sites will draw traffic anymore if this is the case

[ichthyous]

Somebody only needs to rally webmasters (like they did on Reddit with GameStop) to pick a date and block the google bot starting at the same time.....
Even if 25% would join it would make google search useless and the stock price heading down to the earth's core. G would cave in within hours......

Never going to happen. You don't rally people with incentives to reduce the traffic / business they currently have. You rally people with incentives to gain traffic. So far, my traffic is the highest it has ever been in 2025, and it is growing even more from ChatGPT, gemini, perplexity, etc. AI already surpasses my traffic from all social media sources combined.

Informational sites operating along the old model of churning out endless cut and paste articles and hoping to get clicks on adsense ads are cooked. I do think that those offering unique insight, creative text, in depth research, unique products, and unique services will survive. The real issue is the massive copyright infringement of the AI platforms. If your content is regurgitated stuff that 100 or 1000 other sites also have, then there is really no way to prove that it's being stolen...but unique text, images, etc probably have a much stronger case.

Google's stock isn't going to collapse any time soon...it's a three trillion dollar corporation. Pressure needs to be applied on governments to tackle these corporations. In Europe, UK, Australia that is already happening. In the USA that simply isn't going to happen until at least 2026, and probably not until 2029.

[christianz]

I do think that those offering unique insight, creative text, in depth research, unique products, and unique services will survive.

Not with the current changes Google is making. If you are not selling products but your product is stream of high value information and it is monetized with ads, Google is making it very difficult to survive. Also, their SERP ranking updates have been completely nonsensical throughout 2025. No connection with site value, quality, reputation etc and the direction it is taking in the SERP rankings. Just like this latest "spam update" that increased amount of spam.

[Micha]

Spam update is complete. (Tomorrow there will be a new update, you can bet on it.) [status.search.google.com ]

[Shepherd]

August 2025 spam update Duration: 26 days, 15 hours

Ironically, that's also the amount of time it takes to find what you are looking for when searching with google.

[goodoldweb]

@christianz

We’ve noticed an increasing number of Singapore-based bots visiting our webstore recently. In many cases, they even add products to the cart. (WTF?)

Here’s an example of one detected earlier today. Apparently an Amazon bot/AI or a price comparison site hosted on the amazon servers (aws) in Singapore.

User IP: 47.128.32.20

Hostname: ec2-47-128-32-20.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com | ISP: Amazon Technologies Inc | Country: Singapore | Region: Central Singapore | City: Singapore |

[RedBar]

@goodoldweb

This past few weeks I have seen a substantial increase of AWS bots from several locations and were dominating my visitor IP logs.

I think I have successfully blocked them but will know better once October is here.

[Chris travel 30]

So, here are my observations for now, referring to the latest "spam update":
On our german sites we saw a rise of traffic and conversions at the real beginning of the update, followed by a sharp decline in traffic and sales.
One week before the official ending of the update, traffic came back (nearly to previous levels) BUT conversions are down across the board. 1 inquiry on our consulting website, 0 sales on our website that covers the topic "housesitting" (mostly due to the fact that now AIO has picked up this topic as well, leaving us with breadcrumbs) and our biggest site (travel) lost conversions by around 40 % compared to before the update.
So IF we will see the same pattern as in previous updates, there might be a slight rollback of the changes that came with this so called spam update. (I am hoping for it.)

What makes it even harder to walk thru this jungle of data at the moment is the loss of the top 100 parameters, so our external tools are not reliable any more (which is good for G, so now they can present everything they want to us in the GSC *dark sarcasm off*).

My guess: G is now sending traffic that is nearly useless, so we can not state that we lost traffic due to AIO and AI mode (if this will come in europe). I clearly have to say: The traffic that ist coming is nearly useless. Its not just bots. Its real traffic, that does really nothing on our sites than just a few scrolls. The behaviour changed dramaticaly so i assume, it's just way different traffic. Which comes down to one of my last posts here: The kind of traffic that is send has changed (again).

Let's see what we will see in the upcoming days.

By the way: Is there any petition against AIO and all this scraping stuff in the EU at the moment? I really wanna take part in this. We can not go on with this in the future without compensation or banning this sh**. It will end in a world-wide-web-catastrophy if we do not stand up against this. I have not found anything to take part in as a small publisher yet. Any ideas guys?

(OT: Oh and somehow my Clarity recordings have stopped yesterday at around 21:30 - someone else here seeing this? pm me).

[Martin Ice Web]

my thought on last update: is has the ability to kill the net as we know it.
All website owners i talked have severe ttaffic drops while bots are hitting the sites like crazy,

[christianz]

we can not state that we lost traffic due to AIO and AI mode

Most of my traffic drops have also nothing to do with AIOs but with Google going completely insane in 2025 and boosting junk content and demoting industry leading websites that are known to be reliable for decades.

[Micha]

@martin I can confirm your observation 100 percent; I see exactly the same thing at the shop. The news site is more interesting because its ranking has risen, and until yesterday, traffic was unusually high. Spam update over, and suddenly traffic plummeted, discover gone, etc.

And regarding the petition: There isn't one currently underway that could be considered relevant, but something is brewing. I'll let you know when it becomes more concrete.

[longjohnbronze]

Anyone else notice that Chrome's AI features were very randomly and totally not deliberately announced just a few weeks after the monopoly ruling?

[RedBar]

@MIW
I haven't been in Germany this year however are you experiencing strong localisation results in your SERPs?

My main .com is a trade-related, factual information site. Mine is Anglo-Indian and the only other similar one is an excellent Chinese site and we have discussed personally for 20+ years.

We have both experienced identical global falls meanwhile for the top 10-20 products thin local sites are dominating G's results.

I came to the conclusion years ago that G prioritised local widget sales sites over evergreen factual ones. A quick search using a VPN for different countries bears this out.

Any opinion?

[goodoldweb]

@Martin Ice Web

my thought on last update: is has the ability to kill the net as we know it.
All website owners i talked have severe ttaffic drops while bots are hitting the sites like crazy

That’s exactly what we’ve been experiencing. The past three weeks have been devastating, nothing but absolute junk traffic and bots.

AdWords has been no better: costly non converting junk.

[christianz]

@goodoldweb

We’ve noticed an increasing number of Singapore-based bots visiting our webstore recently. In many cases, they even add products to the cart. (WTF?).

For the most part the infamous Singapore bots are Tencent corporation themselves. They are scraping web illegally, ignoring robots.txt and hiding behind fake user agents. Yesterday I had a whack-a-mole fight with them and ended up banning large blocks of IP address ranges.

The more I blocked them the more aggressive they became. They were using their datacenters not just in Singapore but also in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Germany and other places. I quickly realized that I am up against the entire Tencent cloud so I put large part of the site behind login and called it a day.

ChatGPT keeps hammering me with 100s of thousands of daily requests also, but at least those don't hide behind fake user agents and gigantic distributed IP pools, and I can easily block them all.

It is ABSOLUTE DISASTER what is happening with the web right now. Emboldened lawless "AI companies" with endless funding running massive scraping operations and stealing everything that moves or doesn't move.

These AI/bigtech scrapers are like winds carving through post-apocalyptic WWW wasteland, picking up any debris of value until there is nothing but ruins.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Redbar, yes it seems haevely localisation but with VPN we are still in top 10. Without VPN we are at top 3 for many terms.

@all_others: thanx for your reply. It is abnormal quiet in this forum for such a big devasting update!? Was thinking it is our site only.

[RedBar]

It is abnormal quiet in this forum for such a big devasting update!? Was thinking it is our site only.

Maybe just the older webmasters who can see and understand what may be occurring to their selected sites? Many large corp sites do not simply care because they have huge budgets and they have no incentive(s) to even comprehend the situation therefore they are unable to communicate anything worthwhile ... Experienced v Inexperienced?

CFO asks:
Are sales ok? Yep.
Are margins ok? Yep.
Are increased costs proportional? Yep.
Carry on.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Redbar i doubt that these webmasters are on WWM.

[londrum]

the last few weeks my affiliate links were getting bombarded with clicks as well (although my adsense numbers stayed the same). i moved over to the free plan on cloudflare because they've got something that blocks most of the bots, and it's calmed down since then. you can also block up to five countries on their free plan firewall

[ichthyous]

That’s exactly what we’ve been experiencing. The past three weeks have been devastating, nothing but absolute junk traffic and bots.

Not seeing this at all. Traffic has been much higher since the beginning of Sept, which is typical for my traffic. Inquiries picked up but slowed down by last week already. Some noticeable trends:

- Zero new inquiries from abroad, despite the lower dollar. Nothing from UK, EU, UAE at all. Canada and AU died already last year. Traffic from both is waning as well. This has much to do with recession or very low growth. Political instability adds to the mix. When the Ukraine war started in 2022 saw a big slow down as well.
- The inquiries coming in are from clueless people who don't look at anything on the site or read anything. They simply hit a page, fill out the form and go. The form has a place for them to include their budget... Their budgets are regularly 5-10x lower than the actual price for what I sell. I have stopped responding, immediate delete. Never seen this kind of behavior in 22 years I been online.
- I am not seeing much higher scraping from AI bots. I do get spurts from India, which I suspect are AI bots scraping the site. China is blocked completely. It pains me to block India but may have to also happen.
- Much higher traffic from AI sources and growing by the day. I don't think it converts to sales at all.