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]

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.