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.

[goodoldweb]

@christianz

We've ended up reverse checking in realtime every ip.

$hostname = gethostbyaddr($ip_address);

Any request with ‘amazonaws.com’ in the hostname that does not properly identify as a bot is being blocked.

These are definitely useless bots, heatmaps show a dead beat behavior on page, time and time again.

[gatormark]

With everything that everyone has mentioned so far, I am still not going down without a fight. Just this week I introduced two new features into my main web community. I have another feature that I will build into the community within the next week. Having said that, my Adsense revenue and traffic are down about 49% from last year. The last Google update at the end of August hit me like a ton of bricks. But, I am still fighting!

[Micha]

Is the spam update really over? Yesterday, I saw a massive drop in traffic on many websites, even though they survived the update quite well.

[gatormark]

This downfall really started with the Google and Reddit partnership. Not coincidentally, that’s when we started to see Reddit being featured more prominently in search results.

[RedBar]

@Redbar i doubt that these webmasters are on WWM.

Precisely but some of them used to be in the 00s when webmastering was a real thing however with 43.6% (Jan 2025) of all sites being in WordPress the necessity of knowing most aspects of webmstering have been negated with plug-ins etc.

Most company site owners haven't a clue that 50+% of their traffic are bots. I've heard owners boast about how many "hits" their sites get believing that these are visitors or page views.

It's all about a justifiable scale of expenditure, is it within the forecasted budget or not?

[Kursed]

Misha, I’m seeing the same, even after the drop in Spam update - have been hit by another massive drop in traffic yesterday and today.

[tangor]

@Kursed ... Welcome to Webmasterworld! Daily fluctuations can be alarming, but monthly and quarterly provide a better view. Sometimes exterior world events and depress traffic, even globally.

[Martin Ice Web]

so i was playing arround with gemini AI and feeded it some of our website descriptions.
I was astonished how far AI connected to our niche. And the understanding of our niche was astonishly very good. But sometimes Gemini didn´t understand the content and was way of and mixed different niches. I would say 70% good, 30%% bad.

But then i feeded a good written text with honest information about the product.
AI answered that the information i provided was bad for this product and not a good user experience?!
I should omit the information or replace it by AI proposed information with wrong details.

So AI told me to lie to my buyers?

#1: So if google uses AI to rate websites and AI gets false negative signals then i know why the search has become so bad.
#2: google says write content for the user not for the SE but this example tells me i have to please the SE or it will probably not rank my website

[Micha]

@Kursed No idea what happened yesterday and the day before, probably just the usual drop when Google's systems settle down. Today things are back to normal. Otherwise, Tangor is right, short-term fluctuations don't mean anything.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop in USA traffic today from 7am - 11:30am EST so far. at 11am traffic was almost zero...haven't seen this in maybe two months now. USA traffic is -42% this morning. Anyone else seeing this?

[Kursed]

@tangor and @misha - It's still not settling down for us at the moment, I mean it's worse than it was while the update was going on, traffic went back to normal for a day right after the update ended and then went off a cliff since. I am really not sure what's going on at the moment, it does not seem normal vs last year specifically - around the same time.

[Whitey]

Since Aug 26 (start of spam update) we have recovered 15-20% approx of traffic completely lost in last years HCU update. These 2 sites were ccTLD’s localized clones of our main .com site.

I’m wondering if anyone else has seen recovery or movements upwards in this update on HCU related hits.

[mosxu]

Gemini is a total bunny compared to GPT or even Claude!

Shocking that a start up beats a trillion company that easily!

[fearlessrick]

Just reading through the comments here. Yep, Google and Bing are destroying the internet, one failed search or AIO at a time. Just did a bing co-pilot query about information on my own site and it completely missed it, misquoted, used different sources and claimed to be mine. I had to give it instructions to the URL and it apologized (how cordial!). Then misrepresented my statements. It was a pretty easy test (asking what my pick was for one of this weekend's football games), and it failed miserably.

AI will end up on the scrap (or should I say "scrape" heap of history. Companies and investors should prepare to lose billions. Hope they don't use AI to guide nuclear missiles. They'll blow themselves up. (Maybe that's a good thing)

I've been an internet publisher for more than 25 years and all I can say is that the big corps continue to ruin anything good about the internet and steal everything they can from the honest webmasters who provided the the info. Google and MSFT suck. Period. When they self-immolate maybe we can rebuild from scratch. Same goes for governments. Wish they'd all just get lost.

For me, I get enraged on occasion, but now I just ignore and/or insult them, drink a lot and go about my business. Of course, being retired, I have an edge. I don't really need the money, but, hey, a little more than what they're offering would be nice, anyhow.

Good luck to everybody fighting this war.

[saladtosser]

I found out AI overviews aren't "all that" the hard way! I followed their suggestions. Yes, I applied glue to my dominos pizza to make the cheese stick better. I spent the rest of the night in accident and emergency having my stomach pumped! Sadly, while i was sitting in accident and emergency I remembered earlier that day I had advised my pregnant wife to eat some rocks and when I came out of hospital I found out I now have to deal with a huge dentistry bill!

I see G is now testing deceptive ad units in the SERPS, the onslaught continues! I just wish they would go full ads/full AI rather than thousand cuts route, get it over already we know where your going G!

[fearlessrick]

Double post. First time that ever happened to me here.

[RedBar]

Either the bots are on holiday or I've got boss of them, fingers crossed it's the latter!

Traffic's a tad down at the moment however that's because I'm with 100+K attendees at our second largest trade fair in Italy ... The weather's fine, the beer is good and the food excellent as always plus real business being done by genuine people in person ... Lovin' it :-)

[RubicCubed]

When they self-immolate maybe we can rebuild from scratch. Same goes for governments. Wish they'd all just get lost.

We need a Web 3.0 (white web) or something like it where existing big tech companies and their products/services are prohibited from entry and outright banned. They, with Google leading the pack, have ruined the web.

[tangor]

We need a Web 3.0 (white web)...

I wouldn't mind being 50 years younger, 6'4", and in good health!

[gatormark]

For the first time ever, I just saw a primetime Google TV advertisement promoting their AI search results.

[Micha]

What the heck is going on? No matter which website I look at, according to Sistrix, they are all in free fall.
Traffic to my sites has also dropped completely. The results on Google have become really bad since the end of the spam update, and Discover is now even displaying fake Russian sites. I know that after an update, there are always some adjustments, but this is the first time I've seen anything like this.

[gatormark]

Part of the problem is that people are using Google search less and less with the advent of AI. So, website owners like us are getting hammered from all sides. Fewer people are using traditional search. AI overviews are stealing page views.

As I mentioned earlier, I just saw a primetime Google TV advertisement promoting their AI search results. Google sees the handwritten on the wall. We are the casualties of war.

[mosxu]

It is the end of the road.

[Martin Ice Web]

It was clear that zero click searchs are ending in zero ad click searches, too.
The money has to come from the remaining searches.

[Martin Ice Web]

That was a short fun time without bots!
Bots are back and real human traffic is gone.

[saladtosser]

Just see Elon is building "Grokipedia" to replace Wikipedia! Wonder where the information will come from? hmm!

It really feels like USA big tech have completely monetised the www and brought the open web to its knees. That's not enough though, oh no, now they are picking over the bones of whatever's left in case they missed a couple pennies more they can drain!

God bless big USA tech, they took our time/effort/work and experience for free and monetised it into their own product! We got less than a waitress at a coffee shop, no tip, or even a friendly thank you! The worst part though is we actually paid for the hosting/access to let it happen, not just that though... no no! We were then pressured into optimising the sites for speed on the promise of better rankings in the name of "user experience". So we spent more time/money optimising our sites for speed/CWV and all that other crap so they could scrap our sites faster/cheaper, let that sink in lol!

[ichthyous]

I've had a huge drop in impressions in GSC from September 12th onward, but clicks have remained relatively stable - anyone else seeing the same?

[ibb.co ]

[gatormark]

@ichthyous I don't know what the heck has been going on with me since May...

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[edited by: not2easy at 6:41 pm (utc) on Sep 30, 2025]
[edit reason] i.postimg.cc shared an URL [/edit]

[gatormark]

Here' something I am now seeing. Google has an "AI Mode."

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[System]

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

[edited by: not2easy at 11:08 am (utc) on Oct 2, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]