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.

[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.

[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.