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]

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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[postimg.cc]

[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]