October 2025 Google Search Observations

[saladtosser]

@gatormark Been seeing this for weeks bud! Its a shame the AI crap isn't restricted to that tab but its flooding every other tab as well

[RedBar]

Comet uninstalled ... After checking a couple of my exclusive products of at least 35+ years and checking its sources etc, I wouldn't be able to trust its results.

Plus, is it me, I thougt enabling options by default was banned, or is this only in Europe?

[christianz]

The only question I have about something like Comet browser or AI assistants in general is how to block them. I am not interested in hosting anything for any non-human agents. End of discussion.

Comet and ChatGPT and all the rest of them are always welcome to scrape AI slop sites and marketing texts (increasingly also AI generated lol).

[Whitey]

If anyone is willing to contribute to this thread: [webmasterworld.com...] it would be great to have some more feedback.

I only came across some Perplexity ads today promoting the desktop free Comet browser, so was fishing for various perspectives, before I dive in and test it myself.

[RedBar]

Ten Cent Cloud Computing Singapore ignores robots.txt

[Micha]

Okay, this is getting weird. Could it be that Google is running an update right now? That would explain the back and forth.

[shadowlight]

Okay, this is getting weird. Could it be that Google is running an update right now? That would explain the back and forth.

The SERPS are in a constant state of flux, at least from what I see. Not only is rank consistently changing but several times throughout the day when I look, for the same search terms the layout of the SERP changes with the usual clutter changing position, this is everyday.

They will be doing this to constantly test the layouts that produce the most ad clicks. This will be the reason for the back and forth. Clearly they are putting all their efforts into optimizing their own revenue at the expense of everything else.

So many search refinements leading to SERPs and ADs, no doubt they will use this data in continuing to proclaim that the ecosystem is thriving because there are a lot more searches being conducted and more ads being clicked.

Sadly this is only going to get worse to the point where something will have to give. They can only milk the SERPs so much before there is nothing left to extract.

Some of the layouts are horrendous (for web site & business owners).

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[Micha]

The SERPS are in a constant state of flux, at least from what I see. Not only is rank consistently changing but several times throughout the day when I look, for the same search terms the layout of the SERP changes with the usual clutter changing position, this is everyday.

I can confirm that, by the way, and the headline box is totally crazy.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic seems permanently suppressed now. My USA traffic starts at -50% to -69% every day and ends flat if I am lucky. It's almost noon and USA is -49% this morning. Most days it's jumping up late and ending lower by ~ 5-10%.

Meanwhile, non-USA traffic is generally strong, but rotating sharp drops...i.e. one day UAE will be normal or even higher, the next day -27%. Same with UK, Germany, Australia, etc. It seems that Google is rotating the page layouts, number of ads and widgets etc across all markets now to maximize clicks on ads.

In other news...OpenAI has launched a browser, along with Perplexity. I think the days of Chrome's dominance are coming to an end. I think these new browsers will be rapidly adopted. Not that it will help any of us, and it will most likely be worse.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:26 pm (utc) on Oct 22, 2025]

[not2easy]

There may be enough people unaware of privacy concerns to use the new AI browsers, but in the long run, they may figure out that everything they do, say or see online becomes the property of AI generators. Makes Chrome look tame.

[RedBar]

Apart from those annoying Singaporean bots my Argentinean, Brazilian and Uruguayan visitors are increasing. They're all going to valid urls DIRECT with no referring link , no enquiries as yet, strange.

[ichthyous]

There may be enough people unaware of privacy concerns to use the new AI browsers, but in the long run, they may figure out that everything they do, say or see online becomes the property of AI generators. Makes Chrome look tame

This is exactly right...I won't touch an OpenAI browser if you paid me for this reason. Everything you do will be fed to the AI datset. Sam Altman from OpenAi is proving to be as amoral as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. However, many if not most, people will love it and not have any concern. I know someone who talks to his AI chatbot like it's his best friend. He uses it for everything and it is already deeply embedded in his life...it's actually very creepy to see the interaction as there is an emotional attachment there. If a new technology can do everything for them then they won't worry too much about the consequences because they feel that they can't control it anyway.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar, we are seeing the same. But now this "visitors" are all mobil traffic. And this traffic comes in surges like 2 minutes and then they are gone for somke time.

[mcneely]

I usually do light audits once per month w/regard to traffic on my sites.

Over the past year, the ecomm sites have only really ever done well at regional levels while the other mag/news sites have done well with all of the focus or targeting being toward U.K., AUS, CAN, and the U.S..

Best traffic lately for the ecomm's are from the U.S. which is understandable (tariffs) but I was surprised to see an actual jump in organic traffic when I dumped U.K. from the mix and added it's larger ip ranges to the firewall last month. Not real sure what's going on in the U.K. these days but applying the same rules there as I do from Ukraine and Georgia have worked out pretty well.

Best ROI is coming from the U.S. and AUS currently for any ad ventures, and I'm pleasantly surprised that Bing is actually making a show (up to 25% organic) over the past few months. Barely ever got 2% from Bing before.

Google has fallen off a cliff.

Still seeing listings in the page 2 to 4 ranges across the board.
I've also actually started to aggressively write certain mobile devices out in htaccess. We're getting a ton of rubbish from those lately.

[Cryogen]

Since October the 12th I can see a massive drop in traffic in Google analytics, almost 80% drop. But at the same time Google search console shows no drop whatsoever in impressions and ranking. My cloudflare statistics also don't show any drop in visitors, and even one tiny plugin that I use on my site directly (I think it is called top 10 views) shows only a very modest drop in views in the past several days.

Could it be that there is some glitch in reporting in GA in general, or perhaps (as chat GPT suggests) maybe there is some problem with firing GA script on my site..

Is anyone else seeing something similar? GA shows massive drop in traffic but everyone else doesn't show anything similar?

[saladtosser]

@ichthyous the people who use AI for everything seem to think its okay because it doesn't impact them negatively, *yet*. What they don't seem to understand is that everything is interlinked and it *will* impact them as their taxes will have to go up to fund a ballooning welfare bill. The tax payer is the one hit, not the tech bros who put the people on welfare. More wealth transfer from the many to the few!

On a positive note, some seem to think greedy tech bros will bank roll all 8 + billion obsolete (and angry) humans around the world the rest of their unproductive lives with UBI, so its all rainbows & unicorn asses ahead I guess!

[Chris travel 30]

GSC: Does anyone else see something like this: My latest stats in GSC are from Sunday, 19th October and have not been updated since. Same with the "indexed sites", they have last been updated on 18th October.

[Micha]

@Chris Yes, it's the same for me.

[rustybrick]

Google finally confirmed the GSC bug and is working on a fix [x.com...]

[Chris travel 30]

thanks @rustybrick.

Guys, there is something cooking at googles. I smell it.
For me, SERPs and layout of these are kind of roulette. And the traffic send by google is useless since 48 hours. Users, active like hibernating turtles.

[BigKat]

For me, SERPs and layout of these are kind of roulette.

For us, I'm consistently seeing the same ad heavy/spammy layout followed by AIO as shadowlight posted above. Organic results are pushed so deep down the page with this spammy layout that there's not much traffic to speak of. We're ecom in the USA. Our sales are doing ok thanks to the other search engines which tend to send more traffic/conversions during times when Google is using gimmicks to milk the SERPS for more revenue.

[Samsam1978]

I see the users on here are much less, just shows what this is doing to our industry

[Micha]

Whatever Google is doing right now, it's not normal. Google News is hardly being updated anymore. My news site is still in Discover, but only for an hour at most, after which traffic drops off completely. Almost nothing comes in via normal search because it's totally messed up. The headline box shows everything except news on that specific topic and articles that are weeks old. Of course, Search Console is also down, so you can't check your ranking properly, and as expected, the AI overview focuses on large publishers. Let's see how long we small players can survive; it won't be long if this continues.

[RubicCubed]

I see the users on here are much less

Traffic to our products is still coming but not from Google. So we're losing interest in Google who we see now as the enemy more than ever.

[RedBar]

I see the users on here are much less, just shows what this is doing to our industry

Almost ineviable when no one has any solution at the moment since it simply becomes an echo chamber.

This weekend I have removed all 301 domain names and reverted them to my host's holding page.

Furthermore I have closed all but six sites principally because of three Singaporean bots visiting the same pages individually every day. It's not a matter of cost nor bandwidth, it's the skewing of each site's metrics and the false information being generated.

Question ... Just what purpose do these bots derive?

Are they constructing an alternative to Google et al?

[Martin Ice Web]

Yes bots are annoying. There was 1-2 weeks without bots but now they hit again like crazy. I guess it is LLM apps learning.

google traffic is down since friday, will sunday was realy worse.
If gemini and google ranking system is equivalent in terms of understanding a website then I don´t have to ask any further why serps are this bad.

[RedBar]

I guess it is LLM apps learning.

But why visit an evergreen site almost everyday with one visit to each url? If they came to a 50 page site in one go once a week I could understand that but seeing them visit across many sites one url at a time seems weird and not the way I would do it.

Is this the "Chinese" way of creating something?

[BigKat]

If they came to a 50 page site in one go once a week I could understand that but seeing them visit across many sites one url at a time seems weird and not the way I would do it.

Some of it may be agentic search where a user's query is answered by fetching pages/data from the web in real time. For example, I can do a single query (question) in ChatGPT and it hit 5+ different pages within a second. I see thousands of these ChatGPT bot hits each day, and if we're lucky we may get one real human visitor for every 3K ChatGPT bot hits. I believe it was August when news hit that bot traffic had surpassed (51%) human traffic (49%) to many websites. I fully expect the ratio of bots to humans to get worse as agentic search, browsers, etc. become more widely accepted by the masses.

[RedBar]

@BigKat
Whilst I appreciate your explanation the three Singaporean "visitors" I see are all acting in the same manner with no referring link to a specific url and then gone. They don't try to hide who they are but do spoof some bits.

Then they come back 5-30 mins later and do the same again on another url.

Is this behaviour something we're going to have to "live with"?

As I wrote earlier it's not a bandwidth issue, at the moment.

[ichthyous]

An extreme drop in UK traffic today, down 42%. It has been down 42% all day as if UK traffic just completely halted. Anyone else seeing that?

[christianz]

Singaporean "visitors"

Those are Tencent scrapers stealing content for AI. They operate from all Tencent cloud regions, not just Singapore.

As we know, "AI companies" do not have to comply with any laws, not in US and not in China. They are encouraged to steal everything.

[christianz]

I can do a single query (question) in ChatGPT and it hit 5+ different pages within a second. I see thousands of these ChatGPT bot hits each day, and if we're lucky we may get one real human visitor for every 3K ChatGPT bot hits.

Exactly. That's why everyone who has valuable content (and not just online store with marketing info) is blocking all requests with ChatGPT user agents. ChatGPT is basically malware.

[Martin Ice Web]

If they came to a 50 page site in one go once a week I could understand that but seeing them visit across many sites one url at a time seems weird and not the way I would do it.

This is the new way of scraping content. This will not trigger any blocking algos while fetching hundrets of pages within seconds it is clear that a scraper is working your site. Scraping a complete webpage while only fetching a page now and then over a long time is very hard to detect. This will propably been seen as normal user behaviour.

And a Singapore IP does not mean that this is a Singapore scraper. Many VPNs ( like North-VPN) do have servers in singapore.

[BigKat]

That's why everyone who has valuable content (and not just online store with marketing info) is blocking all requests with ChatGPT user agents.

We get sales from ChatGPT and the conversion rate is extremely high when comparing human visitors from ChatGPT -vs- Google. We never blocked them, and I doubt we ever will.

[ichthyous]

An even more extreme drop in traffic today, I'm at -42% of search at 10am. All of the drop so far is from USA and UK, which are far below the norm this morning. Is anyone else experiencing this? It seems that something has been updating these past few days.

[shelloux]

What's with that insane bots China and Singapore traffic? Why the hell they are coming to my website...

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

I think most people in the UK are aware that it is in recession and probably has been all year just like most of Europe. Nuff said !

[RedBar]

Why the hell they are coming to my website...

Because your site may, just may, have a little bit of what THEY want to SELL to someone else ... Simple really :-)

[ichthyous]

I think most people in the UK are aware that it is in recession and probably has been all year just like most of Europe. Nuff said !

That doesn't explain why raging UK traffic one day and then -40% the next. Canada has been in recession for a while now...and my Canadian traffic is far below what it used to be for over a year now. Since all of the tariff issues it dropped even more.

By the way, US and UK traffic both snapped back at 10am sharp and is now erasing the losses. The drops are so extreme these days...that is all Google updating behind the scenes I think.

[RedBar]

That doesn't explain why raging UK traffic one day and then -40% the next

Precisely why I only look the following day, checking by the hour for me is pointless.

[Micha]

Google traffic has been really bad since Friday, but today it's really awful. Total collapse... Soon it will be “The last one turns off the lights”...

[shadowlight]

Google traffic has been really bad since Friday, but today it's really awful. Total collapse... Soon it will be “The last one turns off the lights”...

Absolutely disgusting how things are progressing, its not only individual businesses they affecting, its the whole Economy of countries across the globe.

I came across Mobile SERPS recently on a mobile device where all the ADS and PAA, PASF etc had fonts twice the size of the text on organic results, the organic text was barely legible.

[gatormark]

My website visibility is increasing, but something is brewing. Yesterday, my page RPM decreased significantly. That suggests advertising revenue is drying up, unless the past day or so is an anomaly — and this is the time of year when people spend the most money with the looming holidays.

Also, the volatility in the SERP is unprecedented. Like a lot of you, I have been in this game for a while — 20 years —and I have never seen so many day-to-day SERP changes. One day, Google will display a particular page from my site in its rankings, and the next day, another page from my same site will show instead. It is strange what Google is choosing to display in its results. I have never seen this level of inconsistency and volatility. Having said that, something big is brewing.

[Micha]

No wonder RPMs are falling; many websites are currently experiencing a drop in traffic and prefer to save money. Since last Thursday, Google appears to have cleaned up the search results for spam websites and the really big shops and media outlets.

Many things aren't working properly at the moment: the Google ads I see are complete nonsense, and Discover is almost always empty for me. Either Google's systems are going haywire, or they want to completely destroy their search engine. In Germany, you can forget about search results at the moment, and we don't even need to talk about their AI crap, which spits out almost exclusively English pages.

[chuviie]

Sales are weak over a week now. Traffic is not deeply involved and looks like looking for free options. It’s definitely’Save every cent’ game right now.

[ichthyous]

Also, the volatility in the SERP is unprecedented. Like a lot of you, I have been in this game for a while — 20 years —and I have never seen so many day-to-day SERP changes. One day, Google will display a particular page from my site in its rankings, and the next day, another page from my same site will show instead. It is strange what Google is choosing to display in its results. I have never seen this level of inconsistency and volatility. Having said that, something big is brewing.

I am seeing huge daily swings as well, with each territory swinging wildly...normal one day, down by 25%-40% the next. Today at noon EST my USA traffic is -45%, UK is -32%, and Germany -24%. Canada is typically -50% these days, and UAE can swing from day to day. My visibility is swinging day to day as well, but no huge drops yet. I can only crack this up to the huge amount of crap placed on the page now, especially mobile layouts. The number of blocks of information like People Also Asked, Related searches, etc is just laughable now.

[christianz]

I am not seeing any swings and haven't seen anything of note all year. Swings would imply that there is back-and-forth changes in the SERPs - sometimes things getting better sometimes worse. I am seeing SERPs only changing for worse, consistently all year.

[gatormark]

@christianz

The swings that I am seeing are after page one of SERP. Page one is fairly steady.

[Gagan_Kumar]

AI results change the game

Anyone else noticing how Google’s AI summaries are showing up more often now? It’s kinda wild how they grab attention before the actual links. Feels like SEO isn’t just about ranking anymore - you have gotta make your content easy for AI to pick up too.

Quality over keywords (finally)
Looks like the October update hit a lot of sites that rely too much on keyword stuffing. I am seeing better results when content actually answers the user’s question instead of chasing keywords. Are you guys updating old posts or just focusing on new, intent-driven stuff?

[Martin Ice Web]

google traffic is not only bad but bots are getting very annoying lately.
Surges of bots comes for 3 minutes fetching hundrets of pages and shut of immediatly . traffic from amazonaws is skyrocking (all bots maybe some of them are VPN users)
The remaining traffic is a mix of mobil traffic from US (one page and gone) and real visitors.

Traffic was very good converting ( till yesterday ) untill 14 PM and then nothing the rest of the day.

[Micha]

The remaining traffic is a mix of mobil traffic from US (one page and gone) and real visitors.

I see that all the time too, I just wonder what it is, because Matomo shouldn't count bots for us.
Well, as for traffic, the news site had 0 from Google yesterday and it's not getting any better today. The shop hasn't made any sales via users coming from Google for days.