November 2025 Google Search Observations

[gatormark]

@Micha

Are you able to block all traffic from China and Singapore? That's what I do. It helps a lot, but doesn't stop the bots since many Singaporean and Chinese companies own servers in the USA. I'm talking to you, Alibaba Cloud.

[Micha]

Blocking doesn't help, unfortunately; it's just annoying.

[RubicCubed]

The link in the last October thread to this November thread is as dead as Google is. But I'm seeing more orders coming from below which is breath of fresh air. Shoppers must be getting really tired of Google's garbage results and are trying something new.

?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[christianz]

Blocking doesn't help, unfortunately; it's just annoying.

It's unwinnable whack-a-mole. It may be winnable with help of large cloud service like Cloudflare that constantly keeps track of these things. But not everyone can run behind cloudflare.

The only option then becomes putting valuable things behind login, making open Web less open and worse overall. Thanks to these "AI companies" and deeply corrupt governments.

[Micha]

Since Google traffic to my news site has now reached a stable zero, I'm considering installing a paywall. I don't like them, but the money has to come from somewhere, and if it stops bot swarms from stealing my content, that's fine with me.

[christianz]

I'm considering installing a paywall

Everyone hates them and they may not work out financially for most publishers at the moment, but with this AI nonsense persisting, more and more paywalls will go up and users will gradually get used to having to pay for quality information. Real information not approximation regurgitation.

[Dooku]

@Christianz, why are you not able to use Cloudflare? Technically there is no reason, financially it may be an issue however the free version is more than enough to block all those bots. I use the free cloudflare version and have got ALL major cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, Hetzner and many more blocked, including many ASN networks that house well known shady bots and hosting/cloud server providers that are up to no good.

In the past 12 months or so I have made a real job of this, checking IP range and hosting/cloud providers reputation and have filtered a LOT of crap.
The funny thing is that it also provides a good view on how little actual good traffic is on the web these days. So I am seeing exactly what I have read in a few research docs about "the dying web" and how little traffic is actually coming from REAL people these days.

[RubicCubed]

In the past 12 months or so I have made a real job of this, checking IP range and hosting/cloud providers reputation and have filtered a LOT of crap.
The funny thing is that it also provides a good view on how little actual good traffic is on the web these days.

I've blocked countries and the worst offenders but question whether or not it was worth the time. Google sends so little traffic these days that blocking these bots probably doesn't matter much anyway. Scrapers do find ways around the blocks as well. I just had a T-Mobile USA visitor quickly hit 30 pages and the last page it hit was our privacy policy. I see this strange behavior all the time including visits from Verizon wireless IP ranges.

If the true purpose behind blocking bots is to prevent our content from being stolen and monetized, then maybe we should have first blocked Google because they are the worst offender of them all.

[Dooku]

@RubcCubed, those residential IP's and visitors you see displaying that kind of behaviour are also from bots scraping content.
Even well known AI "companies" use them, but mostly from China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
But also shady companies like Oxylabs who rent out residential proxy IP's are responsible for these.
(b.t.w Oxylabs got sued by Reddit for this).
Here is more info on what is currently happening on the internet regarding evading VPN and datacenter operations and moving to residential IP's for aggressive scraping to feed LLM's:
[krebsonsecurity.com...]

[RedBar]

Interesting article Dooku.

more and more paywalls will go up and users will gradually get used to having to pay for quality information. Real information not approximation regurgitation.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't, certainly I will not since like many others I do know how to find the information I am seeking however I do accept that many simply want easy solutions to everything.

Question ... Do most bots not work on a weekend?

[RubicCubed]

those residential IP's and visitors you see displaying that kind of behaviour are also from bots scraping content.

I'm aware, but the point I was getting at is how much effort is worthwhile to devote to blocking scrapers when Google's isn't sending traffic anyway? We see Google using the content they stole from us in their AI O, which is why we're getting very little traffic from them. This makes Google the worst scraper/thief of them all. If it weren't for us selling products, and the few sales we get from Google, they would have been blocked long ago. But Google is continually getting worse which will make my recommendation to block Google more palatable to those within my company.

[Martin Ice Web]

50% drop since friday. 200% in bots from brasil. I thik real visitors/bots ratio is at 20/80 right now.

[Micha]

The shop has been running really well since Saturday, but the news site: Oh man, Discover is totally at a standstill, even though organic traffic is getting a little better, but that doesn't make up for the news traffic, of course. Well, and then of course there are bots everywhere you look.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, did you recognize that if your shop runs well our shop is down and vice verca?

[Micha]

@martin Yes, I've noticed that too. Do you happen to sell South Korean items? Since we sell Japanese goods, that would explain it. ;-)

[Dooku]

how much effort is worthwhile to devote to blocking scrapers when Google's isn't sending traffic anyway?

You are absolutely correct in that assumption. Here is one example of such an IP, anything that is a call back proxy on a residential ISP ip address is shady and used by scrapers: [spur.us...]

But there is another side to this. Yes it's a lot of work and at first seemingly useless. But a cleaned up log file of which 95% you see is real traffic also gains insight in where actual legit traffic is coming from. When you put effort in that part of your traffic you can use it to target for example regions or certain type of customers (there are online services where you can look up which companies have visited your website and get contact info). Basically, if useful for your type of industry, you can extract more value from that traffic and use other well known (social media?)platforms to target them.....and don't forget email campaigns, which are still the best converting method.

G made there first 100 billion quarter, but that will not last. I am seeing people left and right leaving G for other search options. There will come a time when advertising on G will not produce any real ROI. It's actually not producing much already and that is why G is squeezing their SE to the max and getting crazier each month. The problem are the millions of smaller companies wasting money on Adwords running inefficient campaigns and not really checking them......happy as they are to get a few orders still from their campaign. It's a race now between G's squeeze tactics and more and more people leaving G altogether until not enough eyeballs are left to make any Adwords campaign viable.......that is when the implosion of G will begin.

[Gagan_Kumar]

November 2025 Search Scene: India & GCC

India now has ~800M+ internet users and search is growing fast.
Gen-Z is searching differently - more questions, more “how-to”, more creators influencing trust.
Voice search, local languages, and mobile searches continue to rise.
SEO is shifting from just keywords --> helpful, trusted content that answers real questions.
GCC region shows similar patterns - more mobile search, AI tools, and Arabic/English mixed queries.

TL;DR:
Focus on clear answers, real expertise, local context, and conversational search queries. People search like they talk now - and they want quick, trustworthy info.

[RedBar]

Focus on clear answers, real expertise, local context, and conversational search queries. People search like they talk now - and they want quick, trustworthy info.

And when G fixates and promtes localisation only, where does this get you?

Absolutely nowhere but further down its SERPs.

I agree with your points however, for quite some time now, G "understandably" has preferred local then it can promote ad sales to state wide or national companies, all the time demoting international sites regardless of how good or useful they may be.

[RedBar]

Hetzner, this time from Nuremberg, decided to make its monthly visitation trying all kinds of url variants such as about, aboutus, about-us ... hmmm

10 seconds later Hetzner repeated this from Helsinki, ffs!

[shadowlight]

Focus on clear answers, real expertise, local context, and conversational search queries. People search like they talk now - and they want quick, trustworthy info.

Yet the top result on all SERP's is AIO, clearly stating it may not provide accurate information yet how many people will rely on that information as fact? A lot is my guess.

I was testing this the other day and it was giving multiple answers that weren't just regurgitated inaccurate info like eating rocks etc but it was making statements about certain things with absolutely no evidence to back the statements up and when challenged apologised for providing the information as there was no evidence that corroborated the information it previously provided and went on to provide info on AI hallucinations.

Wikipedias definition of AI Hallucinations:

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called #*$!ting, confabulation, or delusion) is a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact.

[haramamba]

@RubicCubed
Multiple 100%-bot visits from T-mobile, verizon, AT-T.
No referers, no accept_language some times, and SEC_FETCH_MODE may be missing.

[RubicCubed]

@Dooku
You make a point about blocking bots to cleanup logs for analysis, and I've dealt with the major problems with blocks. I don't use GA and it's easy to isolate referred sources of traffic for analysis which eliminates most bot activity. The problem arises when analyzing type-in traffic. I suspect the major blocks we have in place have driven these scrapers to ATT, Verizon and other ordinary residential and business IP addresses. The more we block, the more these scrapers move to ordinary IP addresses. Though late to the game, I believe hosts will introduce tech to block bots like Cloudflare is doing because the money they are losing paying for resources. And I must say the bot problem got worse shortly after Perplexity decided to sell access to their index of billions of pages via API. I can't help but think Perplexity is responsible for the major spike in scraping many are experiencing.

@haramamba
Absolutely correct in that scrapers from ordinary IP addresses and are so bold they aren't even trying to hide it.

[mosxu]

wtf is happening ?

comedy club claims people come back to search because of AI ? So who was searching before AI?

[Fluff_Nutz]

Brussels continues its fight to break up Google. Meanwhile, on my end, after 2 good months, traffic begins to drop once again. Then it dawned and hit me. Lightbulb! It's Black Friday! Of course traffic is dropping!

What is also funny in this article, is the statement 'Google has said that it will appeal the Commission’s decision, which in its view requires changes that would hurt thousands of European businesses' Excuse me, whilst the appeal is not surprising. But, seriously, who is hurting who here? G you have literally destroyed millions of businesses worldwide. They are quite literally forced to purchase ads to stay alive!

[politico.eu ]

[mosxu]

Congress has evidence of wrong doing, what happened ? Nothing even with Trump being shadow banned like many others!

EU going to do what ?

The business model has to change maybe with agentic sales where a commission is charged if a sale is made!

At the moment there is no evidence that ads are clicked or displayed to humans just by looking at difference of two siimmlar retailers and the huge difference in sales they make one can see that something is seriously wrong!

[ichthyous]

My traffic took a prolonged dip in the second half of October due to the loss of a lot of aged links, especially the last week of October. It has now snapped back into place after working on it for weeks.

However, looking at the quality of inquiry from 2025 compared to say 2023, there is no comparison. I am getting a lot of very poor quality inquiries that are not only delusional in their expectations about price, but a lot of them are almost gibberish. Lots of people asking for services I don't offer. I delete about half as they come in. Not sure who is actually capturing the better quality leads from Google anymore...is it the ones paying for ads? Nobody at all?

[Micha]

According to Semrush, there's a lot going on again, so no wonder the shop is at a standstill. The news site has been virtually dead since mid-October, and that doesn't seem to be changing for the time being. But hey, at least I can see my articles in Google's AI nonsense. Man, I could throw up right now.

[shadowlight]

comedy club claims people come back to search because of AI ? So who was searching before AI?

Comedy club are probably using the fact that there are now a lot more searches going on, this helps them justify the huge increase in ad clicks and revenue from the last quarter.

More searches = more ad clicks = more satisfied users conducting more searches on google than before....that will be their spin on it anyway.

In reality they have engineered the SERP's for their own benefit in order to produce these results, we can all see it. Mobile SERP yesterday, page one the usual ad heavy clutter full of additional search refinements and buried organic results, page two (or the second scroll) 4 organics yes 4!, 8 ads and two huge search refinement boxes. This changed as soon as it was refreshed but they will be showing this kind of SERP result layout more and more.

[RubicCubed]

comedy club claims people come back to search because of AI ?

People search more because AI is a trap designed to keep users confined in an ecosystem where users can only escape by clicking on an ad.

[EditorialGuy]

I keep wondering if any players (including startups) are looking to fill the gap left by Google, Bing, etc. in the Web search space.

The open Web may be losing visibility in tools (such as Google) that are evolving into AI-driven "answer engines," but that doesn't mean the open Web is disappearing or that people don't want to find things on the open Web.