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.

[Dooku]

that are evolving into AI-driven "answer engines,"

And this is the result [searchengineland.com ]
So not only a huge drop in organic traffic but ALSO in paid traffic! Obviously G knows this and that's the reason for their desperate methodology.
Because they are also loosing searches to their AI competitors.

However, I wonder if enough people after getting used to the lazy method "asking and receiving answers" would want to return an "old style" SE?
Any new startup that wants to fill that gap needs to be exceptionally good and different.

[mosxu]

Guys (except EG)

I am using G from 90% to even less than 10% since AIs, it is like I feel free again... there was something in the water I feel like I was fed hyptnotizing keywords all the time!

[Micha]

What's going on? My impressions and clicks have skyrocketed in the Search Console and have reached the last peak that the news site had a few months ago. You can't see it in the number of visitors, but at least it's going in the other direction.

[Chris travel 30]

@ Micha, good for your! When you are reporting a slowdown, my sites are up, and vice versa: my sites are now down ^^.

[Micha]

@Chris Maybe you should move to my servers ;) But seriously, it's great that the ranking is improving, only the traffic is still rubbish.

[RedBar]

My global specialist widget traffic is ok however the evidently localised SERPs in some countries means that for the more popular widgets I am pushed down too far however, because only one other site in the world features as many widgets as I do, it means that anyone searching outside of the top 20 widgets I am usually in the top 3 even under a localised SERPs.

Why do I mention this? In the past 4 days I have received 3 genuine bulk enquiries from countries I have never supplied before!

Checking through my VPN there I was #1 in each country, none of which I have ever visited, nor likely to, but someone, somewhere had specified these specific widgets for their projects therefore, for me, the www is still occasionally generating some new business again after months of being dormant.

[saladtosser]

I was looking for some simple spray paint today, typed in "colour code + spray paint" and the top 2 organic sites did the paint, they did it in the colour I wanted but not in spray format just normal paint. Checked over the full page and no mention of aerosols so why does G purposely give me results that don't fit what im searching for! Only a few years back they used to be laser focused on giving me the products I wanted but now they just give me something similar rather than what im actually searching for! The sites further down with "spray" in the title did the trick but why serve up sites first that don't have the keywords in the page at all and rank them above others that fit the search term, mystified! These is why I mostly use ChatGBT now and I suspect im not alone!

[Micha]

Let me jump in here: What's going on with Google News/Discover? Shouldn't it be based on interests? Instead, all I see is soccer, folk music, motorsports, and alcohol news. And of course fake sites with AI spam. Serious news is no longer being displayed. Something is really wrong here. P.S. Oh, and I feel the same way about the paint. I searched for something similar and only got nonsensical results.

[ichthyous]

Now I see what you are all talking about with the Singapore IPs scraping my site. I had to block all traffic from Singapore today. It's just Chinese AI bot scraping...they moved to Singapore because everyone has blocked China. I have had one sale to Singapore in the last 25 years so not a big deal for me, but a real pain for those that do business with Asia.

I am noticing a ~50%-70% drop in daily ChatGPT traffic since about October 17th. It started rising rapidly on Aug 19th, then peaked on October 14th and has fallen steadily back down for a month straight. Is anyone else seeing this same pattern? Is this related to Google blocking ChatGPT from accessing search results?

[Martin Ice Web]

Since two days bots are back and google traffic quality yields against Zero.

I don´t know if it just coincidence but we got an email from google to increase our visibility through google shopping channels for last-minute-shoppers and short after that google traffic fell of the clip and bots came back.

[Micha]

I hardly dare write that Discover traffic is back on my news site today and the shop has been doing good business again over the last few days... @martin We also received the message, but we don't have a traffic dop.

[Martin Ice Web]

Micha, then please give my back my traffic that you stole from me :)

[Micha]

Why? Are the bots I sent you not enough? :-P

[Martin Ice Web]

Not at all! Because I am a nice guy i will send them back to you without any charge.

But seriously, these bots are getting out of hand right now. Every hour we have 20 minutes ( in a row ) only bot traffic.

[Micha]

I know. Not a day goes by without one of my servers overloading. If it were just a few, but regularly there's a whole army of them.

[gatormark]

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.

I don’t see that to be the case at all. As much as I dislike AI because of what it has done to my business, AI is exceptionally useful in other areas. But, to address your ad statement. None of the AI tools that I use try to keep you trapped in their ecosystem. Nor, do they have ads.

Anyway, when I am programming in C sharp or .net, I love AI. It can fix my code and even has rewritten my code going from one framework to another.

[fearlessrick]

It's too early to tell if Google has done something today, but my impression RPM this morning is triple what it's been for the past month and Page RPM more than double. Basically, it's been a horror show since the first of October.

[shadowlight]

I don’t see that to be the case at all. As much as I dislike AI because of what it has done to my business, AI is exceptionally useful in other areas. But, to address your ad statement. None of the AI tools that I use try to keep you trapped in their ecosystem. Nor, do they have ads.

........yet!

They may not have ads yet but AIO are designed to keep you on G and in their ecosystem. Some of these SERP layouts are just taking the pi**, I've seen some really bad (for anything other than G's revenue) layouts recently.

AD
AD
AD
AD
AIO
FRPS (find related products or services)
PASF

The above takes up huge amounts of screen real estate before you even get to the rest of the cluttered mess, ahem sorry, search results.

Its basically just SERPS designed to lead you around in circles reading AIO (which come with disclaimer about being inaccurate), clicking on ADS and conducting more searches via query refinements to read more AIO, clicking more ads and conducting more searches using different search terms. You have to be really determined (especially on mobile) to escape the journey G want you to take.

1) Here are some ads you may find useful, no? 2) Here is our plagiarised compilation of information to help you find what you are looking for which might be inaccurate? Still no? Try these 20 other search terms and go back to step 1.

I've used a lot of AI tools recently, they can be useful but you have to fact check the information presented, I haven't found one yet that doesn't give you inaccurate information and most of them are not presented to 90%+ of internet users as default.

[i rahulgupta]

I see something wrong overall, but I can’t confirm yet, I’m monitoring it as well.

[goodoldweb]

Monitoring, monitoring...

The plex must have been taken over by the joker.

[christianz]

China AI content theft bots have ruined Google Analytics for most websites during the past few weeks. Scraping is absolutely out of control.

AI thieves are attacking the open web, generating losses in bandwidth costs and harming ad revenue.

This kind of criminal conduct will end up cutting off Chinese users from all western web resources, simply because most will block all China IP blocks. At that point they will use their western residential botnets more and things will spiral from bad to worse.

[RubicCubed]

I don’t see that to be the case at all.

It is very much the case with Google, which my response was directed at. Other AI companies had billions of speculative investment dollars fall into their laps so they really have no need to generate revenue until the investor dollars dry up. When the easy money stops, their gravy train will come to a hard stop. We know what comes next because we saw an ad-less Google do it in the early days when they took on and defeated Yahoo. Now look at what Google has become.

AI is exceptionally useful in other areas.
Anyway, when I am programming in C sharp or .net, I love AI. It can fix my code and even has rewritten my code going from one framework to another.

AI's own code interacting with other code is a natural fit for the technology that doesn't directly trample over the intellectual property rights of others and display incorrect responses to the masses for non-coding/programming queries. If a product pushed onto the masses is experimental, then the consumers are experimental guinea pigs. No government should have allowed this mass experiment and their citizens to be used as test subjects. Imagine manufacturing and selling experimental toaster ovens to the public and having no liability when they catch fire because the toaster oven was labeled experimental.

[Conro]

Finally someone has noticed that something is wrong. I have little hope, but at least we have noticed the enormous damage that Google is doing to the web and to publishers' online businesses [ec.europa.eu...]

[Martin Ice Web]

i thin kgoogle switched to X-mas shopping mode....
Worst weekend for over a year.

[RedBar]

Methinks many contributors here have given up in despair!

FWIW I did spend much of September into October tracking down many of the rogue bots etc and, fingers crossed, November so far I have experienced much more consistent traffic levels with no crazy bandwidth spikes. It was helped by analysing several sites' rogues and applying the blocks across all sites at the same time, a lot more work however seemingly very effective.

I have had quite a surprise for one of my specialist widget sites with its bandwidth being more than halved.

i thin kgoogle switched to X-mas shopping mode..

I thought they'd already done that?

Is it just me or are there far fewer Black Friday ads?

[Micha]

Google is really going crazy. I'm starting to think they've completely lost control of their search engine; it's total chaos.

Shopping today: no sales Google sends visitors, but they're not even from Germany. News site: Traffic has plummeted again. My niche is currently dominated by AI spam.

[goodoldweb]

Nearly two weeks with absolutely zero sales. The only traffic we’re seeing is from the various Google’s bots, with just a handful of genuine window shoppers in-between.

This is a live-products store with minimal competition, and under normal circumstances it consistently delivers 15–20 sales per week.

Google’s current behaviour is unacceptable and has become a serious obstruction to legitimate business.

[Martin Ice Web]

FWIW I did spend much of September into October tracking down many of the rogue bots

How did you do that. when ever we turn down some bots three new are coming. Bot countries are switching from singapore, india, Vietnam, US, china.
Whenever bots are back, google traffic goes down the drain and is very, very, very bad (nearly no sales, uiser engagement ZERO, no inquiries ) . So i guess it is google routing this bots.

So what is the intention?
I still think that this is due AI answers and ZERO click queries. Many webmasters are now down to a trickle of traffic. google knows that and is aware of loosing websites to feed their SE and AI. To keep this webmasters up, fake traffic is send. Most of the webmasters will not even know that this is fake traffic. Remember this bots have started short after google switching to AI answers.

[Dooku]

How did you do that. when ever we turn down some bots three new are coming.

First, you REALLY have to put your website(s) on Cloudflare. Fighting these (AI) bots and trying to block them using .htaccess or your Ngginx config file and UWF firewall on any server is a loosing battle.....too much work.

Put the sites on Cloudflare and use their WAF(firewall) instead. Recently I have rewritten my very extensive WAF rule using Chatgpt to much more efficient Boolean expressions. Works great and can be fine tuned extensively.

To keep this webmasters up, fake traffic is send.

Recently there is a lot of traffic originating from call back proxies originating from residential IP addresses, also to my websites.
Investigating deeper, most of them are from AI bots and scrapers. This obviously makes them very hard to block because they use residential IP addresses.
Other major bot traffic comes from a lot of SEO data gathering companies. These are NOT from Hrefs or Semrush, but from criminal operations like dataforseo.com as they don't follow ANY rules and hammer away at your server causing massive bandwidth usage cost for many websites.

So yes, currently the internet is a big mess and I wager that the bot traffic is way higher then the claimed 50% of all internet traffic and increasing each week. Thanks to companies like G and Fb and similar as all they care about is making money with ads and to collect as much data to sell for money.

"If you create an economic system where attention equals dollars (via ad revenue), then automating that brain-rotting process via bots is basically just an easy way to print money." From the article "The Internet Will Be More Dead Than Alive Within 3 Years, Trend Shows":
[popularmechanics.com...]

[mosxu]

@martin

Funny you say that same here when the Rep is writing traffic goes to #*$! which is not to do conversion making a client spend or sales techniques but deception!