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.

[Martin Ice Web]

from AI bots and scrapers. This obviously makes them very hard to block because they use residential IP addresses.

You mean private runing bots or maleware bots?
Why are they coming in surges?
Why is google traffic dropping when bots are hitting our site?
Why are hitting different bots the same site?
Most of the bots are coming from mobile traffic?!

claimed 50% of all internet traffic

I see it more at 80%

[saladtosser]

Massive cloudflare problems today, seen so many sites down then up then down again [independent.co.uk...]

[delorean]

CLOUDFLARE is down, affecting most parts of internet.

[RedBar]

I agree, many major sites yo-yoing.

[saladtosser]

SER down, even Twitter, dang, is the Matrix breaking? Freaking out a bit, not only is my site down but I just glitched out of my office and was briefly being served a pina colada by Sundar Pichai in my Kitchen while John Mueller pole danced in the background!

Is this Cloudflare related or the line I just did? You decide. I'm 50/50 right now!

On the plus side, Barry has a new story for later on today! (assuming his site comes back)

[RedBar]

@MIW ... Dooku posted:

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.

I'm a nerdy geek, I like to know how stuff does or does not work and, yes, hours and hours of work which would probably bore, or drive to insanity, most people.

Using Awstats, Webalizer and Analog I studied the IP traffic coming to my sites and checked out the major users with ipinfo dot io and abuseipdb dot com to verify their status. At first it is very intensive and time consuming, as in hours every day, however now it is a 15 mins quick check once a day then every Saturday afternoon updating each site's file.

If anything new / big appears it is immediately obvious to me. AWS and MS are two massive offenders, some offenders are almost impossible to block at my level nevertheless overall I'm back to pre-July/August levels.

It's never been about a cost issue for me, I rarely use 50% of my allowance, it's been about trying to understand the genuine traffic levels and whether it drives realworld enquiries.

[mosxu]

CLOUDFLARE is down, affecting most competitors but no sales for us, what a joke

[rustybrick]

@saladtosser lol - true, it did give me a new story to put up. Just wish people saw it during the outage.

[Micha]

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google is currently generating artificial or bot-like traffic. We're all suddenly seeing strange “visits” without sessions or interaction.

But Google has a huge problem, because the entire AI sector is overheated. Nvidia is trading at 20 to 30 times its annual revenue, which is a classic sign of a bubble. SoftBank has now sold its entire stake in Nvidia, Peter Thiel's fund has also exited, and several institutional investors are reducing their exposure because the valuations no longer make sense and people are becoming cautious. With hardware cycles getting shorter and data center costs exploding, even US analysts are warning that depreciation alone could wipe out profits if AI revenues decline. When this AI bubble bursts, investment in the cloud will also decline, and that's an important business. Combined with zero-click search, which is destroying the open web, and stricter regulations such as the EU AI Act, Google is building on a foundation that is becoming more unstable by the month, and that will not end well because the company is choking on its own arrogance.

[mosxu]

No sales yesterday not using cloudflare but most of my competitors do, that means that only zombies seen our ads damn it?

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar, i did some research too. And as Dooku said, there is a lot of legit residential IPs from where the bots are coming from. In our case it is mobil traffic (could be fake though).
In most cases this are one-hit visitors from US, India, Singapore .... This traffic comes in surges and lasts for about 10 to 15 minutes.

If it is not google spinning the wheel it is hard to explain why real google traffic is complete (100%) gone while this "bot" or "google fake" traffic hits our site?
It was completly gone for 3 weeks and thursday the abnormal traffic is back and gets worse every day. And it started soon after we got an email from google to increase our visibility on GSA.

[Dooku]

@Martin Ice Web, unfortunately a lot of mobile app developers embed "proxy code" in their apps and push those out with a new update of their app.
They do this in exchange for money from the well known shady a-holes proxy IP selling companies.
This is how these proxy IP selling companies can offer "legitimate" residential IP addresses for rent.

Other methods to obtain residential IP addresses by these IP for rent companies is that they offer a measly $20/month to people to install their proxy app in exchange for say 20% of their bandwidth. Another method is even more shady by hacking IOT devices in homes and using those for their proxy IP's, or again offering money to software developers of popular VPN providers to embed their proxy code into their software and push that out with the next update.

Soon, the "normal" internet will not be so different any more from the darknet.......

[Martin Ice Web]

They do this in exchange for money from the well known shady a-holes proxy IP selling companies.
This is how these proxy IP selling companies can offer "legitimate" residential IP addresses for rent.

Ok, thanx. it makes sense.

[RedBar]

@MIW

In our case it is mobil traffic (could be fake though).

Aha, is most of your actual business solely in Europe? The vast majority, about 80+%, of my non-western traffic is mobile simply because many of those countries, especially China and India, rolled-out mobile masts far quicker than digging-up using tradional methods. Plus, and I have no factual numbers on this, how many users there may be using mobile data SIMs for their access?

FYI I removed all landlines in my offices and factories in China, India and UK just over 3 years ago and I know of many others who have done the same.

it is hard to explain why real google traffic is complete (100%) gone

G's classified ad scheme and its localisation dominates for most popular widgets in my sector. It is plainly obvious, for my widgets, that ad buyers are prompted to buy the higher-cost ads since there are more searches for them meanwhile less searched for widgets, still extremely popular, are not targeted whatsoever.

Ad buyers are being coerced into an auction that G proclaims to be overwhelmingly the most sought for widgets to the exclusion of most other widgets, it is an overt con trick and those companies employing young'ish ad buyers who really do not know their industry's widgets may fall into this trap all the time. Many have been employed for their technogical skills above all other, possibly just as important, criteria.

[RedBar]

CloudFlare scraping?

Why is my global site suddenly having thousands of page downloads supposedly from Cloudflare?

Similar applies to Akamai Technologies.

Any ideas?

[mosxu]

Cloudflare has been tweaking its systems to block “AI scrapers.” but AI and many other scrapers route traffic through Cloudflare or Akamai to blend in with legitimate traffic!

Recent problems could have had to do with AI blocking!

[RedBar]

Thanks mosxu, my top 10 page downloads recently have been these two!

[Gagan_Kumar]

Noticing an interesting pattern this month - pages with clearer intent (especially event pages and how-to guides) seem to be getting a boost, while overly broad content is slipping. Feels like Google is rewarding depth + clarity more than ever. Anyone else seeing similar shifts in their niches?

Did you also see these changes?

[christianz]

I am not seeing any changes. Google is getting worse at ranking websites every day for the past ~300 days. Somewhere late last year they decided to make Google maximally s**t and they haven't deviated from that trajectory even little bit.

[RedBar]

Something may have happed in the USA.

I only supply my widget industry on a bulk basis and I make this very clear on my contact page therefore I rarely receive any USA retail enquiries, however three times this week, twice today, I have been asked where three totally different widgets may be purchased.

Maybe purely coincidental however we'll see if this continues or not.

[Micha]

It's complete chaos at Google. Sales were exceptionally good in the first weeks of November, but now they've been at zero for a week. The news page is practically at a standstill, except for a Discover peak a few days ago. Almost nothing comes in via the normal search anymore. But instead, the search results are getting worse and worse, and my Discover feed now shows me Temu product pages as selected articles. Something is seriously broken at Google...

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, I can confirm our observations. Sales are down to 10%. User angagement <5%. Totally maismatched traffic.

Something is seriously broken at Google...

No. It is profit maximizing. Please use GSA to restore our traffic and sales.....

[Micha]

@martin At the moment, I don't think it's because Google is desperately trying to maximize its profits. Especially not in the news sector. What Google is showing there is total chaos. It seems to me as if something is completely messed up internally and no one knows exactly what it is. In the category of online shopping, however, I agree with you. But since Google Ads are currently generating absolutely no sales, Google risks many companys reducing their spending, which is not conducive to maximizing profits.

[RedBar]

Whilst I empathise with your views that G may be broken, IMHO, it is not, this is all deliberate to maximise their ad sales of the most popular widgets in each commercial sector.

Once they have learnt how to do this extremely profitably they'll be able to apply it to less popular widgets. G classified ads are now in full swing and this will not change unless forced to by legislation.

[Micha]

As I said, that may be true for online shops, but it doesn't work for news and general information. In my field, it's gotten really bad, with fake news, pointless agency reports, and celebrity gossip. You can't find anything that's really important or actually relevant to your search query anymore. It has nothing to do with advertising; it's just nonsense and makes it seem like Google's systems are completely broken.

[BigKat]

It has nothing to do with advertising; it's just nonsense and makes it seem like Google's systems are completely broken.

@Micha

If the nonsense keeps users searching more, then it's making Google more money. If Google answered each user's query with precision, then Google's search volume would drop significantly and so will clicks on ads due to less impressions. Google has already lost users to other AI engines, and forcing existing users to search more is how Google is compensating for this loss. This goes back to that "Code Yellow" email introduced as evidence in court where senior Google mangers discussed making search worse to combat query weakness (fewer searches).

With the above being said, I agree with RedBar's comments regarding Google's deliberate actions to maximizing ad sales. Even if some advertisers lower their spend or pause their campaigns, due to low or no conversions, others advertisers will increase their bids/spend. Google has the data and technology to learn how hard they can squeeze without causing advertisers to pop. Google recently added annotation features to GSC which allows GSC users to add their own comments. As some speculate, I too agree these annotations will be used by Google to learn the behavior of those managing websites and how they react to ups and downs in search. Ultimately I believe Google is in full control with both hands on the wheel. Google knows exactly what they're doing, and their record breaking quarterly profits confirm that.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else noticing a major decline in search traffic from Australia? My AU traffic has declined for more than three weeks straight and is down 84% today from the average Friday.

Similarly, direct traffic to my site has declined considerably since the 17th...even lower than the norm heading into Thanksgiving. Anyone else seeing it?

[Micha]

@BigKat: Okay, from that perspective you’re of course right.

By the way, are you also seeing a massive drop in visitor numbers today? Not just on my sites, but on all the ones I have access to – and it’s really bad.
The pattern already showed up about two weeks ago and had recovered since then, but whatever Google is doing right now, it makes absolutely no sense for me to write articles for my website at the moment.

[goodoldweb]

Google Search has become embarrassingly bad, about as “intelligent” as their own AI, Gemini. Yesterday I simply typed “office space” because we’re looking to relocate our office. What did Google serve me? Page one was about the 1999 comedy movie. Not a single actual commercial real estate listing in sight.

Out of sheer frustration I tried the exact same two words on DuckDuckGo. Boom! instant common sense: the entire first page was nothing but real office-space rentals and listings in my area. That’s what a search engine is supposed to do.

It’s genuinely sad watching what was once the best search tool on the planet get deliberately crippled in a desperate sprint for more ad revenue.

And here’s the bigger, scarier question: what do you actually do when one monopolistic company controls the mobile operating system, the dominant browser, email, maps, video streaming, and global search and then that company gets taken over by people who clearly have no moral compass left? How do you fight that?

[edited by: goodoldweb at 8:53 pm (utc) on Nov 21, 2025]

[BigKat]

By the way, are you also seeing a massive drop in visitor numbers today?

We're in the fourth day of a noticeable decline in traffic from Google. When Google traffic drops, bot activity goes through the roof. It makes me wonder if Google is somehow responsible for the bot traffic. We're USA ecommerce and what we sell aren't items that are gifted, so we don't benefit from the holiday shopping season.