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]

So today another nasty downgrade. The news site already had a massive drop in traffic yesterday, and today it's dead, no more traffic from Google even though the ranking is okay.
Maybe I should just start letting AI take over the work, because in my topic, in addition to the usual big publishers, AI-written articles in particular have been massively promoted by Google. Oh and the shop is dead too, of course. I just don't understand what Google is trying to do. Ranking fluctuations are normal, but this massive back and forth since mid-October is not normal.

[Samsam1978]

In my niche there is zero ads on keywords just an AI overview of my mashed up work so I don't get it either. No income for Google or me. November use to be my big month I am now 25% of what it usually is. Whole thing makes no sense.

[RedBar]

no more traffic from Google even though the ranking is okay.

Depending whose statistics one uses total mobile Internet traffic is between 50-60%

Last night I spent 1+ hour on mobile with my VPN using various USA locations and even though I did feature on the "first page" for many of my widgets it was simply incredible just how far I had to scroll down past all the ads / images / paa / etc, simply to get to my evergreen info pages.

Actually, after that experience, I'm now surprised if I get any genuine mobile traffic!

I also tried some ebay product searching ... What a horrible experience compared to desktop, there was nothing wrong with the site, it was simply pointless for me.

For those of you with large ecommerce platforms, how do conversions compare desktop/laptop/tablet v mobile?

[gatormark]

I have to admit, I am part of the problem. I no longer use Google to search for information. I only use the ChatGPT Plus. And, I love it (sigh)…

[Micha]

@gatomark Leave the forum immediately, traitor. :-P

But I understand you, I also like to use ChatGPT, but only as a tool and not for searching.
On a different note, could it be that Google is currently focusing heavily on storytelling? Traffic has increased today, but for articles that tell stories and are not news in the traditional sense. Strange.

[shadowlight]

I also use ChatGPT as a tool, its great for understanding technical concepts and helps with difficult code.

Google and storytelling made me :).

[RedBar]

Is anyone else being hammered from many locations by MS bots, loads and loads of them.

They're not a bandwidth issue, simply a massive page views distortion on sites that are updated once a week.

Do I have something set incorrectly in my htaccess?

[Fluff_Nutz]

Wow, thanks Google.
I just did a quick search to clarify something I created content for. I was immediately shown an AI response. It had my picture of the Youtube video I did. So, I figured the AI write-up must have been taken from my Youtube video. It clearly shows my video thumbnail. That I pieced together. I also noticed in the write-up that it said content taken from this website and Youtube video. Must be my Youtube video. So there was a link to a site and, what I assumed was my Youtube channel. My thumbnail so it made sense. I clicked on it to double check.

The Youtube video link took me to someone else's video instead. Despite my video thumbnail being in the AI Summary. So I have no links back to my content at all. Not even the thumbnail has an interlink. This is why I tell my writers I cannot be bothered with the site or Youtube. I'm becoming lazier refusing to continue my online business. But I feel I am given no other alternative.

To no real surprise. Both the two links featured in the AI Summary, despite using my Thumbnail. Take you to bigger sites and Youtube channels. How can I grow to the size they are if I am denied traffic growth? Google just doesn't want us. Yet they want the content. Which is it Big G?

I'll admit I don't think many views come from AI Summaries but still I'm a little miffed to see my video Thumbnail and a link to someone else's video content instead. This is actually the first time seeing my content in AI Summaries. Now I know how the rest of you feel..

[christianz]

@Fluff_Nutz

On the positive side, it does not matter if the link goes to your site or unfairly to someone else's site. Nobody is clicking on it regardless.

[RubicCubed]

@Fluff_Nutz

This has been an ongoing problem. Senator Blackburn asked Google to shut down their AI because of false claims about her and sourced citations that led to irrelevant pages and dead links. We, along with others in ecom, also see our product images used by Chatgpt and when clicked on pop-up different products to buy. Keep in mind many of us are getting some really low quality traffic from Google and Chatgpt, likely because our pages are incorrectly referenced in these AI citations just like what we've seen. The larger problem is not just Google or Chatgpt, but a government that doesn't care to hold these companies accountable for exposing the public to this less than intelligent AI garbage.

[goodoldweb]

LOL!

CNBC
"Google must double AI serving capacity every 6 months to meet demand, AI infrastructure boss tells employees.

Google’s AI infrastructure boss told employees that the company has to double its serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services.

At an all-hands meeting on Nov. 6, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation, viewed by CNBC, titled “AI Infrastructure,” which included a slide on “AI compute demand.” The slide said, “Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said at the meeting, where Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi also took questions from employees."

The monster they've created is coming back to bite them on the a....

[goodoldweb]

The money will have to come from somewhere...

[seokees]

To take a step back from the day-to-day horrors of the new 'open' web.

What are you (company/business) back-up plans?

I am still at a loss. I cannot seem to get out of online. Every plan circles back to the web with increasing ad spend, less and less organic which stop me from even starting.

[Martin Ice Web]

Like last year google switched 100% to Black Week results!
Our traffic is now 20% organic to 80% bots or mismatched traffic.
Sales down to 10%.

[Micha]

I'm not giving up, but I'm currently working on a concept for surviving without Google (something I should have done much earlier). Voluntary subscriptions, a paywall for special stories, the podcast, which is doing amazingly well, is now getting advertising, etc. I'm also considering adding a daily newsletter and possibly a community to build reader loyalty.

I have no idea if it will help, since my news site is quite small, of course, but the big publishers do something similar, so why not give it a try? Even though it's a shame, I'm actually a big fan of the free web without paywalls, etc.

[Dooku]

Nobody is clicking on it regardless.

New data on clickthrough rate from Chatgpt, so probably the same with all AI models:
[searchengineland.com...]

[londrum]

Like last year google switched 100% to Black Week results!
Our traffic is now 20% organic to 80% bots or mismatched traffic.
Sales down to 10%.

i'm sure this has happened to me three years in a row. as soon as Black Friday comes around my traffic goes down (it happened to me again this year), and as soon as it's over it goes back to normal. i don't know what google is doing, maybe they are stuffing the SERPs with some extra ads to take advantage of the sales

[gatormark]

I just put two of my sites to rest. That’s my plan. :-(

[gatormark]

I have never seen so much bot traffic in my life. For me, Singapore bots hit an all-time high this afternoon. Wow! To quote from a Batman movie: “Some people just want to see the world burn.”

On a somewhat related note, you should see the number of new data centers being built in the metropolitan Atlanta area. No doubt, all to house AI data.

[Micha]

How was that: Google keeps saying that AI-powered search features would not reduce website traffic. We know that this is not true, and here is some data from Japan. An analysis by the Tokyo-based data analytics company Values Inc. and the platform Note Inc. shows that in September there were around 6.18 billion Google searches, but only 2.26 billion clicks to the listed websites. This means that roughly 63 percent of all Google searches ended without any click.

[nikkei.com ]

[Martin Ice Web]

I have never seen so much bot traffic in my life.

Confirmed. We managed to keep Singapore-Bots away. But now we have hundrets of mobil fetches from US.
It is all Android traffic.
It must have something to do with google because when the mobil (bots) hit our site all google organic traffic is gone.

Yesterday was the first time that google presented an ad withhin gemini. And it was 100% unrelated.

[Samsam1978]

No clicks guys mean NO ADS as advertisors are not converting the products.
This means NO money for GOOGLE or US simple as that.
SHARE PRICE WILL CRASH big time.
Google don't seem to understand basic product marketing, just brainwashed by techno AI hype and ego.
NO ADS means no way to pay the bills.
Imagine the KARMA right now of stealing everyones work and ad revenue.
Karma will prevail.
The Epstein files are crazy, and public opinion on the government has changed @ kate johnson man that is bad.

[gatormark]

Here are a list of countries from where my bot traffic is originating:

Singapore
China
Brazil
Iraq
Argentina
Russia
Venezuela

[RedBar]

My biggest bot problem at the moment is from one specific company from different countries:

MICROSOFT

I have one small 100 page site that MS has in the last TWO days hit 2,000+ pages.

WTF ?

[seokees]

I don't know if enough people want to search the open web. The older generation are used to it though. But what I also see is that a lot of (older) people, are using the ai overview more and more as the definitive answer and not looking further. They do not care about new digital things and even afraid, other than searching on google and emailling, and cannot see diffirence between ai overviews and websites, and are ironaclly not afraid of google ai (but of chat gpt they are, cause of the other interface). Couldnt get people to use other s engines like duckduckgo etc

[ichthyous]

shows that in September there were around 6.18 billion Google searches, but only 2.26 billion clicks to the listed websites. This means that roughly 63 percent of all Google searches ended without any click.

This is nothing new. I would argue that this has been a worsening trend since at least 2017? Google is now "winning" the AI war as reflected in its stock price. OpenAI is now vulnerable as everyone rapidly shifts to using Genesis. Why would people who want a quick answer click through to a website? I see my own behavior...I ask ten thousand simple questions a month and click through if I think the AIO reaponse is vague, potentially inaccurate, or if I really want more info than it provides. Informational sites are definitely at risk of losing most of their traffic. If everyone stops writing articles and the AI data set shrinks then I predict that the next move will simply be for Google, MS, OpenAi, Anthropic etc to start generating their own custom content. They have trillions to invest in data centers and chips...do you think getting some writers ro sit spinning content 24/7 around the world will be a burdensome expense. Soon the content digested by AI will also be written and researched by the same companies, with perhaps the exception of highly detailed scientific and engineering data, etc.
I have seen more than half of the traffic to my informational articles vanish this year, but since my site sells unique products that cant be replicated by AI im still chugging along traffic wise. The budgets of the customers arriving is another story...pitiful. Its like a joke and I just delete then without a reaponse.

[christianz]

I have information site that sells nothing, but, believe it or not, it's not the AIO that is the biggest problem. It's Google having no idea which websites are relevant and which are not, which websites are good and which are bad. Or which even are real.

In 2025 Google is simply unable to rank websites. And AIO spam is big problem on top of that (and on top of all the other googlespam).

Either they are unable to do basic ranking or they are ranking irrelevant and junk content on purpose.

[RedBar]

Who the heck is Netensia SARL?

One of my sites was hit for tens of thousands of pages and GBs of bandwidth, about 4X the actual site size!

[Martin Ice Web]

We are done.
Since yesterday google traffic is down to 20% and 80% bots from all over the world.
Between midnight and 6am not a single user just thousands of bots.
Short time of normal google traffic every hour after 6am without any bots but it switches back after a few minutes.
I don´t know why google is doing this but it is coming from their system.

[Chris travel 30]

@Martin - same here. Traffic, rankings and sales have dropped sharply on our site since 24 Nov. and Bots are up around 90 % than before. Today is the worst so far. My partner says, according to affiliate sales and traffic its due to black friday. I am hoping for it 😉. But no idea why it falls together with the bots