December 2025 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

So I can write off November. News site: 30 percent fewer visitors, 60 percent less advertising revenue, and we'd rather not talk about the ranking: chaos... The shop: sales have declined slightly (-4 percent), which is a normal fluctuation, but here too, the ranking is in complete chaos...

I'm curious to see how December develops, but I'm afraid it won't be good...

[jmccormac]

One of the problems with blocking IP ranges on a country basis (SG being the best example with a pile of maggots operating from data centres) is that the data centres can assign the country to IPs. It is possible to block on ASN but it is also possible to use the geofeed (where some data centres/range owners provide it). One of the most useful sites is the Hurricane Electric [bgp.he.net...] site. It provides a lot of data on ASNs, ranges and routing.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

New day, and Google continues to successfully prevent my news site from getting traffic. Since yesterday, I've had zero visitors from the search engine, but more and more from Bing and DuckDuckGo. The results on Google in Germany when you search for something have also become even more useless. Now all we can do is hope that the idiots realize that what they're doing is nonsense and at least start cleaning up the mess in the news section...

But seriously, I hope it's because of Christmas, because I'm slowly running out of ideas. No matter what you do, it has no effect. It's as if Google is simply saying, “Oh, we have your content for our AI. We don't need you anymore.”

[seokees]

@Micha. “Oh, we have your content for our AI. We don't need you anymore.” But you offer news, so they theoretically need you to give news item for free to harvest for their AI.

[Micha]

@seokees True, but that doesn't mean Google gives us traffic. Better AI spam and now Chinese propaganda in my topic area, very prominent. It's just sickening.

[seokees]

@Micha. Yes that is why the 'theoretically ' part. I have got lots of thin content and even a lot of 404s above me ranking in Google. It is more evergreen content, though.

Unbelievable. 90% is now from other SE's. Ranking well on Bing and Duckduckgo and all the others.

[ichthyous]

Atrocious traffic this entire week, extending the downward trend starting in early October. The odd thing is that I keep losing ranking terms on desktop while I keep gaining on mobile. Add in the 50% loss of traffic to informational articles, and the almost total loss of traffic from ChatGPT (which left almost as quickly as it came) and it's not looking good for the new year.

[christianz]

Google has no idea how to rank websites at the very fundamental level. They can't afford to be this bad at a time when there are competitors like ChatGPT eroding their market share.

Decline of Google usage is a lot worse than certain charts or Google quarterly reports suggest. Just wait until the younger generations discover the Web. Big tech social platforms, Youtube, Ticktock and all those other concentrated "concentration camps" are for old people - millenians and zoomers.

Where does Google Search fit into this picture? Nowhere. It is not as good as ChatGPT as a chatbot/answer engine. And it is unusable for Web. It is completely disconnected from the Web.

[BigKat]

Google has no idea how to rank websites at the very fundamental level.

IMO Google abandoned ranking and is instead putting all efforts into AIO and AIM. Investing any amount of effort into ranking would be a waste of money considering Google's goal to imprison and control users. This is why I believe there has been a lack of confirmed major updates by Google and a constant churn of organic results at the bottom of the page which Google treats as compost that gets turned frequently to accelerate decomposition. I just wonder how long it will be until Google removes organic results for most or all searches.

[Micha]

Google is completely overdoing it today. Yesterday and the day before, I still had pages where traffic was normal. Today, no matter which website I look at, there's a slump, even for shops that have been doing quite well so far.

[oscarsq]

What about google discover? Does anyone see any traffic changes there?

[Micha]

@oscarsq Discover hasn't been working for me since mid-October; it's completely dead for my website, whereas before the traffic was pretty good. But since mid-October, interest matching doesn't seem to be working at all either. My private feed only shows topics that have nothing to do with my interests, and many of my friends are experiencing the same thing.

In terms of traffic, yesterday was probably the worst day I've ever had, and not just on my own websites. Today, Sistrix shows rising rankings, but traffic remains poor. At the moment, it looks less like a normal algorithm change and more like something intentional. If it were just a handful of websites, but what we're seeing right now affects almost exclusively small websites, as if they were being filtered out.

Funny thing: when I enter my main keyword in Google, only Dutch news articles are displayed in the headlines, so something is really broken.

[Samsam1978]

I think everyone needs to rethink what you are doing guys. How you create content going forward etc

[RedBar]

@jmcc

Just deep six the entire MSFT 4.x range

How do I do this please? It's way beyond my knowledge atm.

I'm now at the point of removing all but two sites both of which need to be there for Xmas.

The MSFT 4.x range is hitting tens of thousands of pages a day now and nothing I, nor my server provider, seem to be able to reduce let alone stop.

Fortunately I have a very large widget trade email list to advise clients however this is not any kind of solution.

If this continues to spread everywhere then surely action has to be taken? I have no idea other than targetting the culprits themselves.

[not2easy]

@RedBar - Ordinarily this is discussed in the Crawler, Spider, and User Agent ID forum, but if it helps here, one of MSFT's big ones is
CIDR: 4.240.0.0/12
which covers NetRange: 4.240.0.0 - 4.255.255.255

To block the entire 4. would be 4.0.0.0/8

[RedBar]

Thanks, yes, I know their IP ranges however neither htaccess nor CPanel IP Block stops anything., they just keep on hitting every day.

I am awaiting my host's response for a firewall, would that work?

[mosxu]

What is happening ? Why so many zombies?

[RedBar]

I've spent this morning analysing which sites seem to have genuine traffic v those that have 90+% garbage bots Without a doubt this 90+% are ALL attempting WP exploits which makes me wonder just how vulnerable those sites are plus how are they coping with all this garbage plus what do their real metrics actually look like?

Anyone with knowledge / experience?

What does Google's analytics show, anything?

I've now removed completely several sites and parked them at my name registrar pending the next Sedo auctions ... My tolerance level has been breached.

[morpheus83]

Seems like a Core update is on the way. Traffic is at the lowest point of the year.

[RedBar]

Traffic is at the lowest point of the year.

Almost an understatement ... Flatlining here !

[Micha]

Does anyone still have traffic? All of my sites have lost all Google traffic since Friday. I'm really starting to wonder what those idiots in California are doing. This drop is just weird.

[Chris travel 30]

Besides my very very niche niche site, my sites are way down. The main site (travel) has already jumped over the cliff since 04 December. Really annoying. There is def somethin to come, if its not already in action. The first big drop came on the 27. November, second on 04. December. Visibility is down for my main page around 50 % than it was before (what was even left). Google traffic has dropped significantly, while traffic from bing and other alternative SEs has risen a bit. But it can't make up for the loss - not even 10 % of it. While other affiliate channels are doing well, especially coupons and codes, real affiliate sales from users have dropped since then about 45 %. It is also related so the season, as travel-search will have its high after christmas and new year, but compared with the year to date data, it is what it is: a total loss of over 35 %. And I can figure myself as lucky with these numbers. What gets me on my nerves the most besides that, is that GSC has not been updating since over 7 days now. What the hel* are they doing?

[jmccormac]

@RedBar If it is a Linux server, iptables can be used to block the range. Getting it blocked at the firewall by the hoster might be doable if the sites are not on shared hosting. The traffic from MSFT ranges seems to be probes for vulerabilities rather than webscrapers. The .htaccess approach should block the requests (a 204 rather than a 403 might generate less traffic.)

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

The traffic from MSFT ranges seems to be probes for vulerabilities rather than webscrapers.

It's 90+% WP probes, very little bandwith usage, just hundreds to thousands of page requests per day.

My htaccess has worked fine for years, it's even up-to-date for Apache 2.4, therefore I'm trying a couple of "suggested" tweaks to see if they make any difference.

On Friday my webhost, a small British company, was shocked when he saw what was happening, hopefully he may have some answers on Monday.

[seokees]

Further drop in traffic from google today. Other SEs are really taking share in my different analytics tools. Too much if you look at the marketshare of SEs in general. Really going downhill overall even further, unbelievabe.

[Martin Ice Web]

Down to 25%.
Amazon sales up another 80%.

[RedBar]

Something's happened ... Like many others I see all sorts of email garbage every day BUT this weekend
Saturday had 2,
Sunday 0 and so far after 11 hours,
Monday 2.

Anyone else?

[seokees]

@RedBar What do mean with email garbage. You mean in a lead / purchase form?

[Fluff_Nutz]

Anyone that may be on the fence as to if Big G controls our traffic or not, answer me this. It is now Monday and my Saturday comparison of both the most recent and previous weekend state that my traffic was the exact same. Not one digit over and not one digit below. A literal copy paste of traffic figures. How is this even possible? Granted it may still be bugged and will, eventually, fix itself.

[edited by: Fluff_Nutz at 1:04 pm (utc) on Dec 8, 2025]

[Micha]

At least it's not going any lower for me (which is difficult, because there's still no Google traffic). I'm slowly becoming really curious to know what's going on. It can't be that the ranking is improving every day, but the number of visitors from Google is 0. This is particularly strange for the news site, because it appears in the headlines alone, which can't lead to 0 clicks.

[RedBar]

What do mean with email garbage.

Totally random spammy emails addressed to non-existent email addresses such as edrftg [at] mydomain [dot] com.

I have a catch-all account where I can see these on the mail server and very occaionally a bounced email or form submission ends up there for some bizarre "techie" reason ... This has only happened since my move from Plesk to CPanel.