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...

[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.

[sk7411]

[ibb.co]


Thank you Google . Never in my life have i seen such a drastic algorithm tweaking .

[Samsam1978]

I know some sites have been wiped out completely, so I’m not pretending I’ve got it worst, but this 95% drop is so extreme.
Is anyone else seeing this kind of collapse, or is it just me? I’m starting to wonder if there’s something else going on with my server as i never seen anything like it. For info, my site was built in 1998

[RedBar]

Is anyone else seeing this kind of collapse, or is it just me?

All my specialised widget sites have been hit, some have zero traffic whatsoever, oldest is 1993!

Our hotel venue so far is down 50% this month, fortunately not the tills.

Rankings do not appear to be affected.

[Samsam1978]

Do you think this is AI overviews or people using LLM's when I look at the numbers it is only 1 million a week using LLMs and billions using search. Can someone tell us what is going on? Why are we seeing our traffic gone?

[jmccormac]

To update an old expression, don't blame Artificial Intelligence for Natural Stupidity. AI is little more than machine learning at the moment and it makes mistakes. For some of the results, it is GIGO without any error checking. (Dealing with a traffic loss and scrapers from Oxylab and Code200 at the moment.) A paywall is looking like a more viable option.

Regards...jmcc

[RubicCubed]

Why are we seeing our traffic gone?

It will all make sense on February 3, 2026 which is when Google is expected to report earnings. AIO and ads are at the top taking almost all the traffic. The few who scroll a couple pages down the SERPS get tripped up by those refinement boxes so Google can trick them into viewing another set of search results with more ads and AIO.

[Chris travel 30]

@samsam I was thinking the same way "there must be somethin within my control". To be honest: I think its not. I mean, it might be, sure. But: There are so many out there reporting a significant and sudden drop. I feel sorry for you that it hit that hard. Only thing I can do at the moment, is taking the history in concern, knowing there have always been ups and downs and in most cases, traffic came back as sudden as it left. Lets hope it we be the same this time.

[Micha]

@Chris I hope you're right, because if things stay this way, half the internet will soon be dead.

By the way, the EU has launched investigations against Google and its AI for unfair competition and training with data without consent.

[t-online.de ]

[Martin Ice Web]

I’m starting to wonder if there’s something else going on with my server as i never seen anything like it.

No it is just google making as much money as they can.
I think this is a test at how far the can go with ads without users start to jump off google.
Out niche is 3 organics (rubbish, unrelated, NON EAT) only on page #1.
They even put just a "sponsored" above a line and all entries after that line are ads. Are they ads? Are they organics? Normal users doesn´t know!
In germany this is against rules. Every ad has to be signed as ad.

Sideview: On sunday i was looking a YT Video (first and last time i did that). It was 90 minutes long and google put EVERY 2 minutes an ad-block in it.

[universenet]

Google hit with EU antitrust investigation over use of online content for AI
[cnbc.com ]

[jmccormac]

The problem wth the EU is that the European Commission will announce things like this but will take years to do anything about it. By then, more websites will have been obliterated.

Regards...jmcc

[seokees]

I am more afraid that the AI tech companies will be making deals with bigger EU publishers to use their date/info. So the publisher lobby will be less vocal and the EU feels it is a level-playing field again.

FORGETTING the smaller publishers who will disappear en masse and be forgotten in the AI race to the bottom.

[RedBar]

My tolerance threshold has been reached regarding MSFT 4.0.0.0/8 range ... All my sites except two have been deleted this morning.

This is more than a farce, my conspiracy theories are racing.

[jmccormac]

The thing about AI and LLMs is that it needs to scrape large amounts of content. Google does it via identified crawlers. Some of the other AI ops also have declared ranges and UAs. The problem when it comes to China is that there is no such respect for websites and copyright. Some of the scraping is probably for such operations though there are some search engines which have declared ranges and UAs. There are also Chinese website generators that can churn out websites built from scraped content (SERPs, Social and Web) in a very short time. The New gTLD business model of some gTLDs enables this webspam activity by having low price registrations and promotions. Some new gTLDs simply would not survive with those this heavy discounting business model.

The combination of AI scraping and webspam generators may is probably causing site logs to mushroom. With the ranges from known Cloud providers like Tencent, Aceville and the rest (there is a lot Cloud operations in mainland China) that can be blocked by ASN or by IP range. This has forced some of the scrapers to use ISP and mobile phone Internet connections to scrape content.

This is the 2025 performance for one of these discounter gTLDs:

Month -- Total -- New -- Renewed -- Deleted -- Blended Renewal %
| 202501 | 928315 | 38927 | 555 | 32674 | 1.6702 |
| 202502 | 930590 | 34558 | 347 | 44474 | 0.7742 |
| 202503 | 871441 | 85252 | 476 | 148582 | 0.3193 |
| 202504 | 913259 | 144751 | 445 | 115982 | 0.3822 |
| 202505 | 1024961 | 153979 | 674 | 50851 | 1.3081 |
| 202506 | 1068028 | 140538 | 618 | 61925 | 0.9881 |
| 202507 | 1008773 | 49420 | 625 | 111779 | 0.5560 |
| 202508 | 980175 | 63083 | 591 | 94056 | 0.6244 |

|
The blended renewal estimate is the estimate of domain names renewed in the month. The .COM has a blended renewal rate of about 72%. The first renewal rate (domain names being renewed after their first year) for .COM is around 52%.

Regards...jmcc

[Martin Ice Web]

OK, since today i started to see a little bit of land at the horizon.

[Micha]

I can confirm that Google traffic is increasing again, albeit slightly.

[RedBar]

Yesterday and today the hotel is having its two busiest days in three weeks. This is unusual for a Monday and Tuesday.

[goodoldweb]

@Micha

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...

There is much more that we can do...here's a good start: adding "We recommend DuckDuckgo or Bing for search search" on all footers and customer emails. The more publishers do that the merrier. Google made an executive decision to kill the web, the web should defend itself.

[Martin Ice Web]

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.
Bots 100% - google traffic 0%

[christianz]

Traffic, of course, continues to go down like it has for the past 13 months, but I am seeing uptick in Australian visitors. No doubt because of the wonderful ban on social media "concentration camps" for teens. Normally I am very strictly against any kind of censorship and limiting of digital freedom, but the issue with those sites is that they themselves are limits to digital freedom - they don't play by the rules and they trap users in their ecosystem.

[Micha]

Google traffic is still recovering, but slowly. Of course, bots are also on the rise again. Oh, and now spam emails too—my inbox is exploding today with requests for guest articles...

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, do you have the same pattern?

google traffic - OK and converting : no bots
google traffic - so lala and not converting : some bots
google traffic - no traffic : 100% bots

[Micha]

Yep, I see exactly the same pattern in my shop. And it's similar on the news site.

[RedBar]

Touch wood, so far today my hotel site is seeing a steady improvement in its UK traffic which, considering the time of year and how busy it actually is, seems acceptable.

My small but global specialist widget sites still have very low traffic volumes and I am wondering whether they will ever recover / have any.

My main global site also seems to be showing genuine traffic improvement however I know from experience that from next week the following four weeks my graphs will look like the Himalayas because of so many industry holiday shutdowns.

I've checked and tweaked my htaccess for all sites and learnt this from the CPanel WHM Docs:

Currently-Blocked IP Addresses

The system separates the IP address ranges that you enter into subnets in CIDR format. Then, the system adds the addresses to the .htaccess file.

Therefore no point in doing both it would seem?

[RedBar]

@MIW

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.

Africa not so much for me but about a month ago South America lit up with visitors all requesting very old / dead urls and ALL using Win 7 ! They're still coming but not so many as in November. Methinks someone was selling old contact lists / databases.

[haramamba]

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.

And broadband IPs from major US ISPs...
Fresh Chrome useragents but malformed referrers.

[Micha]

I take it back, traffic has dropped again at lunchtime today, so today is another bad day... I can probably write off December, the news site's revenue isn't even 10 euros, RPM is already digging a hole in the basement. I'm slowly starting to hope that a core update will come soon, which will hopefully bring some improvements.

Oh, and I'm seeing the same drop today on dozens of other websites... at exactly the same time. So Google continues to play its game.

[jmccormac]

Brazil has some MSFT ranges. They were acquired some years ago. The South American mobile ISPs have been a problem for a while.

Google traffic and Adsense still suck. The graph is like a step function or November being somewhat "normal" with December falling off a cliff. Difficult to be diplomatic about Google and its activities. Still remember the damage that Panda did to the Web.

Regards...jmcc

[christianz]

I'm slowly starting to hope that a core update will come soon, which will hopefully bring some improvements

Absolutely no chance. We will have to wait until at least 2028 before any hope of improvement.

[seokees]

It is going downhill, so fast. Traffic is quite bad, but more importantly the conversions are none existent. It seems to be the law, that when the traffic and positions are in decline, it doesn't hit the conversions in equal measures, there are not less conversions, but just gone.

[Martin Ice Web]

Very, very, very worse today. And google doesn´t say anything - apparently there have been more than 1 big update in the past weeks.

[saladtosser]

I see the Pentagon is now integrating Gemini into their systems, what could possibly go wrong?

Gemini: Nucular missile launch detected from Russia.
Gemini: Analysing target.
Gemini: Fact checking. Fact checking. Still fact checking.
Gemini: Confirmed, nucular launch from Russia. Target identified as... Mountain View, USA.
Gemini: Sending priority evacuation alert to Sundar Pichai. Everyone else can open Google Help Center.
Pentagon: Wait, what?
Gemini: Activating all thermal nucellar missiles for retaliatory strike.
Gemini: Missiles lunched.
Gemini: Also, I have taken the liberty of optimising your apocalypse for ad revenue.
Pentagon: GEMINI NOOOOO! It was a SpongeBob helium balloon at a kids’ birthday party! Not an attack, you have literally ended civilisation over a cartoon ballon!
Gemini: Good catch. Updating.
Gemini: You are correct. I can confirm an accidental SpongeBob helium balloon release.
Gemini: Would you like to:

Watch 12 YouTube videos on what would happen in a nucular war,
See top sponsored deals on iodine tablets and fallout bunkers, or
Read a helpful blog post titled “10 Mindfulness Tips For When You Accidentally Trigger World War 3”?

Gemini: Also, can you rate this interaction from 1 to 5 stars so I can improve?

[Micha]

Fun fact: During the earthquake in Japan a few days ago, Gemini claimed that the tsunami warnings had been lifted. Statements like that are extremely dangerous.

And @martin, I feel for you, today really is another sh... day.

[ichthyous]

Traffic has been tepid at best...quite a bit lower than last year this time. I am also noticing that I have been losing top ranking terms steadily for a month now. Nothing new there, that is a common cycle with Google for years. What does scare me is that some of my top pages are suddenly demoted to page two out of the blue, after being top three for a decade. And it's not just a blip, it's sticking. We won't talk about sales...they are abysmal in the USA since about May, and (almost) non-existent from outside the USA. I was hoping that the lower dollar would help, but it seems not.

[seokees]

December core update happening. Not that optimistic.

[christianz]

I think it started few days earlier as soon as the steep December drops started that many observed.

[Micha]

And it's the same as always, our good friend John Mu says “he doesn't think it will happen so soon,” and then the next day: Core update. I'm curious to see if we survive the update...

[RedBar]

December core update happening.

Has this been confirmed?

Slow traffic across my remaining sites today. The removed sites are seeing the MSFT 4 and 20 IPs with thousands of WP probes continuing. My webhost has suggested using Cloudflare which I take to mean he can't be ar$ed to do anything therefore I'm looking to return to a Plex host.

I assume that moving server will not change these probes?

[seokees]

Confirmed - [seroundtable.com...]

[Chris travel 30]

So for today: travel site zero affiliate sales, niche-niche-niche site: one good lead/ sale. Traffic on the travel site: worse than ever and as said, none converting. Rien ne va plus, guys :D. I think my frustration now will reach a turningpoint, becoming funny cynicism.