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...

[Samsam1978]

Not sure what is going on worst Christmas earnings since I started the website over 20 years ago.

I had to reduce some ads because site looked too spammy.

90% down in traffic, still top result, AI slop being promoted.

Whole WEB, is going down FAST, and adsense revenue is down same.

Thousands lost for me and Google now - AI give ZERO ads on queries.

Crazy strategy

[jmccormac]

@Samsam1978 It is like Google wants to be the new AOL with AI keeping users within its walled garden.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

And we all know what happened to AOL: megalomania eventually consumes a company. What's more, the AI hype is still a bubble, and even Bill Gates said a few days ago that when it bursts, some large companies will fall. Well, Bill is often wrong, but I agree with him on this point.

Let's talk about traffic: it increased on the news page yesterday evening, and today there is Discover traffic, although I currently consider this to be more of a coincidence. However, the shop experienced a rush of visitors last night and achieved a daily record within four hours. It's still early in the morning, but the sales figures are already looking good again. And most of them came, surprise surprise, via Google.

[jmccormac]

@Micha Yes. Google was once a search engine and had the motto "Don't be evil." It changed from being search engine busienss to being an advertising business a long time ago. Some of the parallels with AOL are even more worrying for Google supporters in that AOL became dependent on its subscriptions and advertising to its subscribers. Google deoends on a kind of "subscriptions" (Adwords/Gmail/its MSFT Office effort/Youtube) and advertising revenue from Adsense ad ads on its SERPs. Its mobile phone business also relies on its core "subscriptions" to some extent in that it is almost like those AOL CD-ROMs driving users to Google's main advertising services.

In terms of traffic, volume is still low and Adsense is dire. Might as well take this opportunity to upgrade the site's server.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Although I didn't think I had made any significant changes to my htaccess files I have to say, at the moment, my traffic is looking much cleaner and more "normal" across all sites. Notably, fingers crossed, my Singaporean issues have almost abated to the point it is hardly registering ... We'll see.

My mainland China traffic is consistent every day, the same half-a-dozen large companies in my early hours visit, check the home page is there and then leave. China's a big export market for us therefore we do not see this as any problem. Is Singapore now adopting the same home page only visit, maybe?

I'm expecting the UK economy to officially enter recession, the construction industry here is in an almighty mess!

[mosxu]

Where is the traffic ? What is happening ?

[christianz]

Traffic is already gone for months and nothing is happening.

[mosxu]

Never seen such gross manipulation

[universenet]

it will happen in January, when google will be fined by the EU

[jmccormac]

This purely speculation. One potential effect of Google's stuffing of SERPs pages with its own ads and AI "contribution" has pushed the results from real sites down the page. Even though sites rank for specific keywords, the results are pushed down the pages because the ranking software ignores the adverts and the AI block in the page. Does ranking software take into account how a page looks to a human rather than a bot?

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Absolutely jmcc, I have been commenting on this for years now. Google Classified Ads plus localisation of results really came into force about 10 years ago and if they were allowed to they would not have any organics on the first page for in-demand keyword ads.

Interestingly I see in my industry that outside of the top 10-20 keywords, ranking top 3 is easy for me plus, even though there are thousands of extremely popular widgets, no one, and I am being serious, no one targets them ... Certainly Google is not going to suggest them because they want everyone to compete for the most expensive keywords.

It's a complete manipulation con yet they get away with it because most advertisers are too dumb to see what is actually happening and especially so the younger advertising departments through lack of experience.

[Samsam1978]

They will see when they don't have any sales. ROI must be the lowerst in the entire internet history.

[shadowlight]

it will happen in January, when google will be fined by the EU

Fines are just a cost of doing business for G and they will employ the same strategy as always by appealing.

90% down in traffic, still top result, AI slop being promoted

Top result with 90% decrease in traffic, says it all about the current state of affairs.

[RedBar]

Oh, did MSFT stop paying its power bills for 4.0 and 20.0 IP ranges in AU, JP, KR and US and allow IE to start?

A sudden stoppage Friday into Saturday for all my sites with only a couple of them affected Saturday into Suday however a noticeable visit from 13.0 from Ireland for one site only.

Otherwise traffic looked normal, especially so for my global widget site, which would seem to be "not normal" considering a major update. How many of us will see any semblance of normality until 5th January 2026?

[Martin Ice Web]

Most of the bots are gone since the CU started. So google is responsible for the bots, no doubt.

Worst weekend regarding google traffic/sales since a long,long time. Amazon sales picked up again since friday.
Amazon sales are rising since google started this mess in summer.
And I see that i changed my behaviour when searching: completly disregarding google, instead looking at amazon and idealo.
The pitty is, that i don´t want to buy at amazon because you know. Support the small resellers. Unfortunatelly this is not longer possible with current serps ( google + bing)

[Micha]

@martin That's right, it's amazingly quiet in terms of bots; they've practically disappeared from my pages since Friday. And I agree with you: I'm also ignoring Google (Bing, etc.) more and more. Poor results and advertising are just not helpful.

Otherwise, I can't complain at the moment; visitor numbers to my news site are rising again and RPM is also recovering. It's strange with the shop. Since Friday, we've had one sales record after another, and oddly enough, it's the slow-moving items that are selling. But hey, money is money.

Oh, and the update seems to be pushing subdomains full of advertising to the top. Didn't Google used to penalise those?

[RedBar]

So far today I'm at 50/50 wih probots (probing robots). MSFT is still probing domains that have zero pages, only one email account, plus being joined by both Google and Amazon again on other sites.

What amazes me is my webhost's attitude when I point out that after two weeks of December I have one site that has used 25% of its 2025 bandwidth solely through MSFT WP probots, they're not bothered.

[jmccormac]

@RedBar In some respects, Google would probably want to be a PPC search engine but the regulators would not accept that given its market dominance. Much of the traffic from those WP probes results in 404s. Some of the bots will test to see if there is a website on a domain name rather than probing for vulnerabilities.There are different kinds of bots. Some probe for vulnerabilities. Others scrape content. And some are relatively benign in that they are just checking to see that a website exists on a domain name. The registries run their own crawlers for this purpose.

@Martin Most of the bots from MSFT ranges are probes for vulnerabilities. The IP ranges tend to get blocked on a rolling basis and this tends to drive the maggots from range to range. The upside for site owners is that it lights up bad neigbourhoods (in terms of a lack of control and traffic) enabling those ranges to be blocked.

Traffic seems to have improved today. Not sure if it will stay that way though.

Regards...jmcc

[ichthyous]

My site seems to be "recovering" in that the steady decline in top 3 ranking terms has finally turned around, but USA traffic is atrocious. It's getting to be far below last year's traffic, and the single highest traffic page on my site has mysteriously lost about a third of its daily traffic despite no change in ranking. Every day something new, with traffic from different countries vanishing for a day, to traffic to various categories on my site dropping one day and returning the next. It is all very unstable, and seemingly not correlated to visibility like it used to be.

[samwest]

Hey all - long time no see! Looks like I'm not missing anything, same old same old.
From my end, it's gotten so bad, I've been clinging by a thread just to pay just the hosting fees, so I went to an unmanaged VPS with CyberPanel...that setup made it 3 months before it corrupted its own Django. I wiped the server again and rebuilt it with Unbuntu 24.04 and aaPanel...which has it's own lovely quirks, but is finally stable...so, the bottom line is even though I've been down for weeks (on and off) it wouldn't have matter becuase traffic is all ZOMBIE again, and in some cases, we're not even seening Zombies anymore.
25+ years online, and it seems nothing will ever improve. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

[RedBar]

Yay samwest, nope, you've not missed much !

Good old MSFT is trying to play games with me :-) Now they're probing an empty site from Singapore and India therefore I've uploaded a mini site to that name to see if it makes any difference, I doubt it.

Meanwhile my global site is having a strong run at the moment in the USA , especially with a specific student subject, plus some interesting project searches in the Middle and Far East.

[gatormark]

I am using multiple methods to block bot traffic: firewall, MaxMind, and Robots.txt, to name a few. I use a script to keep my MaxMind database up to date. It seems to be working well now. I block China, Japan, Argentina, Singapore, Russia, and Brazil. As soon as one country is blocked, another country rears its ugly head.


# ==============================
# AI Training & Scraping Bots
# ==============================

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /

# ==============================
# Search Engines (Explicit Allow)
# ==============================

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

User-agent: DuckDuckBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Yandex
Allow: /

User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /

# ==============================
# Default Rule
# ==============================

[RedBar]

I block China, Japan, Argentina, Singapore, Russia, and Brazil.

I can't be that generic since I do considerable amounts of business there especially so China, Japan and Russia,however if one does not then there's not much point in allowing them but, and I genuinely mean this, for me easily the most spam bots come from the USA.

[RedBar]

Almost 17.00 UK time and bots have disappeared from all my sites except one, has Xmas come early?

[jmccormac]

Some of the companies that offer scraping as a service use pay as you go mobile phone SIMs in countries where access/bandwidth is cheap. That means that there can be a lot of junk traffic from mobile networks in some countries that can be out of profile. These botnets are quite different from the data centre botnets and can be more difficult to block. Singapore is used for a lot of Chinese bots. Most of that activity comes from known bad ranges like Aceville etc.

As for Google search, it is difficult to be diplomatic about what they did in the last few weeks.

Regards...jmcc

[BigKat]

Back in March a company called DesignRush released their study [news.designrush.com...] stating 80% of visits were bots, and it's probably a lot worse now. Scraping to steal our content, to deprive us of actual human visitors, is the lawless landscape we're operating in now. Those who don't start whacking moles now, and take other security measures, will see bots worsen as organic traffic continues to slowly disappear in its entirety.

Unfortunately for the many small publishers out there without an existing user base, who don't sell a service or goods, I fear the battle is long over and they exist only to feed the AI machines content. Organic traffic for info-only content is nearly gone anyway, and fighting for what crumbs remain isn't worth it IMO.

[jmccormac]

Wonderful Google AI again. Was searching for an ISP IP range in Kuwait with "UCC Kuwait" as the query. This was what Google's AI provided: ""UCC Kuwait" most likely refers to University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland".

Regards...jmcc

[christianz]

Google Analytics are completely wrecked by bots, mostly abusing the Analytics tags (measurement protocol) directly, without visiting the site. Usually was showing up as Singapore but now is US/Ashburn.

[RedBar]

WooHoo MSFT you've just broken your own record !

This morning a 6 page .com was hit just over 4,600 times from, yes christianz, 52.0 range Singapore ... Only 164MB for precisely what you bunch of complete and utter incompetent muppets?

What will they do when everything has been removed ?

[jmccormac]

@Christianz Some Chinese Cloud operations use US IP space. Perhaps that could be what is wrecking analytics?

Regards...jmcc

[christianz]

@jmccormac

Could be that the same operation switched from Tencent to AWS or some other cloud which is in Ashburn area (which could be anyone).

What I don't understand is the motivation - why are they doing this? Trying to hurt Google by making Analytics worse? I don't see any economical incentive to spam Analytics live view with fake user_engagement and page_view events (triggered by direct calls to Analytics API, not visiting site).

This has been going on for months and there are several threads in Google Analytics support forum and Reddit about this. I get the AI scrapers stealing content, but why spam the Analytics protocol for thousands of sites?

[jmccormac]

@Christianz The AI scrapers (there seems to be a few types) may be loading and executing Javascript in an attempt to avoid being blocked. This can cause problems for analytics. At this stage, I have to block (at an IP level) entire data centre ranges for scraping. Most of them don't execute the Javascript. There are some scrapers using mobile phone Internet to scrape and they do try to mimic human users. They do execute the JS.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

Currently, the impact of the Google update appears to be unfavorable. In my topic area: More and more AI sites (with rather silly articles), financial stuff, but nothing more. Accordingly, traffic to the news site is almost dead. Maybe we should start writing about crypto junk too; Google seems to love it right now.

Shop: Has been almost at a standstill for 3 days now, hardly any G-traffic, before that it was going really well, but Google probably wants to give the team an early Christmas vacation.

The worst thing, though, is Google News. I've never seen so much nonsense in the “For me” section as I do now.

[jmccormac]

There seems to be a vulnerability in Google's approach to News. It has to do with an automated Dunning Kruger effect. Most news organisations have an editorial process to filter out junk and bad reporting. The assumption within Google seems to be that algorithms can do the same job as reporters and editors. Some news orgs have been using AI to summarise and generate articles for a few years now. But they also have editorial oversight.

This isn't the only situation where Google's assumptions failed. It tried to compete with Amazon on Cloud hosting. Amazon is still the top Cloud operator. (Based on the monthly gTLD website/IP surveys that I run). It tried to compete with Godaddy on the domain name registration business. It couldn't and later sold its registrations business to Squarespace. It tried to compete with Twitter. Twitter won. It tried to compete with Facebook.Facebook won. It tried to compete with Identity Digital and others on the 2012 round of new gTLDs. The presentations on Google's new gTLD programme were completely naive in that they were presented by smart people who had no idea of how the domain name industry operates. Identity Digital and others won.

Unless Google does something about the underlying assumptions on news and on AI (GIGO), it could end up driving users to other SEs.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

WooHoo MSFT you've just broken your own record !

Smashed that this morning with 9,425 pages, Singapore of course.

[jmccormac]

@RedBar If they are primarily from 43.bbb.ccc.ddd ranges, just add a line to the .htaccess that serves them a 204 result. Alternatively, deepsix the ranges.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

@jmcc

I've already done that with the 43 range and it seems to be working, this is the 52 range which I've just uploaded so hopefully could see improvements over the weekend if they obey the rules ... Which I doubt!

As expected my traffic is well down today and will now bounce all over the place until 5-6th Jan.

[jmccormac]

They still show up in the logs but they don't get any content. The problem with the MSFT ranges is that there may be some legitimate bingbots in those ranges. Apart from the WP probes, it is the content that the scrapers want. Just saw ByteDance with a /16 US range. Most of the ByteDance attempts seem to be from SG ranges.

Google has certainly banjaxed Christmas for a lot of site owners with this "update".

Regards...jmcc

[ichthyous]

Looking back over the last 60 days or so, I have seen a sizeable drop in traffic to my highest traffic category pages on my site. Roughly down 18-37% for search traffic compared to same period in 2024. Direct visits to these pages were quite a bit higher, but I tend to write off most direct traffic as bots that the analytics aren't weeding out these days.

The interesting thing is the ranking for some terms is higher than ever, but the traffic is lower. Checking the highest traffic page I am now solidly in first place for months, and I also have the first image and the third image in the image block above the organic serps. There appear to be no AIO for these searches, and no ads show up for this search on desktop every time I check. But still...traffic is quite a bit lower since November. The only conclusion is: 1) people are using Google search less or 2) searches are down due to lower economic activity...people just aren't looking to buy anything. I suspect it's a combination of the two.

[gatormark]

One thing I know for sure is that the days of informational websites are over. They are done. The only sites that have a chance of surviving are web communities and websites that sell a product.

[Micha]

God, Google is getting on my nerves. The ranking is improving, but since 8 p.m. yesterday evening, there has been virtually no traffic from Google. The shop has also seen a slump since 8 p.m. Dozens of other websites whose statistics I can view have also seen a slump at exactly the same time.

For the shop, it could be Christmas, but the rest... It seems as if Google is targeting small niche sites; I can't explain it any other way. Now we can only hope that this will change with the current update, because it's pointless to publish articles like this.

[christianz]

Yup. Giant drop, precisely at 00 GMT. You can always count on Google to do the wrong thing eventually.

[seokees]

Not yet zero...but close, trafficwise. No revenue for a good few days now, which is unprecedented since starting it 10 years ago.

[gatormark]

Google is not sure what to do because it’s fighting for its life. AI is putting a lot of pressure on Google.

[ichthyous]

Google is not sure what to do because it’s fighting for its life. AI is putting a lot of pressure on Google

Sorry, but this narrative simply isn't true. Google's stock is the best performing for the MAG7 this year outside of NVIDIA. I started buying earlier in the year when everyone was ringing the death knell and I have a 72% return so far. The narrative has flip flopped completely. Google is now seen as the leader in AI and OpenAi is now being viewed with great skepticism. Open Ai doesnt have the resources to compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Etc. which all have countless revenue streams behind them. Open Ai has chatGPT and is vulnerable to competition coming from all these companies, plus other AI platforms, plus Chinese AI etc

Google has tons of revenue from google cloud, data center expansion, and Gemini is seen as a successful model for incorporating Ai into an existing search business. Do not confuse a three trillion dollar company with your personal situation. WE are under stress from our own dependence on search, but all of these companies will always end up just fine.

[gatormark]

@ichtyous

Let’s revisit this in 12 months

[ichthyous]

Let’s revisit this in 12 months

@gatormark I don't see the story changing much other than the jockeying for positioning...this one up today, the other one up tomorrow. Sure, there could be a complete crash caused by an AI bubble, but underneath all of it is a race for dominance that is not going away. The human race isn't going to be asked whether it wants AI rammed down its throat...the $$ incentives are too great, and those controlling the AI platforms have bought off the most powerful government in the world, so who else is gong to stop them? The EU?...it's irrelevant in this race.

The way I see it, it boils to US AI giants spending like drunken sailors vs. much more efficient Chinese AI models (in terms of spending). But the genie is already out of the bottle and we are just collateral damage. I prefer to try and profit from change along the way rather than being relegated to the dust heap. And do keep in mind...shares can be sold when the narrative turns again...

[gatormark]

Bots are running rampant and they are affecting Adsense page RPM. Google cannot filter them out. I was successful for a couple days, but now I’m getting bots from a dozen countries. They caused my largest website to crash today. I know they are all AI bots training their algorithm.

[jmccormac]

@Gatormark Some of the SG/CN bots seem to come from Huawei and Aceville ranges. The problem is that the they have assigned different counties to various IPs so that they appear to be from non-problem coutnries. Haven't seen those bots executing JS though. They shouldn't have much of an impact on either analytics or Adsense.

The ones that have affected the analytics/Adsense on my site seemt obe coming from mobile ISPs and proxies and compromised devices on ISPs in countries that would normally not be interested it the content. I've a 811 IP range Code200 block and that seems to have been trying to hit the site heavily scraping content.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Crazy question? Does a deluge of ads plus other infos actually deter / hinder people rather than help them?

Last night using my VPN for Los Angeles, I searched G for my industry's most popular widget. It was horrendous, nothing but ads, images plus other info options.

Even as a long-time widget professional, quite simply this was over-facing, absolutely far too many alternatives offering very much of a muchness. An awful experience on both desk top and mobile.

Does anyone at G ever look at the mess they've created?