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...

[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?