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]

I enjoy the first few days of a new month since my server stats clearly display the bad bots etc ... It's kill time ... Today's biggest culprit as usual is MS.

[christianz]

New month, new record lows in Google traffic! For me 2025 has not been volatile at all, just smooth beautiful decline. No ups and downs - just downs.

[Martin Ice Web]

I wonder if this bot activities hurt rankings/traffic as we know that there is a tresshold for (every) website.

@christianz, yes, traffic is going down every day and the quality is realy bad.
But as i wrote before it started just a day before black friday. Sharp drop in traffic/conversions.

[jmccormac]

There seems to have been an uptick in bad activity from Microsoft cloud ranges. At this stage, it seems that the best thing to do is deep six the ranges.

As for the traffic, down for the last few days.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Microsoft has been going nuts across all my sites for several days now even on sites that have 301s to Ecosia!

I'm now building a nice IP range block list of these MS abusers along with a few others especially Singapore.

Interestingly, at the moment I have only one Google abuse IP!

[jmccormac]

See quite a few scrapers from Google Cloud / googlecontent. Google has also been hitting the site hard though with little return. Much of it is historical data that has not been updated for some time. There was an uptick from MSFT ranges and they tend to be scrapers/maggots rather than MSFT/Bing spiders. Traffic still way down today. The Singapore ranges that cause problems seem to be Huawei/Petalsearch/Bytedance related.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

@jmcc

Is there a specific reason why MS bots hit 188 pages per IP?

I've had some light hits from Google Cloud but nothing on the scale of MS.

[CommandDork]

I've been battling trash bot traffic from Singapore for the last few weeks myself. It's frustrating.

[Fluff_Nutz]

For me. Google traffic was increasing but it was very short lived. Now it is dropping once again. Yesterday saw -30% fall. Both Google and Direct traffic is dropping. The only traffic source that is currently increasing and remaining steady is Bing. This smells of an unannounced ''update''. Which, for me, has been on-going for 90% of November.

When an ''update'' hits for me Bing goes up in traffic. When an ''update'' is not happening both Direct and Google increase. Hence it has to be an ''update''. Plus it has only just been Black Friday and Thanksgiving. Two indicators for ''updates'' and corpo profit gain.

Also, another reason I think Direct traffic drops for me is because an ''Update'' messes with everything. All websites. So, if you use Social Media to bring in traffic this also takes a hit. Happens all the time over on Youtube too. Serp shuffle. There is no escape.. Also, social traffic gets combined with Direct for some reason. I saw you take my Reddit traffic and place it into Direct Big G. Why? Why did my Reddit traffic need hiding into Direct? Before you did that the correct traffic was correctly labelled

Also, I find it so annoyingly frustrating that big Youtube content creators complained recently of a huge traffic drop. Which Google said was down to Ad Blockers. Such a blatant lie as I did a quick search on Youtube yesterday and couldn't find the result I wanted until half way down the screen. So many sponsored videos taking top 4-5 places. Meaning, just like the search, most videos are on page 2 or more., Huge indicator for traffic dropping. Also, no one searches page 2. Which is sad as, now, there is a massive increase in videos getting no views at all.. Also, Youtube refuses to push long form content. Preferring Shorts to compete with TikTok. Which wasn't Youtube's original intent. So many videos that I used to search for and always remained at the top of the search is, now, half way down. I was surprised to see this at first.. Then I remembered that Youtube is controlled by Google

According to Reddit and a posted article I saw. Open AI doesn't make any profit with their AI and won't until, at least, 2030. So I suspect companies like Google where AI is currently not bringing in anything. But its still costly and to the corpos, still necessary. So they increased their greed for profits to maintain it and its huge cost. Hence so much fluctuation. It's stupid really. Why can't we have stability? Why can't we earn from our work?

As with many others rankings in GSC is terrible. It took a massive nose dive around November 19th. It was high and remained high from July and sadly ended in November. Why? Can't be bots as it would have always been decreasing.. No?

I don't fully understand the bot invasion. My site is only 2yrs old. But should I block them when they bring in traffic? I'm slightly against blocking them as I need the traffic. Though I do still have a lot of German IPs blocked.

Comparing last month's traffic and revenue though. Despite not being a fan of the unnecessary fluctuations. Traffic was fine until November by the way. It has to be an ''update'' due to public holiday. Anyway, in comparison to October. November was still +6% in traffic and +9% revenue. Somehow, still holding on..

[seokees]

Yes the Bing and Duckduckgo traffic is increasing and Google is decreasing fast since a week now. Conversions are really low. Thought it was something I done to one of my sites. But it is also happening on my other relatively larger sites. Only the smaller and newer sites, whom not bringing in enough traffic and revenue are quite stable.

[jmccormac]

@RedBar Are they genuine Bing crawlers with full msn host names? Both Google and Bing crawl from specific ranges and MSFT publishes a list of its spider IPs. It is also possible to check that an MSFT IP is a genuine Bing spider IP. (Can't remember the URL.). All of the problems from MSFT ranges have had no reverse DNS set for the IPs.

Some sites may use rate limiters that will only allow a limited number of hits from an IP over a period before blocking the IP. I haven't checked the number of queries per IP from Bing. The rate limiters may also whitelist known SE spiders. Some of the crawling patters from the main SEs, including Google, can seem a bit odd. One of the strangest in the last month has been Apple's applebot. That was taking hundreds of thousands of pages a day and using a lot of genuine Apple IPs.

December seems to be shaping up to be a bad month for Google traffic.

Regards...jmcc

[Martin Ice Web]

Bing and duckduck go are the SEs that bring the most traffic. google is dead.
What doesn´t wonder because our nicht is now filled with ads and only 3 organics on first page. The google pages look so crowded.
If I need 30 seconds to sort out what is ads and organics i leave immediatly. I wait for the day that google uses pop ups for ads.

[ichthyous]

Google traffic has been trending downward very slowly since October. This is mostly due to the implementation of AI and also the sheer number of ads at the top of every page. But I also think it's the global economy...it's not good anywhere in the world right now. We are already seeing here in USA how jobs have vanished for new grads and the economy has lost jobs three months in a row. They are all moving in with their parents. The insane economic policies from the white house, including nonsensical tariffs and chasing away much needed labor is starting to have an impact on prices and people's quality of life. Business is the worst I have seen it since the recession of 2009/10. There aren't many new inquiries and the ones that do come in are mostly garbage that get deleted. This is going to last for a while I predict...especially if the stock markets, housing markets, and crypto all tank in unison...which is looking entirely possible now.

[RedBar]

@jmcc - According to ipinfo dot io and other sources I check before blocking they are MS IPs and many are already acknowledged as abusers.

Does CloudFlare block these?

ATM MS is easily my single-most abuser across ALL sites by far

[ichthyous]

@RedBar....Cloudflare has a built in set of rules that you can set to be more stringent or less stringent. I think it lets through plenty though. If you want to block specific IP ranges / ASN you can do that easily using custom rules. For example when I have bots abusing the forms on my site and sending me spam I look up the ASN range for the IP and it is almost always from a network that is commonly used to spam. I just block the whole ASN and be done with it. One that is very bad on my site is one called Leaseweb. They are relentless in spamming from networks across the US and also in the Netherlands. I have all of their ASN blocked now and much less form spam.

[jmccormac]

@RedBar MSFT publishes a list of its crawler IP addresses and that's the authoritative list. Anything else is probably going to be a scraper/maggot. Sometimes there might be someone in MSFT trying an experiment but the traffic from MSFT cloud ranges over the past few months was not benign and led to those ranges being deep sixed.

I don't use CF so I am not able to given an opinion on its blocking features.

Some of the work I've been doing has involved identifying the web hosting providers for all gTLD websites. (Have it at 99.33% identified at the moment.) Operators like Leaseweb and others have ranges all over the world and are not sumply confined to the US or the Netherlands. Some of the larger US operators also have ranges in Europe. Due to some enterprising Chinese business people acquiring large blocks of IPv4 addresses from Afrinic, much of Hong Kong's gTLD websites are using IP addresses originally intended for Africa and Hong Kong has more gTLD websites than the rest of China. China also has operations using Singaporean IPs and US IPs. Some decades ago, Google used to locate Cuban IPs in Italy wih its geolocation effort. Things are magnitudes more complex now at an IP level.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

I was doing a search on Google for the main registrar of a DIY website service provider. The provider didn't have its own accredited ICANN registrar but Google's AI provided completely incorrect information. I don't have a high opinion of Google's expertise on domain name issues (a map and a flashlight level of expertise). There seems to be no error checking with Google's AI. Given that the first renewal rate (domain names being renewed a year after being first registered) for .COM is down around 50%, many domain names and their websites will not renew. In 2005, the first renewal rate, excluding Domain Tasting, for .COM was around 72%. One of the unintended effects of AI could be, along with increasing registration fees, to drive down the numbers of new websites surviving past their first year.

Regards...jmcc

[Fluff_Nutz]

Someone help me. Why am I still up at 4am in the morning editing articles? More so when traffic is still dropping.. I need my sanity tablets..

[jmccormac]

That is what creators (unlike Google) do. Keep creating and don't let them grind you down.Create for people not AI.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

@Fluff_Nutz I'm wondering the same thing. Since Wednesday, traffic has dropped by another 80%. I don't even need to mention advertising revenue, and I'm slowly starting to fear that things won't recover and the news site will just die out.

Only the shop is doing surprisingly well, but that's probably because it's December.

[sk7411]

Something happened between Dec 2nd and 3rd. -50% drop .

[seokees]

Things (traffic, conversions and related) are still going downhill. Bigger competitors are stable for what I can see with the naked eye and in the ranktrackers (but unreliable of course). My newer smaller sites are stable trafficwise funnily enough, but the conversions dropped since late November.

The only real difference between my sites and the competitors I can clearly see are the massive backlink profiles and really high DA/PA (for what is worth).

[Martin Ice Web]

Worst drop last night. Not a single user between noon and 4am.
We are at 30% of normal traffic.
Amazon sales are up about 300% (not normal). It is because users can´t find anything on google anymore.

Content, EAT, UX is not king anymore. It is simply google running ads like creazy.

Bots are going wild. Particularly from residenz IPs from us.

[RedBar]

The 6 Microsoft IP blocks I am having problems with are in the 4.xxx.x.x/xx range from US, Korea and Australia.

htaccess does not stop them.
CPanel's IPBlocker does not stop them.

On a small 10 (ten) page .co.uk site so far ths month (3.5 days) these 6 blocks have hit/scraped/whatever, just over 2,000 pages.

This is insane!

Meanwhile, like many others here, UK traffic has halved when it is normally rock solid.

[xCart]

I've been observing SERPs and I've noticed that Google is acting very chaotically. It selectively terrorizes websites. For example, it throws websites that actually have fluff content into the abyss, but leaves websites with completely crappy content untouched. I see that the websites penalized in June briefly approached the top 10. And in the end, it threw them back out again. Strange and senseless.

[Micha]

Today is even worse than yesterday. Apart from having a flood of Chinese visitors (bots) calling up non-existent URLs, Google traffic is practically zero today. I must say, I'm really impressed with how quickly and efficiently Google is destroying the web.

[Samsam1978]

Today, it is starting to look DESPERATE now.

Chatgtp launched in 2022 and recently did a code red, Google is now 3 years down the line and what we got guys?

Ads are 50% more expensive, conversions for advertisers are hardly nothing, no-one is buying, ad spend is at rock bottom. Google changed the reporting structures since 2022. They have merged into broader categories like "google search and other" this lets them offset weak display income with Youtube performance. Hiding the decline. They removed the network line, this has declined year on year. They have tried to offset losses in display with other gains. Youtube is littered with ads and creators are starting to leave. I watched one video, and it was 2 minutes of forced ads (I have ZERO) interest in to watch 3 minutes of someone talking in their bedroom? Come on it's a joke.

What has all this AI stuff been for? What has destroying millions of websites been for? Stealing creators words?

To be the best in AI? Against a competitior (OpenAI) who was never a threat to google in the first place.

This is starting to become the worse business strategy EVER and will be spoken about for years to come in marketing books when it all comes to a head. It isn’t just “product change.” It’s destruction dressed up as innovation.

You cannot build a sustainable future on robotic summaries of content you have stolen from humans then mash it up so it does not make sense. Google has also stopped people discovering new ads or new topics by stopping traffic to websites. The public don't want AI they want a website, if they want to chat they will go to a chatbot. Why are Google mixing the core offering which is confusing users: Nano banana, Gemini, AI mode, AI overviews, Google search (products are all over the place) Its also turning into an AD search engine with the way they have reorganised sponsored links into tricking users into thinking they are organic results.

You can’t starve the creators, degrade the web, and still....expect people to keep buying; people visiting Google have switched off as well. THEY ARE NOT CLICKING on ads or websites. Congratualtions Google you have killed off your ad model. You can’t force advertisers to pay more for less and expect them to keep smiling.

It will all.... just implode.

[searchengineland.com...]

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 5:52 pm (utc) on Dec 4, 2025]

[jmccormac]

@RedBar Just deep six the entire MSFT 4.x range. As for Google, it is definitely screwing up. Unfortunately, it will not suffer the consequences.

Regards...jmcc

[edited by: jmccormac at 6:02 pm (utc) on Dec 4, 2025]

[Samsam1978]

@RedBar - Ditto I am seeing 20% of traffic is bots from China and Singapore