January 2026 Google Search Observations

[blend27]

BTW, Happy New Year! from North East of US this time around!

[edited by: not2easy at 2:36 pm (utc) on Jan 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Samsam1978]

Ive seen a CPC 50% drop in my adsense revenue and RPM down about 33%. It does not pay for the server. Worse in 18 years. I literally feel like just removing adsense at this point.

[Fluff_Nutz]

RPM is also low over here and I'm not with Adsense, thank god. Way better options out there. But everything is very poor on this side. Low RPM, which I think is typical for this time of year. January and Feb are usually the worst months for that. But outside factors don't help either.
Traffic has been bad throughout this month so far. Every traffic source just keeps dropping. Direct, Google and Bing are on constant daily drops. I'm now struggling to keep to November levels of traffic. I have lost all of December growth, unfortunately. But some of that growth was due to holiday season, so a small drop was expected. Alas, this waterfall doesn't end. I agree this isn't fun. I want to be able to rely on the site for future investment! How long must our patience go on for until these constant daily drops end?

[tangor]

ASIDE: This is the start of Tax Season (Jan-Apr) in USA. For many sellers this has traditionally been a lowered traffic period.

OTOH: When those tax returns start showing up, so do the customers!

[RedBar]

Right, I do not know as yet whether it is me or them (maybe coincidence) however I have in the last couple of days drastically reduced WP page probes from thousands per day to tens !.!.!

I did a lot of deep diving research and found some very simple code to add to my htaccess file. I'm now goint to implement it accross all sites to see what happens. If this continues to work do the mods here want me to post this piece of code?

Meanwhile traffic continues to look normal including, surprisingly, the hotel venue which is usually very quiet at this time but doing ok, it is covering its costs.

[not2easy]

@RedBar, you can share htaccess codes but the place to share it would be in the Apache forum here: [webmasterworld.com...]

You can link to the topic here, but by posting it there, you could have additions/ideas from others and be on topic. ;)

[saladtosser]

@tangor tax/self assessment return time in UK as well!

Clearly Google is continuing to tweak the results to continue to reduce organic traffic week by week, day by day to beat the last quarter and satiate their insatiable stock holders, but that aside January is basically the Monday of Months! People are paying off x-mas debts they ran up, filing tax returns and paying the tax man in Jan!

Throw in the general lack of confidence and uncertainties in most western economy's, the cost of living only going up... THEN add in AI job insecurities and we have a perfect storm as people try to pay off personal and business debts and hold back on spending to save for the forthcoming AI job apocalypse! This is why gold is through the roof, across the board uncertainty!

[RedBar]

My global weekend traffic was half of where I would have expected and Monday is continuing in the same vein. I am "assuming" that it is the current geopolitics that has caused this making various speeches / comments this week in Davos more or less turbulent.

Sounds like a good time to take a break !

[Gagan_Kumar]

January 2026 Google Search Observations

People are searching about AI a lot more now.
On Google Trends, AI-related searches are going up fast. ChatGPT is one of the most searched things in the world, showing that AI is now part of daily life.

SEO is changing because of AI.
New searches like AI SEO optimization and zero-click search show that websites are trying to appear in AI answers, not just get clicks from Google links.

[RedBar]

@Gagan_Kumar

Are these your observations or AI generated ones? We already know this, the question has to be what, if anything, should we, could we, do about what is perceived by many as a threat?

If it is a threat, more precisely what is that threat?

I'm playing devil's advocate here to stir-up the old grey matter :-)

[Soulofmonk]

I am noticing more and more people not scrolling down below the AI overview. CTR is at an all-time low :(

[Micha]

Matomo now shows more traffic from bots than from normal users. At first, it was bots from China, now they're coming from the US, which is just annoying. Traffic from Google is decreasing day by day, and Discover seems to be playing nothing but nonsense. I'm slowly starting to get really worried about my news site. The new site, which I launched as a test a few weeks ago, is growing extremely fast. Even my agency's site, which isn't actually maintained, is currently inundated with visitors. To be honest, I don't understand it.

Well, on the other hand, the shop is doing surprisingly well, with very good sales figures every day.

[RedBar]

At first, it was bots from China, now they're coming from the US, which is just annoying.

You're only just getting US bots? For many years the US has easily been the top source of my trash bot traffic by a huge margin. At the moment I seem to have most of this bot traffic locked-down but, of course, a new one came in on one site this weekend with a new IP range ... It was Amazon, why?

[not2easy]

It was Amazon, why?

Amazon hosts bad bots: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Micha]

US bots are new to me, but they don't come from AWS, and they only call up old URLs that no longer exist. It's just annoying...

Yesterday I had zero visitors from Google, but endless bots. The ranking is okay, but as we all know, that doesn't mean anything these days.

By the way, DuckDuckGo has launched a survey on AI, and the result is clear: 93% are against it.

[voteyesornoai.com ]

[universenet]

US bots are new to me, but they don't come from AWS, and they only call up old URLs that no longer exist. It's just annoying...

If you see that URls what not exist are still in your google webmaster so is clear google sending them.
Google want to be sure that you do not earn some dollar from that links, so need check all time if exist like secret URls

[RedBar]

Amazon hosts bad bots

Thanks, I do have quite a few Amazon IP ranges blocked, in fact this is my first "new" one in several weeks and it stood out like a sore thumb!

[Micha]

@universenet The URLs appear in Matomo, but not in GSC. Therefore, it cannot be Google. According to goacess, the hits yesterday came from kepler9-g9.opoint.com and were extremely aggressive.

[RedBar]

Is it just me or is it slow today? Davos, geopolitics, economies, weather, holidays?

[morpheus83]

Emails for links exchanges are directly related to an ongoing google update. The moment we get these our traffic dips in the coming days.

[RedBar]

I've just had 7 days of bot quietness and was thinking my new measures had everything "under control" however overnight the rogue MSFT bots decided to pay a visit to several sites boosting page views. As yet I am not at all sure what page views they are but I do have thousands of "empty user agent string".

Would this be MSFT?

[not2easy]

MSFT is a host, they are not usually MSFT bots, but many do have "empty user agent string". You can block that too in .htaccess - again found in the Apache Forum: [webmasterworld.com...] ;)

[RedBar]

Aha! Checking my analog stats programme it would appear that all these MSFT visitations are creating 404 page visits.

You can block that too in .htaccess

Funnily enough when I did some research on this WebmasterWorld was the first result, the only problem was I didn't have a clue what they're talking about :-(

[not2easy]

It is just a rewrite rule - for blank UAs (^-?$) - I did not link to a specific example because most of them are in old threads with no further participation possible. I'd suggest you ask a question in the Apache forum and probably have an answer today. That way any questions can be answered.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Redbar.

i can confirm the MSFT bots. But they do have user agent strings.
I don´t know why MSFT doesn´t block this bots. It must cost a big amount of bandwidth and computing power.

[RedBar]

@MIW ... I re-checked mine and 75% of mine have empty user agent strings!

I also re-checked what was being generated on my most hit site and 404s were #3, at #2 with about 25% were 403s but at #1 at 50% were 401s ... Do these "bots" actually learn anything ?

Traffic volume looking normal today with the USA down a bit, is this in anticipation of the imminent winter storm ?

[not2easy]

They are seeking weak spots, usually with a list of requests (often with a wp- prefix). They are just looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.

[ausfmarketing]

My website (which averages 200 visitors a day) has had 200 visitors in the past 30 minutes. Almost all of it is coming from bot traffic in appomattox, USA.

[christianz]

Bot traffic is really insufferable these days. It likely ruins ad revenue too, advertisers don't want to bid on fake traffic. So not only are these "AI companies" harming us by stealing our content and traffic, they are also making it harder to generate any revenue from whatever traffic we have left.

[Micha]

This is really bad at the moment, the bots have been overrunning my website for days and there's just no way to stop them. @christianz you're right, my RPM will soon slip into negative territory if this continues...

[Martin Ice Web]

Yes and US bots are now #1.
I had to block large IP range like 23.108.64.0/19 from Leaseweb in US.

I don´t have a 100% working method just right now. Blocking requests with no referrer seems to be dangerous.
Some do have google.com as referrer.
It would be good if google would do something about it. Like append a secret ID ( not the google WMC-ID ) , so we could distinguish between real google traffic and bot traffic

[jmccormac]

The problem with Google appending an ID to the referrer is that it could be faked unless it is something like DKIM. It would also increase the load on the server if every webserver had to verify the referrer.

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones. A quick check shows 10 countries.

Regards...jmcc

[Martin Ice Web]

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones.

yes, but currently it is only us bots that are going creazy.

[jmccormac]

If it is only US bots, you are lucky. Deepsix (IP level block) the entire range without any hesitation.

Regards...jmcc

[haramamba]

@MIW

I don´t have a 100% working method just right now. Blocking requests with no referrer seems to be dangerous.

Show them a simple captcha (2 buttons like human/bot).
My situation is harder - already banned leaseweb/ms azure/amazon/google appengine 7 years ago, but thinking about blocking comcast/t-mobile ISPs.
I didn't see so many bot requests from US broadband and mobile nets before.

[gronetwork]

@haramamba

You can block requests from comcast/t-mobile ISPs without referrer. However I notice lately that half of the bots (global minus China) have now a referrer (google.com), it is still easy to spot them because you can see IP level blocks with a referrer for every request and they are not crawling the website.

Google (or another company) could create a code (script) that we would add in the header of a website (html, php, ...) and it would check if the IP is a bot, if yes it would be sent into the void. It would be a good alternative to Cloudflare. For the moment the bots are present on a page for less than a second, so an IP could easily be flagged as a bot if it does that frequently. The goal would be to have one unified database of bad bots and stop wasting our time with this task.

Such plugins start to appear for Wordpress.

AMZ bots are feeding Rufus (AI that appears on AMZ, without any reference to your content). They are also trying to get rid of the middleman.

[ichthyous]

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones.

Leaseweb is a terror...it took me weeks to block all of their ranges in USA, Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. These are all just spambots. Block via AS number and take all of the IPs down together otherwise you'll be at it forever.

[ichthyous]

January 2026 Google Search Observations


1 - Traffic up considerably compared to December. It's clear now that Google knocks out anyone who isn't paying for ads so their paid sites get the business before the holidays.
2 - Traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI sources up a lot. Now 8% of my total traffic...up from 1-2% only six months ago
3 - A lot more AI bot traffic, as defined by CF. It's outrageous how much bandwidth they suck up...especially Google AI
4 - Backlink count is dropping like a stone. Google does not want to count or report backlinks like they used to. I don't think they have dropped them though as my visibility is same as last year.

[jmccormac]

Some of the botrunners and scrapers try to evade AS blocks by getting spaces on other AS networks. Some of the work I've been doing is on grouping websites by Web Hosting Providers and at the IP level, the Web is a lot more complex than at DNS level. Godaddy's main DNS provides DNS service for approximately 12K diffferent web hosting providers.

The idea above of Google turning into a Pay To Play search engine seems right. The problem for Google is that it is built on other people's data and if the other people don't supply that data, Google's busienss model is in trouble.

Regards...jmcc

[shadowlight]

Google's busienss model is in trouble

In more ways than one, that is why they are extracting as much value from the ecosystem as they can, while they can.

Their unchecked monopoly and manipulation is coming to an end and they know it which is why they are no longer concentrating on long term sustainability in search.

Emails describing how the SERPS could be engineered to increase searches and revenue in user negative ways were published during previous trials [justice.gov ]

"We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page)."

This has now been done, aggressively. PAA, PASF, RP&S etc all over the page, irrelevant organic results that don't match search intent. They have lost the Monopoly case, remedies have been imposed and regulators are looking into further remedies and what has G done? Rolled out AIO aggressively worldwide and drastically increased zero click searches while blurring the lines between ads and results. Harming publishes further by starving them of traffic & revenue while at the same time posting record breaking revenue.

Regulators are looking into remedies to prevent AI and AIO in G search harming publishers. G have appealed to try and postpone current remedies, there is no chance that it will be overturned.

Look at the state of the SERPS, mounting court cases, publisher revenue and traffic drops. Its no longer a case of is Google a monopoly, are google causing harm, its a case of what can be done to stop them.

Recent Mobile SERP

AD
AD
AD
AD
AIO
Organic
PAA
Organic
AD
AD
PASF
Organic
Find Products & Service From Advertisers

[foxyalicia]

Is anyone else seeing crazy ups and downs? I'm seeing the average position in Google Search Console yo-yo.

There are about 5,500 indexed webpages. Over the past six months, AP has ranged between 6 and 19.

I've stopped sweating when I check Google Search Console and see it's at 11.7 llike it was this morning, because it's happened so often, only to settle at around 7.5 within a week.

But it's still annoying as heck. Not only do the ups-and-downs mess with the view count, but I have no idea if I'm "really" moving up or down. Like, is a certain site design change good or bad? Who knows!?

It's kind of extra annoying because my site is resource-oriented (think: unique downloads), not info-oriented nor a review site, so I'm not really impacted by AI.

[jmccormac]

@Shadowlight I haven't been following the legal adventures of Google closely. The AI results are increasingly a case of GIGO. I was trying to get some information on Amazon's market share of gTLD websites. All I saw was rubbish about it being about 5.1%. It is actually (based on a monthly survey that I run on *all* gTLD websites) approximately 31%. A lot of large operations use Amazon. Measuring the web hosting provider market is a complex business and there is a lot of spoofers making claims about it.

This isn't the first case where Google's AI slop gave clearly incorrect results. I was checking the registrar for the websites of a DIY website service. It got that wrong too. There is simply no error checking in Google's AI model. The quality of results on some searches related to hosting and domain names has declined.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

@jmccormac I don’t think Google actually wants to run a search business anymore. To me, it looks like they’re trying to make sure there’s no way around Google at all. Take this AI sales stuff, for example. Sure, they say it won’t have any impact and that they won’t charge fees. But let’s be honest, we all know how that company operates. It’s just hot air. I’m pretty sure a lot more is coming, and in a few years, no matter what you do, Google will be part of it.

[jmccormac]

@Micha It still needs the content to feed its AI. The problem with large businesses is that if inefficiency doesn't kill them in the long run, greed will. It has been an advertising business with a search engine for many years now. AI slop seems like a way for Google to avoid losing users and traffic to genuine websites. In some respects, is beginning to resemble America Online's and Compuserve's walled garden model.

Regards...jmcc

[Dooku]

Anyone else received the "Bot traffic is ruining stats" email today from Statcounter?
Many of their customers now receive over 95% bot traffic on their websites. That should tell you enough about the actual state of the internet today.
Thanks to the immoral business strategies of big tech. I have got my sites on Cloudflare and developed some really elaborate WAF rules to block those bots.
Now I receive very few bots on those websites. But the "blocked by rule" log file in Cloudflare with blocked bots is HUGE! I also estimate that these are over 95% of total traffic.....if you could call that traffic.

The last quarterly earnings report of google has an interesting detail. I can't remember exactly, but something in the ads section growth went from 12% to 2%. That is actually an 80% loss. From memory, this means that google needs to increase squeezing the serps and their advertisers. And the advertisers are seeing less and less ROI now. This leads me to believe that the turning point is now getting near.

Together with the fact that in the last few weeks investors are now stopping throwing money in the AI pit of companies like OpenAI and the likes, it's going to be very interesting very soon. Sam Altman is now so desperate he is willing to put ads in ChatGPT.....because nobody is willing to pay for ChatGPT. The situation is even worse at Anthropic.

[christianz]

Everything is bad so far in January. Rankings and traffic are terrible (so called core update was small bump that is fizzling out and was too small anyway). Ad revenue is fantastically poor too.

Bot traffic and systematic abuse by criminal thugs marketing themselves as "AI companies" is record high.

[Martin Ice Web]

google traffic is very poor. It looks like this last CU vanished all of gs competence to recognize the intention of the query. google keeps "adding" keywords to the query that leads to totaly mismatched traffic.
Therefore user engagement is very poor.
So every CU has not upgraded the quality but downgraded it.

Since yesterday bot-traffic is at a new height.
MSFT is now the biggest bot-spam network.

[Micha]

@christianz January was really extremely brutal for my news site: traffic dropped by around 90 percent, ad revenue by roughly 98 percent, while rankings stayed largely unchanged. I’m hoping this is just the typical January/February slump. Otherwise, it’s hard to justify publishing new articles at all. Well, and then there are the bots. Interestingly, my shop performed quite well in January, which was honestly unexpected for that time of year.

Another thing I noticed: even more low-quality content dominating the top positions in my niche. In Google News headlines especially, cheaply translated sites from China and Vietnam are ranking very prominently. Some of them have extremely slow load times, yet Google seems to favor them. Chinese state propaganda content is also highly visible, alongside a lot of crypto-related articles. Serious news mostly appears only as standard wire reports.

As for Discover, it feels effectively unusable at this point. My feed is filled with low-effort content like “how to turn on a washing machine” or “how to cut bread properly.”

The wonderful new world of the internet that Google has created for us

[edited by: not2easy at 12:06 pm (utc) on Jan 27, 2026]
[edit reason] cleanup [/edit]

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,
this is what our nicht is about:

-less and poor content
-keyword stuffing
-title = <h1> = <h2> = <alt>
-low resolution picture
-only 1 picture

Just the opposite of what google is claiming they are looking for.

[RedBar]

@MIW ... Spot on, you're description is precisely the same I have been posting for quite some time now. These sites all seem to use a very similar template style.

MSFT is now the biggest bot-spam network.

Yep but catching it rapidly are various networks out of Vilnius, Lithuania.

I am experimenting with various pieces of code in my htaccess and some seem to be working well. This morning I just uploaded a new piece of code which looks promising.

[Micha]

@Martin what Google says it wants and what it actually promotes are two very different things. I’m starting to think we were simply naive enough to do what Google told us to do. Now we can see where that leads: our content is feeding their AI, while our websites slowly die.