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]

[Martin Ice Web]

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.

I am on it too. But there are so many thiing to regard. Most of the bots are using Homepage as referrer. But if found that some robots ( qwant ) use the same referrer.
The best would be geo-location but that is to slow.

99% of bots hit item pages not the category-pages. So i think they are fed by google-shopping-lists.

[RedBar]

@MIW ... To be honest I am not at all sure what these bots are requesting now however I need to wait until 1/2/3 Feb to see better..

I "think" I have all the WordPress probes nailed down plus various other bits and pieces but I am still seeing on several sites up to 1,000 page requests every day but I do not know for what. As mentioned last week the majority of requests have empty strings and these all seem to correlate with the quantity of 401 and 403 pages!

Hopefully when I see new, clearer logs next week it will make things evident. The one thing I do know is that neither MSFT nor UAB Baltic take any notice of any htaccess instructions. This is not a bandwidth issue, all these page requests use very lew MBs for me.

Are you being hit for bandwidt?

[caspergt1]

What's the obsession with bots on this forum, how is blocking bots improving your SEO?

[RedBar]

What's the obsession with bots on this forum

Do I / we assume you feel you have zero bot activity?

Do you not perform any site analysis for yourself / company / customer (s)?

[caspergt1]

Any site has bot activity, any half decent site get scraped. How is it negatively impacting your organic search performance? With all the broadcore updates / en#*$!ification of Google organic this should be the least of your problems? Cool you blocked a bot from Lithuania or India.. what's the actual value gain for your organic performance? I can only imagine this being an issue if you're on extremely crappy hosting.

[RedBar]

I prefer accuracy when analysing a website's performance data, not guesswork nor approximations.

I can only imagine this being an issue if you're on extremely crappy hosting.

If you have ever read my posts I have never mentioned crappy hosting performance, in fact I have specifically stated:

This is not a bandwidth issue, all these page requests use very lew MBs for me.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Speaking of bots, what I do know about them is that they do not bring in revenue. Yesterday my site was hit with a ton of bots originating from Singapore. However, whilst traffic increased the revenue did not. In fact the revenue dropped. So they do nothing but cause increased, further, problems.

[christianz]

These bots not just don't bring revenue - they potentially cut it. Advertisers put your site in "bot traffic / fake traffic" bracket and bid on it less.

Speaking of Singapore, I have constantly 50-100 "active users" (bots) from Singapore since 2 days ago. They ruin analytics reports.

That's just one bot army in this constant onslaught. It has gotten so bad that in GA realtime in US I often don't see population centers as largest circles but all the cities where largest datacenters are located. It really feels like the end of the Internet. Extreme greed and criminality, especially at the highest levels in government, ruined everything.

[christianz]

Speaking of current ranking/traffic trends - keywords are sliding and traffic is sliding even more. Only thing more awful and terrible than Google is Bing - absolutely useless. I logged in their webmaster console for the first time in long time and apparently there is even bigger downtrend. Luckily I don't care about Bing and nobody should. They are basically self-castrated in some sort of arrangement/deal between MS and Google where MS agreed to not compete. Otherwise they could not have dropped the ball more badly with the ChatGPT headstart and how they buried the chatbot interface as soon as they actually started making gains.

[Chris travel 30]

I got the feeling that there might be an unconfirmed update since yesterday. Big swings in rankings, slightly mismatched traffic and affiliate sales are down. For me, this was always the sign for rotation in SERPs or update. Semrush Sensor is also showing heated vola.
Anyone else?

[Micha]

@chris Yeah, there’s a Google update rolling out. According to the Semrush Sensor, volatility is extremely high right now. So welcome to the roller coaster buckle up, it’s going downhill.

[Chris travel 30]

@micha thanks. I can't find any News on it. Nothing is confirmed, right?

[Micha]

@chris Google hasn’t announced anything, but since every tool is lighting up, it’s pretty clearly an update.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Chris, it feels like an update. But we are seeing bad traffic since 3 days. Got worse from yesterday to now.
Sales are down again.


bing is a joke right now. Sometimes there are only ads and 1 organic on the first page and none is matching the query.

[christianz]

Pretty huge drop. Yes it seems like accelerated over the past 3 days.

As far as bots - 210 Singapore bots as "active users" online as I am typing this. Plus many others in smaller quantities.

[morpheus83]

Seems Google is again fine tuning the update. Traffic was normal last week and now again its in the dumps.

[caspergt1]

@Redbar I prefer evidence based analysis, you have provided 0. Keep on blocking bots, let's see how much it will help your organic performance.

[christianz]

Some insights into the popular Singapore bot problem. It looks like they are using Starlink to evade geolocation - Starlink IP for page load (HTML) and later use a set of Alibaba Cloud IPs from Singapore to load every resource listed in that HTML (images, scripts). Blocking Singapore is not enough. It seems like ASN block of entire Starlink could be necessary.

The reason it shows up in GA only as Singapore is because Google Analytics tag is also loaded like all the other scripts, from Singapore cloud, not from Starlink. Starlink is probably used this way by many scraper groups, perhaps xAI too.

[Juniya]

Worst January in decades. Can't say I am too surprised! Smh!

[mosxu]

Anyone experienced largest zombie attack in the last few days ?

[ichthyous]

Some insights into the popular Singapore bot problem. It looks like they are using Starlink to evade geolocation - Starlink IP for page load (HTML) and later use a set of Alibaba Cloud IPs from Singapore to load every resource listed in that HTML (images, scripts). Blocking Singapore is not enough. It seems like ASN block of entire Starlink could be necessary.

The reason it shows up in GA only as Singapore is because Google Analytics tag is also loaded like all the other scripts, from Singapore cloud, not from Starlink. Starlink is probably used this way by many scraper groups, perhaps xAI too.

Fascinating catch! I was just on CF updating my security rules and noticed that Singapore is now the majority of hits on my CF managed challenges...and for such a tiny country that is def not real traffic. Now I have no idea...I don't want to block all Starlink traffic, perhaps some of it is valid...

India has been out of control in the last month. Changing managed challenge on CF to interactive challenge dropped my India traffic by 53% and still dropping. I have now updated China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Bangladesh to interactive challenge. I don't need or care about traffic from any of these places. CF "managed challenge" is pointless I find, they all get through anyway. Solve the little puzzle kids or f-off entirely from my content.

[ichthyous]

Not seeing any major drop in traffic here at all, but I am seeing that Google is no longer reporting links like it used to. The overall count has dropped a lot. Also, the types of inquiries coming in are very, very poor quality. Not sure how Google has managed it, but you really get only the leftovers now. People with such low pricing expectations that they must be completely delusional in their thinking. People in Yemen filling in forms in arabic and not making any sense. People asking for free things, or just scammers. We are truly just getting the dreggs.

[RedBar]

India has been out of control in the last month.

Apart from the Indian MSFT bot my traffic from there appears as normal which is good for me since we do a lot of business there.

In fact my new measures appeared to be working until late last night when one small site had a big hit from Lithuania, the last time was 7th and 8th Jan for 1100 wp-loin.php brute force requests each and last night was for another 1100+.

I thought I'd locked those down, need to check my coding otherwise, for me, it's looking ok but with an early Easter I do expect February to create an increase in traffic / enquiries.

[ichthyous]

@Redbar I checked and most of the Indian visits are MSFT bots coming from Indian IP addresses, you are correct. I did some research on the CF site and numerous people are complaining about it. It seems that MSFT cloud services are being used to host scraping bots. I am keeping it blocked for now, even though I don't like blocking Google, MSFT, Amazon IP ranges.

You can sign up for cloudflare and set up rules to deny access to any specific pages. They will never even reach your server nor slow down your site with these brute force hits. The $25 a month is well worth it.

[christianz]

@ichthyous

Unfortunately it is not just Starlink they are using for page downloads. They also use residential proxies/botnets. I banned some dozen of different ISPs in strange African countries where many of their bot nodes were located. But this is an endless whack-a-mole. It's interesting that they decided to load assets (images and scripts) only via Alibaba Cloud. This is what gave their scheme away and I was able to catch loads of their proxy nodes.

It is important to underline that AI companies are criminal entities. They are no different than drug dealers, human traffickers or financial scammers. It would be helpful if society also viewed them as such and they were prosecuted for the harm they are doing.

[ichthyous]

It is important to underline that AI companies are criminal entities. They are no different than drug dealers, human traffickers or financial scammers. It would be helpful if society also viewed them as such and they were prosecuted for the harm they are doing.

I'm trying to take a more nuanced approach as I am getting more and more traffic from AI sources. But ultimately it's a direct threat at the heard of my business. My work is being rampantly infringed by actual humans, and now used to train AI bots. You can check at haveibeentrained.com to see if your images are being used in datasets. I suspect that with this current 'regime' in the supreme court, congress and white house there will be zero action taken on the copyright infringement front with the AI platforms. It might take years in the USA and will be led by UK/EU/CA/AU first for sure. They no longer have any reason to play ball with USA tech at all since they all got tariffs slapped on them anyway...they will now remove the shackles on going after USA tech.

[EditorialGuy]

Worst January in decades. Can't say I am too surprised! Smh!

The month has been a mixed bag on a day-to-day basis, but overall, things are up (especially in the last few days). That's no big surprise, since we usually see growth after the beginning of the year. We're still way down from where we were before AI Overviews came along, though.

The one bright spot is how well affiliate bookings are holding up on our travel-information site. The quantity of Google traffic may be down, but it feels like the quality of that traffic is up (which stands to reason, I guess, since people who want in-depth information from a Web site are likely to be better prospects than people who grab a quick AI answer and disappear).

[System]

February 2026 thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 11:47 am (utc) on Feb 11, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]