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]

[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.

[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 ?