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]

[tangor]

And may this new year retire some old observations and bring in a bunch of new ones!

[RedBar]

Welcome to 2026 and the continuing saga of rogue bots ... for me.

MSFT obviously had a couple of days off but, so far, has only reappeared on half of them, the massive increase I have seen the last few days, and again on only half my sites, has been the visitation of several operators from Lithuania doing their WP probes. One "site" I have with a single page image stating "There is nothing here except this text" has been probed twice in the last 36 hours for more than 2,200 pages.

Otherwise my traffic is seemingly better than expected, I wonder what next week will deliver since I have seen some very questionable promotions of very, very thin information pages however I guess that is precisely G's intention to arm-twist decent sites into AdWords ... Note to G ... Blackmailing definitely will not work with me.

[Micha]

A small addition to the wishes for 2026: May the AI bubble finally burst.

And @Red Bar, no, you're not alone, I still get an army from China every day.

Otherwise, the news site ranks well, but Google traffic is extremely poor. The shop: Well, it's New Year's, so everything is as it has been since October.

[RedBar]

I still get an army from China every day.

Touch wood however my Chinese traffic is what I would describe as normal, no spikes, no heavy hits from one or two IPs, and considering China is my industry's #1 producer having a huge domestic market for imported widgets, overall my Chinese traffic is less than half of my US traffic which derives me nothing!

[jmccormac]

@RedBar That LT traffic may be from the Code200 scraper operation. They had 811 IP ranges. Seems to be after content rather than probing for WP vulnerabilities.

A lot of content scraping, especially from CN and SG, seems to be collecting content for AI. After the main CN and SG Cloud ranges started getting blocked, there was an uptick from Chinese mobile ranges. The problem with traffic from these ranges is that they are also sources of genuine traffic. Google isn't the main SE in China. Baidu and Sogou seem to be better sources. Petalsearch/Bytedance seem to be problems rather than traffic sources.

Happy New Year all and may it be better than the latter part of 2025.

Regards...jmcc

[Samsam1978]

I have literally lost 20 years of work, all these updates chipping at my traffic every update - and today I make less than my mortgage. New articles are not getting any traffic even though human written. What is all this for? Google AI overviews no ads, AI mode no ads. What is the point of all this? People came to my site discovered products and ROI was clear, now that is gone due to this crazy AI strategy. I am going to have to downgrade my server for the 2nd time now, honestly I am just thinking of pulling the whole lot. 20 years of serving content to 1-2 million people a month gone. Does google know what its really doing? How can this be profitable to them when no advertisor is even advertising on my keywords. They need to roll back ASAP or this is the new norm, advertisors won't keep advertising on stuff that does not ROI Google.

[christianz]

They need to roll back ASAP or this is the new norm, advertisors won't keep advertising on stuff that does not ROI Google.

What needs to be rolled back is entire 2025. For a while it looked like this last core might go in right direction but that seems to have been very weak effect.

What they should have done is supercharge the HCU to the max, ban all the "made for Google" slop entirely and permanently and never look back. But instead they spent the whole year diluting results with junk.

[RubicCubed]

ban all the "made for Google" slop

What's at the top of the SERPS is Google's own slop. Whatever organically ranks at #1 doesn't matter because ads, AI O, refinement boxes, carousels, etc. are all that users see and they rarely scroll beyond it. Google could in theory remove 100% of the slop appearing in the organic results and it have no measurable impact on traffic to the sites that remain.

I'm thinking either this year, or possibly next year, Google will remove organic results from most searches because users just aren't scrolling down that far to even see them. Organic results are already a little used feature, and maybe they don't want to remove them yet until we publishers are conditioned to accept very little or no traffic from Google. Once organic results are gone, Google will make more money by controlling the user experience and also save money by firing everyone who once worked on organic search.

[RedBar]

@jmcc ... nah

Seems to be after content rather than probing for WP vulnerabilities.

6 page site this morning 1,115 /wp-login.php attempts !

Very similar on other sites. BTW that attempt from UAB Host Baltic was made through GB.

[ichthyous]

I'm thinking either this year, or possibly next year, Google will remove organic results from most searches because users just aren't scrolling down that far to even see them. Organic results are already a little used feature, and maybe they don't want to remove them yet until we publishers are conditioned to accept very little or no traffic from Google.

Don't you think that this is a bit hyperbolic? Holidays are over and I am suddenly getting a lot more traffic. It is certainly not zero, and not even really down that much since AIO introduced. For my informational articles, yes, but the rest of my content is fine and so far about the same as last year.

Google is not going to make big moves and kill off its organic search any time soon. Most people depend on AI for quick answers or information that used to take several searches, so yes those searches are gone. For the rest of us people are still searching for actual physical products or unique information from a personal perspective. I really am sorry that some of you are getting wiped out by the lack of searches, but don't assume that it's the entire internet because it really isn't.

[RubicCubed]

Don't you think that this is a bit hyperbolic?

Not really when study after study has reported significant drops in traffic to publishers.

Google is not going to make big moves and kill off its organic search any time soon.

Would you consider AI Overviews and AI Mode to be minor changes to search? Many publishers, including myself, blame AI Overviews for extreme drops in traffic.

I really am sorry that some of you are getting wiped out by the lack of searches, but don't assume that it's the entire internet because it really isn't.

If one wants to understand how a monopoly exerts their dominance, one has to think like one. In every update there must be some winners to help offset the many more that lose. The ratio of winners to losers is widening with AI O taking a larger slice of winning pie. Just in one year, the percentage of AI O's in the SERPS has doubled. The fact that some are getting by now doesn't mean they will survive the next update which will consume even more free traffic from a well that is drying up fast.

[Shepherd]

massive crawl January 1st and 2nd 2026

[Martin Ice Web]

Happy New Year to everyone!

After the update our niche is full of 100% AI driven websites (commercial).
I would say 9 out of 10 are new AI webshops - never seen before.

The scary detail about this AI driven shops is, that AI descriptions are more biased to write positive characteristics ( whether they are true or not ).
If i read this descriptions the products connote that this item is perfect for everything - but it is not - it has descent disadvantages.

It seems that google did throw EAT completely over board.

[RedBar]

massive crawl January 1st and 2nd 2026

Hmmm ... Everything as expected here for those dates.

Also as expected my business traffic is down this morning which, if previous years are to go by, should steadily increase through the week however this of course depends just how maxed-out businesses / the public are.

[Micha]

It seems that google did throw EAT completely over board.

Absolutely. I can confirm your observation.

I’m seeing the same thing in both the area my shop operates in and in the topic area of my news site. On top of that, there are plenty of fake shops ranking well, including ones that offer products that don’t even exist. Aside from that, my news site has had virtually no Google traffic since mid-October, which means hardly any income.

[ichthyous]

The ratio of winners to losers is widening with AI O taking a larger slice of winning pie. Just in one year, the percentage of AI O's in the SERPS has doubled. The fact that some are getting by now doesn't mean they will survive the next update which will consume even more free traffic from a well that is drying up fast.

This is the real question. There's no doubt that we live in a world of tech monopolies, not just Google by a long shot. The US admin co-opted them all very effectively and is reinforcing this monopolistic stance, despite clear public opinion which mistrusts the tech giants and wants more regulation of them. The US public is unambiguous about not trusting AI at all. It will take a massive swing in voter behavior before any of this begins to get tackled. And considering how susceptible the US voter appears to be to propaganda running rampant on these same tech platforms, that change may not be coming any time soon.

Most owners of websites will probably not survive unless they can quickly transition to other platforms, which all have their own challenges and are hard to make a real living at. It's a bind, because overall employment is going down...and any jobs these former independent website owners could have taken are not likely to be abundant anymore. This again circles back to radical political turbulence coming our way. If I truly needed to support a family I would be looking at nursing school, becoming a plumber or an electrician. Tech, finance, even law are going to be whacked. My own field is being decimated...chief creative officers are making $600k a year (I know one, and I know what they are paying him) and they are using AI more and more, and so they are firing everyone else underneath to flatten the organizational layers.

Also to be considered are
1) generational change - GenZ simply isn't consuming information the same way as previous generations. They have job insecurity and are living with parents. They aren't likely to become a strong source of viable consumers any time soon.
2) Global economic shifts - we are seeing the unwinding of a previously stable world order. That is not conducive to spending or consumption. People save and hoard cash and resources in times like these. And now we have the former arbiter of that stable world acting in unstable and capricious ways. Watch out...

[jmccormac]

@RedBar May have been different from Code200. That's a scraper operation. The problem with relying on the country for an IP is that the country can be changed easily enough. The Huawei ranges have multiple countries assigned to their Cloud ranges and some Hong Kong operations have large numbers of US flagged IPs. With a dedicated server, it is probably a lot easier to drop the WP probes like the wp-login using iptables. MSFT is well the way to getting all of its Cloud ranges banned. There is some activity from Google Cloud but nothing close to the same magnitude.

@RubicCubed Google is pushing genune results down the page in an effort to monetise its SERPs. The problem with removing organic results is that it could cause a backlash against Google that could see its crawlers being blocked and regulatory investigations. The Web hasn't turned competely hostile against AI crawlers yet though some AI crawlers are being actively blocked by large sites and some large publishers (The New York Times (I think) took legal action against some AI scrapers. The main problem is the Chinese scrapers that simply do not respect copyrights. With Google being a US domiciled company, it seems to behave itself in the US and the EU. Chinese scrapers have no such qualms and this is leading to Chinese Cloud operations getting deep sixed by IP range and also by ASN.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

Just thinking about the E-A-T issue in terms of hacking and there is one possibility. I've seen it a lot with Conditional Access systems and it boils down to smart people making dangerous assumptions. The assumption, based on how AI shops and slop seem to be dominating Google's results, is that Google assumed that its AI system is too well designed to be gamed or hacked. And yet like any other unhackable system, it seems to be actively exploited. The assumption -- and it is carved on the tombstone of every unhackable CA system -- is that just because the designers couldn't hack it they thought that nobody else could either.

E-A-T seems to be a qualitative assessment. AI webspam depends on taking the content from E-A-T sites and "repurposing" it. Can Google's AI model tell the difference?: Has Google abandoned E-A-T in the hope that its AI will sort things out?

Regards...jmcc

[shadowlight]

my news site has had virtually no Google traffic since mid-October, which means hardly any income.

G news returned some results in the top 10 that were dated over a decade old a couple of days ago. Unbelievable.

[RubicCubed]

The problem with removing organic results is that it could cause a backlash against Google that could see its crawlers being blocked and regulatory investigations.

@jmccormac

The backlash already exists, though rather weak, due to publishers losing massive amounts of organic traffic. This tells me publishers have already been conditioned to accept very little traffic from Google moving forward. These same publishers won't block Google because receiving a few visits is better than none. Google hasn't faced much backlash from users either, which means what we see now is here to stay and surely will get worse for publishers.

Coping with regulatory risks is easily addressed by Google with citations in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Though we know very few users click on these citations, it's gives Google some protection from regulators. Google's argument will rely on those citations, being the new/evolved form of organic listings, replacing deprecated organic results. Google would argue displaying organic results would be redundant.

Whether organic results remain or not really doesn't matter much since few users see them now. A #1 rank that results in a dozen users daily once brought in 5K users daily. In reality organic results are nothing more than a token gesture by Google in our niche. It's entirely possible Google's plan is to wipe out more publishers so that there are few remaining that will scream once Google pulls the plug on organic results.

[rustybrick]

Anyone seeing any movement today?

[saladtosser]

@rustybrick Tiny movement on one serp i watch, one position movement on one site!

[jmccormac]

@RubicCubed I remeber the destruction caused by the Panda update. (Completely ignorant of the diversity of content on the Web and how people use it. That "thin content" excuse ignored how people develop their presences on the Werb and why some don't need a fully developed website along with SEO and analytics. It actually led to people using their Social Media presence as their website.) There was also that infamous blogpost by a now ex-Googler who seemed to want websites to be the equivalent Wikipedia with a shopping cart. (He also decided to lecture the European Commission on legislation over a fine imposed on Google despite having absolutely no expertise.) People make decisions that affect people actually creating the Web. And that's the problem in a nutshell.

Google has wormed its way into being the intermediary for many websites and webdevs have build businesses on that. In publishing, the key is to maintain an audience as well as growing it. The whole purpose of SEO seems to be to focus on the latter to the extent that many webdevs have become almost completely dependent on SE (typically Google given its market share) traffic. As has been seen with this and many other updates, they have put their commerical future in the hands of Google.

Concentrating on following the whims of Google and its updates is potentially lethal for publishers if they don't grow their own audience. That is the position in which many publishers have willingly put themselves.

Google's AI slop has added an extra level of danger for these publishers. The Web isn't a single market and it has multiple economies. For developing markets and countries, it is always good to target markets where the ROI on a site might be much higher than it is locally. This is a driving force behind many blog, shop and affiliate networks. The buying power of a Euro, Pound or Dollar might be much higher than that of the local currency. AI takes that article spinning to a new level. It facilitates competition with the very websites that the AI scraped. E-A-T might have been some way of dealing with this but the incentive to game Google's efforts is high and lucrative. Even high authority sites are targeted to build the profile of some of these AI churned sites.

The regulatory risks for Google of completely dropping organic results are very hight especially in the EU. The EU has been much more adversarial than the US when it comes to Google acting like a monopoly. It won't make any difference to those who have had their businesses wrecked by Google and its updates.

Regards...jmcc

[jmccormac]

@Rustybrick Some slight improvement.Traffic-wise it is the first week back to work for a lot of people so that is not unusual.

Regards...jmcc

[Micha]

Anyone seeing any movement today?

In Germany, things are quiet, with only the usual minor fluctuations.

[Martin Ice Web]

what this last Core update did to our vertical:

Bad things:
-affiliate sites are back ( bad user experience )
-404er ( very bad user experience )
-AI driven websites ( bad user experience )
-foreign websites from all over the world ( bad user experience )
-webshops that for sure do not have any skills or tech-basics what they are selling ( very bad user experience )



good things:
-google makes more money

[Micha]

@martin Ha ha ha, that perfectly describes what you can see here at the moment.

[Samsam1978]

I saw massive adsense drop 5th and 6th PV are down. They did something again. The fact that advertisors are now forced to use AI auctions so they can't manually tweak is going to effect earnings. I think given AI Overviews is now nearly 2 years old, that and stupid updates all the time that remove traffic, grouped with the slop above organic results (so users can't be bothered to scroll past all the videos, forums, AI overviews) means for Google they are going/or facing massive advertisor drops in budgets. Q1 of 2026 I predict is going to be the time we will see in the accounts the impact of this AI strategy. AI does not pay, advertisors don't want to be on these pages, they yeild no discoverability so people don't buy the products. I use AI for helping me collate documents, do admin tasks - not search the internet. Google is to search the internet but right now I don't really want to as it is so full of AI slop created by Google themselves. My website link in AI overviews went over to Reddit! The whole thing is broken. It needs to rollback to before AI even came out to make sure the websites made are legit human written content. People don't want to read AI for information unless it is a quick answer like 2343/343 or short answers. AI OVERVIEWS need a BUTTON it is being forced on people that don't like/or want to use it.

[RedBar]

@MIW

-foreign websites from all over the world ( bad user experience )

Bad because they are foreign or bad because they have poor information etc?

If they are quality sites with relevant information meanwhile the other examples are poor then something, again, is wrong, however if there are quality non-ranking German sites G really needs to get itself sorted out.

I write as a foreign site owner trying to rank in many SERPs since my widget trade is truly global with global competition.