February 2026 Google Search Observations

[jmccormac]

@Christianz That is is a fascinating insight. All of the SG maggots I have seen are just scraping raw html. There have been a few Starlink attempts on other pages but those pages are rate limited. What I have seen in some of the monthly gTLD Website/IP surveys is that some gTLD websites are hosted on Starlink customer IPs. Given the rise of residental proxies, there may also be a connection there with some of the SG maggots (crawlers and spiders being from search engines, maggots being from AI/scraper botnets).

Regards...jmcc

[edited by: not2easy at 11:48 am (utc) on Feb 11, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

@RedBar No, whiplash from all the head-shaking over the nonsense this Google update is causing right now

I had proper Discover traffic again, but general rankings are going up and down. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Google’s systems are running amok.

[Martin Ice Web]

Since yesterday traffic is in free fall.
User engagement: 0
Zombies: 100%
Bots: up again

[seokees]

We're so depressed of the bad traffic (in more ways than one), that we are still in the Jan 2026 instead of a new Feb 26 post ;)

[morpheus83]

So true @seokees. The downward swings are just so wild that you just loose complete hope in what you are doing. The recalibration or as we used to say in the earlier days Google Dance has started once again.

[Da_Guv]

One thing that may help (or not) in stopping the Singapore (or other) bots - it worked for me. Get your latest website log file and upload it (if too large then select a few hundred lines of the latest entries) to Chat GPT or Claude to analyse. Explain the behaviour and ask it to look for problems. It found out that the Singapore traffic was emanating primarily from a range of IPs owned by Ali Baba (notorious #*$!s) and gave me instructions on how to create inbound firewall rules that block that range of IPs. In half an hour they were all gone and haven't returned. Not sure if this works with other ranges, but I am working on it.

[RedBar]

Good one Da_Guv ... I've pretty much stopped all the bad bots except the MSFT ones, also from Singapore, and a couple out of Lithuania, with 90+% of them getting a 401, 403 or 404, but for how long is anyone's guess.

3 small sites I've simply 301d to an alternative search engine as an experiment to see what these bots will do when something / someone realises they are achieving nothing. Does anyone have any idea?

I was going to 301 to Bing but thought a smaller, alternative SE may provide some fun.

[ichthyous]

One thing that may help (or not) in stopping the Singapore (or other) bots - it worked for me. Get your latest website log file and upload it (if too large then select a few hundred lines of the latest entries) to Chat GPT or Claude to analyse. Explain the behaviour and ask it to look for problems. It found out that the Singapore traffic was emanating primarily from a range of IPs owned by Ali Baba (notorious #*$!s) and gave me instructions on how to create inbound firewall rules that block that range of IPs. In half an hour they were all gone and haven't returned. Not sure if this works with other ranges, but I am working on it.

Great practical advice...I never thought to let AI analyze my log files. I use Cloudflare rules, but sometimes the rules just aren't that effective.

[ichthyous]

Is it me, or was there a substantial drop in USA traffic on Sunday, Monday, and now Tuesday? I cracked Sunday up to the superbowl, as it was only USA traffic that was down...but yesterday traffic was way down from everywhere. Today not as bad, but still sluggish in the USA.

This also coincides with a big drop in inquiries...it wasn't great before, but now not one new inquiry since the 4th other than people asking me for employment, internships, or if I need their various services.

[Martin Ice Web]

Massive drop tonight -50% and big attack of bots ( >200%).

[Micha]

Okay: RPM is rising, traffic is rising, ranking is rising. My news site is coming back to life. Shop: Yesterday saw more sales than ever before in a single day. It won't last long, but at least there's life in the place again.

We finally have the bots under control... the filter rules are working, a few still get through, but the number is now low.

[morpheus83]

Good for you Micha, I am assuming your shop and news website is in german? I ask because the discover update is targeted at English content for now.

[Micha]

Yep, both in German. I'm looking forward to the update. If I understand correctly, we should benefit from it, as the news site is the only one of its kind in Germany, but with Google, you never know.

[RedBar]

11+ hours gone and my global site so far is at 21% of its normal traffic whereas I would expect it to be 50+% ... hmmmm ... UK sites also well down however this can often recover, we'll see.

[morpheus83]

Anyone else seeing traffic from China?

[RedBar]

@Micha

We finally have the bots under control... the filter rules are working, a few still get through, but the number is now low.

I'm in the same position but what visually annoys me, with this morning UAB Baltic hitting 3 sites for 1,100+ pages each all wp-login.php, is that whilst they are all 403d for very minimal bandwidth, I see their ridiculous attempts in my graphs etc and have to manually adjust the statistics to read, and look, correct.

Do you have a solution to this?

[Micha]

@RedBar Since I use goAccess and Matomo: with goAccess it was easy, I just had to tweak the configuration a little. With Matomo, however, I have no idea yet how to solve this. What might help you: protect wp-admin via htaccess password query, which is more secure anyway.

[Juniya]

@RedBar, you can code your own plugin or use several out there that hide the wp-login url with a click. I used to do this with my sites back in the day, worked well, can't remember why I stopped doing it.

[RedBar]

Thanks, I don't even use WP but here I am successfully fendimg off mass WP probe attempts whose bandwth usage was getting silly but now down to single figure MBs.

[makintocheplus]

My french site lost lot of its rankings, with RPM at its lowest in years...
I just hope to make it to minimum AdSense payment this month...

[christianz]

Can Google get back to ranking useful websites/apps instead of just ranking MFA spam like they insist on doing over the past 15 months?

[Martin Ice Web]

After recovering from November update , we lost about 80% of our good traffic with the update on 12.02.

Every time when it is looking good google changes things to the bad.

[Micha]

I would really like to understand what Google is trying to achieve with its latest update. Spam is on the rise and Discover is going completely crazy. My news site has a little more traffic, but the ranking jumps have gotten even worse. The shop has seen a decline in sales since yesterday.

Other shops are also reporting sharp declines, even though traffic has not fallen but risen.

[christianz]

Other shops are also reporting sharp declines, even though traffic has not fallen but risen.

Shops are probably receiving non-converting mismatched traffic because "a store" is one of the "square hole, round hole, triangular hole" type of cookie cutter "shapes" of websites this dumb ranking algo understands and thinks are "credible".

Stores are also obligated (at least in EU) to publish their legal entity and address visibly on the page. This is again - huuuuuuuuge signal of endless expertise trustworthiness and topical insight and frankly competence in any topic.

Things that Google is not evaluating are the actual content and actual usefulness of the site, and relevance to the original query.

[morpheus83]

Looking at Google Analytics is the new horror since the update has started.

[christianz]

Looking at Google Analytics is the new horror since the update has started.

Yeah I never seen numbers this low. And this has nothing to do with Discover either.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Can only echo the past few posts regarding G Analytics. Every single day is a traffic drop. With yesterday being the biggest drop this year, so far.. Why? What is going on? How much tolerance does one need? I wouldn't use Analytics but my revenue provider uses it leaving me with little choice

Anyway I have, now, blocked the Singapore bots. They still try but no longer get anywhere. If my revenue drops due to bot traffic then I find little use in having them around. So they join the German bots in block jail..

[BigKat]

With yesterday being the biggest drop this year, so far.. Why? What is going on?

I'm seeing a big increase in AI Overviews here in the US. Maybe that's to blame?

[Micha]

@christianz That's right, but it doesn't explain the sharp decline over the last three days. Semrush and others are showing significant movements on Google, so there's definitely an update underway.

I can also see that the ranking of my news site is fluctuating extremely strongly, more than usual. I'm glad that Discover traffic is back and RPM continues to rise, and I'm slowly getting back into the zone where at least my costs are covered. However, the shop is suffering badly. After a really good first half of the month, it's now the third day of stagnation. What's noticeable is that, according to Matomo, visitors from Germany are declining, while those from non-German-speaking countries are increasing, which is pointless because we only sell in Germany.

[BigKat]

those from non-German-speaking countries are increasing, which is pointless because we only sell in Germany.

I see the same in the US. Currency is set to USD on our site, structured data and also in our product feeds. Despite this, Google is doing an absolute terrible job with geo location. But what is Google doing right these days to improve the UX? Clearly Google is placing profits over usability and usefulness. Thankfully the other search engines are picking up a little of the slack from Google's many failures.

[ichthyous]

I'm in the same position but what visually annoys me, with this morning UAB Baltic hitting 3 sites for 1,100+ pages each all wp-login.php, is that whilst they are all 403d for very minimal bandwidth, I see their ridiculous attempts in my graphs etc and have to manually adjust the statistics to read, and look, correct.

Just get cloudflare...you will never win this game doing it at the server level. I have a master rule set up to deny all of these requests for files that don't even exist on my site. CF denies the request and it never even hits my own server so no slowdown. You can keep adding filenames over time as you see the requests.