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]

[jmccormac]

Just on the MSFT/IN problem, I noticed a few changes in RIPE IP ranges assocated with MSFT. They changed their netname to "cloud" but the ranges are showing up in many countries. Basically, an IP address can be assigned a country in a geofeed file that is often made available by the IP address range owner. Microsoft's geofeed file (CSV format) is available on

[microsoft.com...]

The geofeed format gives the subnet range, the country, the zipcode and city for most ranges. It is also possible to do a WHOIS query on an MSFT IP and get the larger range without any of those details.

Ironically, for all Google's waffle about geofeeds, it doesn't seem to publish one for its Google Cloud ranges. Given that Google has seemingly bet the farm on AI, a lot of the scraped content will probably end up on AI generated webspam sites that are competing with real websites.

Regards...jmcc

[RubicCubed]

I'm seeing a lot more AI Overviews in search to take even more of our traffic away. Any others seeing the same?

This is highway robbery!

[RedBar]

Just on the MSFT/IN problem

It's interesting that Awstats indicates that these are USA visitors however, again thanks to Awstats, the MSFT IPs given track to AU / IN / JP./ KR / SG with the occasional other country.

[jmccormac]

It is down to how the larger ranges for MSFT are treated by the software. On a WHOIS lookup, most of the large MSFT ranges are US ranges. It is only in the geofeeds that the ranges are broken down by country. Google Analytics might be somewhat more accurate. This is one of the MSFT IP ranges that popped up in RIPE with India as the country.

inetnum: 57.159.0.0 - 57.159.255.255
netname: cloud
country: IN

Most Indian IP ranges are in the APNIC (Asia Pacific NIC) regional internet registry. The 20.bbb.ccc.ddd and 40.bbb.ccc.ddd ranges are generally handled by the American regiistry (ARIN). The range owners can designate the country for IP ranges and it makes things more complex for any software or IP geolocation service. At this stage, the best thing to do with MSFT ranges is to block everything and only allow legitimate Bing IPs or Duckduckgo IPs. It is easier at a server level (httpd.conf or iptables) than at shared hosting level (.htaccess).

Regards...jmcc



Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed and my attempts seem to be working including cutting 20.xxx block down to 10s of pages.

What this has also revealed on some of the smaller specialist sites is just how very little traffic those sites actually have, at the moment some are down 80+%. It's definitely review time!

[Micha]

Do you remember the days when you could make serious money with extreme clickbait because Google was ranking it very prominently? I’m starting to feel like those times are coming back.

For weeks now, Discover has been barely usable. More and more websites are appearing that claim to belong to real businesses. Tree nurseries, building inspection companies, fire protection services, and similar trades. Many of these sites have only been publishing since January and are pumping out clearly AI-generated articles with headlines like: “Seit ich diesen Trick nutze, habe ich im Winter weniger Probleme im Haushalt.”
Translation: “Since I started using this simple trick, I’ve had fewer household problems during winter.” And Google is sending them a lot of traffic.

Many of my friends also say that their feeds are full of this kind of content. Naturally, well-researched articles cannot compete with that. So we’re now competing with AI-driven nonsense and, frankly, moving backwards in terms of quality. At this point, you just feel like banging your head against the desk.

In Germany, the state media authorities have launched an investigation into whether Google’s AI mode and Perplexity’s AI search threaten media diversity and freedom of information. Unfortunately, I only have a German-language source for this: [handelsblatt.com ]

[Da_Guv]

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.

I have been fighting the Singapore problem since Friday, when my Adsense earnings tanked. The Singapore traffic has been around for a few weeks but it suddenly ramped up on Saturday and the bottom dropped out of my Adsense. This is odd because it was targeting my login and register pages, which have no ads on them.

I've seen others talking about a huge drop in Adsense in January after being attacked by the Singapore bots - same catastrophic decline. If it continues like this I'm dead in the water, having run the same site for 20 years.

So I've been working on trying to stop it and had limited success. My AI worked out that it was originating from Alibaba, so I nuked that range in Windows Firewall (geoblocking doesn't work, obviously). The traffic from Singapore stopped dead - from 1,800 active 'users' to 0. But that only lasted two hours, then it started up again.

The AI reckons there are two phases to this attack - once I whacked the Alibaba ASN, it switched to residential IP rotation using consumer ISPs, residential broadband, mobile networks and the like over a low, slow distribution. This would fit the Starlink theory posited above.

I have never seen anything like this and have no idea how to combat it, but am wondering if this is actually a targeted attack on Adsense. If many of us are losing revenue, so is Google. Lotta folks don't like Google.

Any ideas on how to combat this? Rate limiting doesn't work because of the low, slow distribution.

[Dooku]

Any ideas on how to combat this?

The ONLY ways is to get your website on Cloudflare. Block ALL ASN's from the well known network transit providers, like from Singapore and China. And for the residential IP's you need to create a Managed Challenge rule that challenges bots that land on a product or article page directly with EMPTY referrer (different than no referrer!), and registers their cookie state and if they run JS. Then the residential AI scraping bots and other cr@p will stop because it eats too much resources and effort for them so they move on.

[RedBar]

Has there been an update? I ask for two reasons:

1. A well above average genuine trafffic volume.

2. Several retail / Joe Public enquiries from the USA in the last 24 hours, usually I only get 2 or 3 a month.

Pure coincidence?

[Martin Ice Web]

@Redbar,
i SAW that too. 3 days of very good traffic. But yesterday in the evening: BAM. Big drop.

[RedBar]

Another solid traffic day across all sites for me especially my global site however it is still noticeable that the West is not as active as it used to be, Eurasia is where it's at for me. Mr MSFT visited a few times this morning, in fact apart from MSFT, Amazon visited one site with a new IP range ... Blocked:-)

[christianz]

For me the last "solid traffic day" was probably 12 months ago. There hasn't been one since. Google is constantly getting worse and worse.

I did a search related to specific eye disease symptoms, and after AI Overview, AI Q&A and several largely OK results I get the following:

#5 - Wikipedia article of Mark David Chapman (guy who killed John Lennon).
#6 - Article about psychiatry of Breivik terror attacks in National Institutes of Health
#7 - Vaguely related research PDF
#8 - Middle Tennessee Scheduled Lane Closures for February 1 to 7
#9 - Designboom article about facade of some Chinese cafe
#10 - Woodworking subreddit post about how to design a "Latch for a huge round door"
#11 - Business News article about "New Plover YMCA expected to open this year"
#12 - Jeruselam Post - "Why Zionism and goal-setting go hand in hand"
#13 - DMCI Homes - website of some company that turns recycled waste into concrete hollow blocks
#14 - January Book Review by "Najet" on Substack
#15 - Wikipedia article of Manhattan

NO MORE RESULTS.

[BigKat]

Traffic from Google continues to deteriorate. About the only good thing is the DOJ announced they were appealing [theverge.com...] the remedies that judge imposed on Google in the antitrust search case.

[Juniya]

Google has fallen off the deep end, I was searching for something and on the front page it showed a website/domain that has been clearly hacked and for a very long time and the other results are of websites from 10 years ago, maybe there is a major glitch? What is going on behind the scenes? I am starting to think there is an even bigger plot than we are imagining going on.

[ichthyous]

The ONLY ways is to get your website on Cloudflare. Block ALL ASN's from the well known network transit providers, like from Singapore and China. And for the residential IP's you need to create a Managed Challenge rule that challenges bots that land on a product or article page directly with EMPTY referrer (different than no referrer!), and registers their cookie state and if they run JS. Then the residential AI scraping bots and other cr@p will stop because it eats too much resources and effort for them so they move on.

@Dooku. I have been busy blocking entire ASN from Singapore recently. I have all traffic from IN and SG set up for managed challenge...but it really doesn't work, they still get through. I have China set to interactive challenge and it blocks almost everything.

I tried to set up an interactive challenge rule for all Singapore hits with no referrer, but it just doesn't work. Can you please explain how you managed to get it to work in a PM? Thanks!

[RedBar]

Is it just me or has Statcounter's display broken ?

[not2easy]

I read that Statcounter is making some changes, something about not counting non-humans. Data overload or something.

[Samsam1978]

Google earnings 400Billion = now close to the whole of pakistain GTP - but share price falls due to the 185 billion Capex.

Search +17%
Cloude +48%
Subs +17%
Youtube +9%
Network -2%
Other -8%

Seen 15% drop since the AI overviews > to AI mode change. I found myself in AI mode on more than one occassion by accident while doing personal searches.

[Martin Ice Web]

Very strange behaviour yesterday: traffic from google stopped in the late evening. Not one visit from google-users for half an hour.
The strange thing is, that bots stopped at the same time. Not one bot in this half an hour.

Server was OK (100% Health)

Traffic came back with -50%, 100% mismatched , Zero user engagement.
Bots 50% more than before.

[Micha]

@martin, that's interesting, because that's exactly what happened to me. At 6:30 p.m. sharp, Google traffic dropped off. Almost exactly 30 minutes later, the bots were suddenly gone too.

[morpheus83]

Traffic is in the dumps since two days and have received 20+ emails for link buying. So yes, a major update is on the way.

[christianz]

Yes pretty huge drop for 2 days. And from already laughably low levels, of course.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ Micha, the bots are complete gone? Did not come back?

[ichthyous]

Just watching a CNBC tech stock analyst discussing Google's earnings today on "Closing Bell Overtime". He mentions that Google's searches are now at 80%+ zero clicks out due to the success of AIO. He said that means that Google has a lot of room to claim more revenue per search, since it doesn't have to share anything with publishers anymore and can keep all the visitors within it's own ecosystem. It's interesting to hear how Wall Street see the picture...no problem if there is no original content being created anymore due to Google not referring traffic, or if the AI becomes pure slop since it has no fresh data to feed on, or if the internet shrinks up and dies...as long as Google's profit increases in the short term it's fine by them.

[Micha]

These “secret” updates really annoying. Traffic from Google has plummeted, RPM has fallen even further, and there's no point even talking about revenue anymore. It's exactly the same with the shop. If Google were at least honest for once, they would just shut down their crappy search engine, leave only an AI window, and everyone would know where they stand, but this back and forth is just exhausting.

@martin They came back, and there were more of them, or rather, there still are.

[Dooku]

as long as Google's profit increases in the short term it's fine by them.

The "key word" here is short term. The slop is now really getting out of hand, just look around. Also in youtube where now entire channels are created talking ABOUT youtube AI slop and content slop on websites. And the actual AI slop video's which have increased so much that you need to check first if you are looking at actual content created by a person?
Google is now effectively sh|tting in their own living room until the stench is unbearable and there are hardly any eyeballs left to see the ads......and advertisers will leave.

[ichthyous]

And the actual AI slop video's which have increased so much that you need to check first if you are looking at actual content created by a person?

Dooku I watch several channels which are 100% AI gen images and voiceover, however the narrative presented is phenomenal. They are typically videos about economics and historical themes. I know the difference, and there is some serious research being put into the videos, they are not 100% slop where the actual factual information is concerned...but the silly impressionist paining-like visuals, or cartoon visuals all using the same AI voices make it hard to determine what is what.

I realized many of these channels are being produced in places where they know people won't watch the video if they use their real identities...i.e. I traced one of my favorite channels back to the source in Africa. So they cover with AI generated visuals hoping to attract a wider audience. But the information can often be quite good. Have to take it on a case by case basis.

[RedBar]

I had a strange surprise today when several of my most popular widget videos had way more views than usual therefore I performed a G Video search to check the results. My surprise was that the first 20 results were all Instagram, not one YouTube, what's going on there?

[RedBar]

Is The Net broken or are you all on holiday?