March 2026 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

Weird month: News site back in Discover, so numbers are good, revenue is okay, even though RPM is still pretty low. Shop revenue up a whopping 44% compared to February last year.

Overall: The ranking is jumping back and forth, which is really wild. But for the first time in a long time, I can finally be satisfied again.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:24 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

Yes, something happened yesterday, or rather on Saturday: Discover suddenly reappeared, our ranking rose sharply according to Sistrix, and we suddenly outstripped the big news sites in our field. Finally, something to be happy about.

Shop: Sales suddenly started to increase on Friday, Saturday was still weak, but yesterday was a boom and today is also very good. Our ranking has also risen. So something is happening right now, I'm curious to see if it stays that way.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, so we got hit very hard. It is now more than 80%, besides the fact that we are ranking even better than before for many terms.

[Micha]

@martin The fluctuations are currently severe. I'm glad that the shop continues to achieve good sales, but the news site is fluctuating back and forth in the rankings. Traffic is okay today, but yesterday's ranking gains are gone again.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, i figured out that google messed up our descriptions, pics and metas in serps. Users get a total different item as expected from serps.

[makintocheplus]

Lot of Bot traffic lately... causing RPM to drop significantly, from Singapore... added WAF rule in Cloudflare to challenge/block.

[markRg]

If you're looking at RPM in AdSense, try checking Impressions RPM instead - it shows more accurate numbers than Page RPM

[RubicCubed]

Lot of Bot traffic lately...

I'm convinced Google is using these bots to skew our traffic stats. During those rare periods when Google does send traffic, the bots almost completely disappear. I think Google is using these bots as void fill when Google is siphoning off a lot of legitimate traffic. I'm not saying Google is running a botnet, but they're allowing scrapers into search and stripping the referrer from the links those scrapers find in Google before they land on our site. I know, some will say it's a far fetched theory. But coming from a company that is nothing but smoke and mirrors, saying clicks are growing out of one side of their mouth and the web is in rapid decline out of the other, it's a plausible theory. One thing I'm sure of, and numerous courts agree having handed Google a series of antitrust guilty verdicts, Google just doesn't play fair and can never be trusted.

[markRg]

Google hasn't been a “corporation of good” for a long time, and they forgot about the slogan "Don't be evil". I don't want to be a lawyer for the corporation.

But your message already sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory. I have many websites, a lot of traffic, and a huge amount of bot traffic on my sites. I can say for sure that bot traffic does not affect Google AdSense revenue in any way, and it does not affect traffic from search engines. It only ruins statistics and loads the servers that's all.

I even developed my own statistics system for my sites to track this. Bot traffic is easy to distinguish: it comes from data centers and their AS networks. Of course, there is also traffic through residential proxies.

[gronetwork]

Yes, it's odd that during major Google Core updates, the bot stream completely stops, as it did in December 2025. These bots only serve to extract data from the web to train AI. Are they all controlled by Google? probably not. Personally, I've never seen "Google-Extended," which is supposed to be the one that collect data for AI training. If you look at the Apache logs, you'll see millions of IP addresses (from all over the world) massively extracting data from the website, methodically and alphabetically (like if it would just be one bot). The companies that manage them must have an incredibly complex system.

There's no real alternative to Cloudflare; it would be easy to list all these IP addresses, as they always come from the same IP ranges. Residential proxies also use the same IP ranges; it would simply be a matter of submitting challenges to these IP addresses. Processing these ranges one by one is tedious.

And it's strange that by 2026, no new alternative search engines, pro humans, had emerged to try to preserve the open web and fight against these gigantic closed ecosystems. The general public seems content with TikTok, YouTube, and AI chats, despite incomplete or hallucinated information. When you ask a question to GPT/Gemini/Claude, most of the time the answer will be different, the sources very vague, and if you do your own web search, you'll find that the answer is still often wrong; or non existant: the agents being unable to admit their ignorance.

[ichthyous]

Very poor traffic again...another drop in top ranking terms and traffic -20% for the USA, and down across the board internationally. I really don't see how the update ever ended. We had a couple of days of good traffic and back to the same patterns as during the update...

[Maleda]

@ichthyous we're also experiencing a drop in traffic too (UK based), Semrush sensor hasn't dropped below 9 now since mid February, and our own keyword tracking via Serpfox is seeing almost hourly fluctuations, so I think there's still an ongoing update although this hasn't been confirmed by Google.

[ichthyous]

Every day now a new catastrophe...terms I have ranked at the top for for a decade or more, since yesterday a 66% loss of traffic to that page on my site. I searched and my site has vanished...not on the first 11 pages at all.

The only thing I can say is that some very good quality and high-ranking sites went down along with me...I can't find them either. Replaced with endless stream of 'how-to' youtube videos, as if anyone needs page after page of youtube videos repeating the same content over and over! This might be temporary, but when Google does this for six weeks straight to a rotating selection of your pages it really destroys business.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@ichthyous

Same here. A few good days but all good days end rather quickly. Now its just daily traffic drops AGAIN!. Currently -35% compared to January and revenue is now falling too. Currently looking at two bad months in a row right now. I also did a random search in my niche yesterday and, to no real surprise, only saw 3 website blue links. All buried in between images and Youtube videos. It's funny I still have images of my site being in rank 1 before the AIO was released. I took a picture of it as I thought it was a big deal back then, my how things change and, sadly, not for the good. Just greed. Now, just like others, my site no longer ranks on page 1 let alone rank 1

Huge drop in impressions. Ranking fluctuations. It does damage business and motivation. Hoping its temporary but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. I had a huge wall of text written before this site went down, I assume due to bots? But I'll say what the point of that message was about. Long story short, search engines, including Google want us dead. They announced the ''update' was over. Even mentioned as much on their website. The fact it hasn't. Is this now our new normal. A constant never-ending ''update''

Annoying. I had huge hopes for the site and really wanted it to grow. Become something. Had a lot riding on it. Alas, consistent, or any kind of growth is so hard to come by now.. Unfortunately..

[morpheus83]

This update is the longest, I dont think even the Oct 23 HCU lasted this long.

[Maleda]

Would love to know what the end goal is for Google... by increasingly pushing the end user into using their AI overviews, keeping them within their own ecosystem, and therefore reducing traffic to external sites they must realise that the majority of these sites they rely on to feed their AI will eventually disappear due to lack of visitors.

Disappearing sites = less content to feed their AI = Inaccurate data = Unhappy users

I'm struggling to understand what their long term plan is.

Sorry, just moaning out loud.

[Micha]

Something's going on today; traffic has plummeted, no matter which website I look at (including mine).

I'm struggling to understand what their long term plan is.

Forcing the internet into its own ecosystem, satisfying shareholders, money, money, and money

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,, after two days of "good" (what is good?) traffic, we see the traffic decline too. It is even worse today (-50% so far).
But there is one thing that is different: bot activity is very low too

[Micha]

@martin Traffic to my news site spiked again at noon today; now I'm curious to see if the shop will follow suit.

[RedBar]

Mostly yesterday but also into today the good old MSFT WordPress probes have been attacking all my sites, thousands of utterly pointless page attempts since they just get batted away. Interestingly MSFT is the only one still attempting this, there is the occasional new one but all the others from late Autumn seem to have stopped for the moment.

Traffic across all sites is averaging -20% and on my own sites generating no identifiable new genuine business enquiries. Our local hotel venue's traffic is well down for the time of year BUT it has a full house many of which are regular bookings.

One thing that is very noticeable in the hotel is that residents rarely socialise later on. I can only put that down to the huge increase in drinks prices and, I shall be honest here, even I have stopped drinking there on a regular basis!

[morpheus83]

There is no end to the flactuations, last weekend was a ray of hope but after that swings continued and each passing day the traffic dropped slowly and today we are at dismal levels.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Bing is the exact same right now. Both B and G are in constant daily drop mode. In fact looking into it, these drops have been on-going as far back as January, if not longer. So it is a really long ''update'' if this is actually going to end? I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. I actually read an article some months back about members of Google talking about completely removing sites altogether being an idea. It was them contemplating the thought at the time but I wouldn't be surprised if they went ahead with it. With the amount of garbage and what the SERP currently looks like, its certainly possible.

Due to the amount of garbage on the search, traffic is terrible even if a rare increase shows. So good traffic increases is an over exaggeration. I'll admit. I'm just lucky to have other sources that seem to be working. But for how long, who knows? But I doubt we will see good traffic any more unless the SERP was cleaned up, highly unlikely to happen though, sadly.. Good days are over.. It's really disturbing how a company as big as G. who owns the monopoly. Who is practically Skynet. Can only give you the same amount of traffic as another, similar company, with the only difference being they don't have a monopoly. Gives you a good idea of what real greed truly looks like

Thankfully due to other sources the revenue is increasing again. Alas, overall traffic is still -30%

[ichthyous]

I'm still seeing a constant erosion of top-3 ranking terms...at first very large drops and now a slow drip of losses each day. Visibility for the the high-traffic terms that has been whacked in a round-robin fashion for six weeks is recovering for the second time. I had disappeared completely but snapped back into place again for some terms, but the ranking is jumping around a lot.

The results are now absolutely packed with "how to" articles and how-to youtube videos page after page....lots of new small sites but basically all repeating the same content. It strikes me that Google is weeding out anything that might be e-comm or sales oriented completely from the main results and segmenting those sites into the shopping tab only. That won't be good for me as my customers aren't looking to buy the cheap crap that predominates in the large ecomm sites which dominate the shopping results.

[Micha]

Google seems to have it in for online stores. Our store is currently getting a lot of traffic from Google, but zero sales from visitors coming from Google. Our news site, on the other hand, is booming. As for the rankings, they’re still changing practically by the hour, and according to Semrush, an update is still underway..

[RedBar]

Without being political I am seeing devastation in my global construction sector with projects being postponed indefinitely and current production supplies put "on-hold". Trade associations "claim" ME cancellations are down 40%, many shipping companies are not accepting new consignments and, obviously, being extremely careful if / when quoting costings.

I'm not even sure if the survival of the fittest applies any longer but what I am being informed is that there may deinitely be a change in attitude by many producers towards some export markets.

[Fixithome]

From what I’ve observed in the past couple of weeks, Google’s SERPs have been unusually volatile. Some keywords are moving between page 1 and page 2 almost daily, which suggests Google may be testing smaller algorithm adjustments rather than rolling out one large update.

One noticeable trend is that topical authority and brand signals seem to matter more now. Sites that publish consistent, niche-focused content appear more stable compared to sites pushing large volumes of generic AI content.

For example, in the home improvement and interior design niche, a site I work with called Fixit Home focuses mainly on flooring, carpets, curtains, blinds, and interior fit-out guides. Pages that provide practical project insights and structured internal linking seem to be holding rankings better despite the recent fluctuations.

So far the pattern I’m seeing is:
• stronger brand/entity signals
• more importance on topical clusters
• weaker performance from thin or repetitive content

[Martin Ice Web]

So far the pattern I’m seeing is:
• stronger brand/entity signals
• more importance on topical clusters
• weaker performance from thin or repetitive content

I can not see this but the opposite.

[christianz]

So far the pattern I’m seeing is:
• stronger brand/entity signals
• more importance on topical clusters
• weaker performance from thin or repetitive content

I think you are right. In this version of Google it doesn't matter that you have the best and most relevant content. You need to:

A) Set up a brick & mortar office on Fifth Avenue and reference this address in your site
B) Become a government organization and host your site under .org domain
C) Wrap all your useful content in useless AI slop to avoid "thin content"

[Micha]

@chistianz What? I thought you just had to parrot the nonsense that self-proclaimed SEO experts spout all day long

[ichthyous]

From what I’ve observed in the past couple of weeks, Google’s SERPs have been unusually volatile. Some keywords are moving between page 1 and page 2 almost daily, which suggests Google may be testing smaller algorithm adjustments rather than rolling out one large update.

One noticeable trend is that topical authority and brand signals seem to matter more now. Sites that publish consistent, niche-focused content appear more stable compared to sites pushing large volumes of generic AI content.

I would agree with this...we are seeing a constant update and my bet is that it won't end, it will just keep updating daily. I am seeing different parts of my site vanish entirely...going from ranking top 3 to non-existent and an 80%+ loss in traffic. A few days later it pops back into place again. This has been rolling for almost two months now.

I would also agree that Google is favoring results with very narrow topics and focus. My site does not contain any AI-gen content at all, but it does depend on broad categories and each of them functions as a kind of site within a site. These larger and broader sites are getting whacked. I dropped 10 top 3 ranking terms overnight...since this all started I have lost almost a quarter of my top ranking terms. Haven't seen that kind of move in years. And the drops continue.

[Micha]

There was another drop today; Discover is stagnating, and the rankings have plummeted (it’s funny to watch: for my main keyword, the top three spots change every time I refresh the browser). The shop is also stagnating right now. Same story: the rankings have plummeted. And according to Semrush, there’s still a lot of activity; it hasn’t stopped since mid-February. It would be nice to finally figure out what Google is up to.