April 2026 Google Search Observations

[Martin Ice Web]

from now on I would say we call the updates: core-downgrades – best of two worlds: spam and ads

[edited by: not2easy at 3:07 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[capulkit]

From last 20 days, Google is deindexing my pages. Have drop of 50% in traffic. I have 10 million pages and not a single of it is spam. Site has been running since 2017 and never had spam issue.

[Micha]

Hmm, I guess I’m the exception. My news site is getting better and better. Discover is driving a lot of traffic, we’re getting more traffic from the news section, and organic traffic is also on the rise. The shop is also running very smoothly right now.

So, I’m just going to enjoy a little peace and quiet for now, until the next chaos hits.

[Martin Ice Web]

Started on friday we saw the biggest drop ever seen. we are right now down to 20%. Replaced by nonsense websites.
google ignores keywords in queries and show complete unrelated results.

@Micha, i am happy for you. Hope it keeps up.

[RedBar]

at $25 per month if you can't afford that then you really don't have a viable business.

For me it's absolutely nothing to do about cost, it's about understanding and being in control of one's websites. If someone wants to outsource and pay for a service that may or may not work, that's fine, however personally I like to solve issues myself which I definitely have done with an excellent piece of code.

I understand that the WordPress issue is not a WP issue per se but a plug-in and / or themes problem.

[Atif]

But honestly, every time there’s a core update, the same pattern happens — sites that were comfortable get reshuffled, and it feels like a downgrade rather than an improvement.

[absheikhh]

I get the frustration, but I don’t think it’s just “Google killing the web.”
What I’m seeing is more of a shift:
Informational traffic is dropping (AI overviews = more zero-click searches)
But intent-based traffic is still there, just harder to capture
Also noticed the same pattern some mentioned, conversions spike right before updates, then drop after rollout. Feels like SERPs get reshuffled and intent gets diluted.
At this point, relying only on Google seems risky. Diversifying traffic (email, social, direct) is starting to feel less optional.

[shadowlight]

I get the frustration, but I don’t think it’s just “Google killing the web.”
What I’m seeing is more of a shift:
Informational traffic is dropping (AI overviews = more zero-click searches)
But intent-based traffic is still there, just harder to capture

AI overviews = more-zero click searches because google is re-writing and displaying web site / business created content on their own platform which ultimately results in less traffic / opportunities for the creators of the content to capture value from, and more opportunity for google to capture value from said content.

Informational and commercial intent based traffic are both still there, the shift is exactly what you describe. It is harder to capture, because google have made it harder to capture.

They have done this by displaying third party content on their own platform (AIO), increasing zero click searches and cluttering the SERPS with PAA, PASF, Find Products From Advertisers, alongside ADs.

This results in information that requires more effort to find, increasing both keyword search volume and AD impressions / clicks.

The SERPS, especially on mobile are extremely AD heavy, especially for anything commercial. Often 7 ads before you reach the majority of organic listings on mobile search and that's in addition to AIO, PASF, PAA, Find Products From Advertisers with one or two organics mixed in and two of these organic results are not even as big as ONE single Ad.

Depending on search term, their affiliate SERP features might also be present (Flights, Hotels, Shopping).

This leads to many businesses either laying staff off, shutting shop, spending heavily on ADS often with diminishing ROI and passing the increased cost to consumers.

At any point relying on google for traffic is extremely risky, unless you have the budget to buy a steady stream of traffic from them and unfortunately they control 90% or so of online information discovery worldwide.

[RedBar]

The SERPS, especially on mobile are extremely AD heavy, especially for anything commercial.

Absolutely plus usually very localised. I try not to business search on mobile, it is far too awkward.

[shawnb61]

Who knows, I may turn to CF one day. Thus far, I've been resisting.

I'm surprised the dangers & tradeoffs of CF are just not discussed at all, anywhere. Folks seem unaware of the whole MITM aspect, and the potential issues today & down the road.

I've been keeping a very simple approach: I block ASNs with bad guys in them - ***unless*** I have active registered users there.

My experience is that ASNs exhibit bad behavior - at the ASN level. Bad activity comes from them - aggressive crawls, hack attempts. Either they are small regional orgs who are overwhelmed (lots of that in Brazil last year, I suspect), or, they simply don't care what their customers are doing as long as they pay their bills. One way or another, bad activity comes from that ASN. Blocking part of an ASN doesn't help. That activity just moves to other IPs within the ASN at a later date.

It's the org that's the problem, not the IP. Whether it's lack of governance or resources, the result is the same.

To complicate matters, the IP ranges within ASNs change over time. A LOT... ESPECIALLY for these bad guys... I've blocked whole ASNS, only to find myself under attack by them a few weeks later. "I thought I'd blocked that guy..."

But I had blocked the whole ASN via a bunch of CIDRs, as it was defined on a particular date. But that definition changed a couple weeks later.

Before my ISP allowed blocking by ASN, I blocked by CIDRs for my problematic list of ASNs, and found that I had to re-cast my set of CIDR blocks ***every month*** to follow the new ASN definitions. Things improved quite a bit, and I didn't have to chase specific IP ranges anymore.

My dilemma occurs when I have active, registered, participating users accessing my site from a bad ASN.

Which brings me back to CF... I have lots of active, valid, users in various bad ASNs. Contabo, Datacamp, Digital Ocean, AT&T, AWS, AS45899 (Vietnam), etc. In my experience, blocking by IP range is a waste of time, and at the same time I don't want to block those ASNs due to the active, participating, valuable users I have there.

So... I may ultimately need to fall back to CF some time. I haven't given up the battle just yet...

[shawnb61]

Not everybody is running an ecommerce site... My site is just a bunch of guitar junkies sharing info on guitar effects, guitar synthesizers & modelers. 44K members, globally. Zero monetization, a couple of us just renew once a year & ask folks to help offset & they do.

There are many, many thousands of such communities out there like this, running their own sites, having somehow avoided being Borg'd into the social media platforms. My site uses SMF, and I help out over on SMF, supporting these sites. "Labors of love" - train junkies, gamers, model junkies, fantasy ethusiasts, anime fans, photographers, developer communities, small local manufacturers, artists, neighborhood orgs, churches, etc. Most of these little sites have hundreds of users & low/zero monetization.

Many created their sites 20 years ago and have been keeping them afloat. Fighting ongoing changes to PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc., over the years is bad enough. Now folks need a much higher level of technical skills to keep such sites afloat as they are under siege by bots. Or they need to shell out more money, as the crawling blows past the CPU or other resource limits for the cheapie hosting plans we all use.

I am convinced in the long run that this federated model is going to regain relevance, as folks realize they need to abandon the social media platforms. Reclaim their content.

But in the meanwhile, IMO, we gotta help these very cool islands of enthusiasts stay afloat. Whether they're commercially viable or not.

[MrSnuts]

Like @shawnb61, I operate one of those enthusiast communities too (guitars involved, too), with a voluntary subscription/supporter setup, so, I am happy to read from someone from that forgotten part of the web.
I also feel this segment of internet might eventually re-gain relevance, seeing that social media is drowning in AI slop and also starting to be treated/regulated by governments who notice the toxic impact it has (think youth protection laws).
I do have some doubts people are aware sites such as ours still exist, if you are a TicToc-Kid and have never seen these enthusiast web projects, you might not go looking for them, so, that's the obstacle to that return of this community driven web.
We are not too far from the public realizing how calm & cool those communities are compared to what else is out there, who knows, there might be a nostalgic turnaround in some niches at some point, and maybe a search engine able to surface these sites might find an audience - but that is all wishful thinking.

Now, regarding CF: I'm on a paid plan for about a year now, and yes, configuring CF without ChatGPTs help will drive one nuts @RedBar. I can only state that the $25/month are saving me roundabout $120/month in bandwidth. I am hosting Terrabytes of audio on S3 instances, and AI crawlers loved to download heavily until I stopped that by CF, hence the savings.
The MITM concern is real tho, if you are dealing with truly sensitive data, CF might not be the tool of choice.
I did wonder about the same concerns when it comes to using free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates, I would not be surprised if we all found out these were door opener No1 for any government activities some day. That's a wild theory, admitted, and I chose to ignore both concerns for my main project.

@shawnb61 - CF can handle exactly the mentioned scenario of "I have valid users on bad ASNs" quite well by its "managed challenges" - those require solving some captcha like thing if the ASNs reputation is too bad or other factors indicate this might not be a human, so this is exactly what covers your scenario, minus the manual effort chasing ASN and IP changes.

Last, @ichthyous mentioned claude code, and he's right. I am a heavy claude user and churned out the long missing apps (iOs+android) for my community using claude. Took six weeks, cost around $500. If you can describe what you want in detail, this tool is able to speed things up and reduce cost so dramatically that it turns all your former cost&effort evaluations upside down.
If you have been around for some years and invested time & sweat upgrading php versions, servers, mobile requirements and whatnot, be aware tools like claude are capable of doing these tasks from now on. We are entering a new ballpark here, with lots of opportunities if you have some ideas. This really should be noted as a golden opportunity for enthusiast or small budget projects, the thought "this is going to be too much work for little return" really needs to be revisited with AI tools in mind.

I do feel the pain of those whose projects/businesses are going down the drain with the recent development - getting rich on organic + ads has been over for long now, and as Martin reports - doing ecommerce based on organic results must be a bad rollercoaster, too... good luck to everybody out there.

[absheikhh]

I think what a lot of people are seeing here is not just ranking volatility but traffic redistribution.
Pages might come back to similar positions after updates, but clicks do not recover the same way. That points more to SERP changes than pure ranking loss. AI overviews, ads, and other features are likely absorbing a big chunk of the clicks.
The “conversion spike before update” pattern mentioned above is interesting and I have seen something similar. It feels like during testing phases, results are cleaner and intent matches better, then once fully rolled out, things get diluted again.
Also worth noting that some businesses are reporting stable or even improving revenue despite lower traffic. That suggests less but more qualified traffic in some cases.
Overall it feels less like everything is broken and more like the rules of where traffic comes from and how it converts are shifting.

[Micha]

Let's just say it like it is: Organic search is as good as dead. Anyone who relies on it is in big trouble. However, there are differences. Here in Germany, the situation isn't as bad as it is in the U.S., at least judging by the comments here in the forum

[Martin Ice Web]

What i see in serps is fully amateur websites from years ago. Never been visually updated. Code is like from 90s.
That rises my opinion that google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it.
I can go into ervery vertical. It is a mess. Coding, examples, shopping or information.

@MrSnuts, I never said that we a only relying on google organic traffic. We are selling on amazon too. And since the last update the sales have shifted towards amazon.

[christianz]

rises my opinion that google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it

They are TERRIBLE at it.

[RedBar]

I've removed Cloudflare completely for several reasons however easily the number one reason is its blocking of perfectly valid US VPN traffic. How do I know?

Because it was myself testing it and received the same unathorised attempts from all three sites.

[RubicCubed]

google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it.

I don't think they even try because their own AI spam sits atop of the search results. Few people look beyond AIO, and if they do then they are distracted by PAA, PASF, etc. I think eventually there will be no organic results for most info searches, which is why they don't even try to deal with spam now. With universal commerce protocol, I think Google will also try to deprive stores from traffic too.