June 2026 Google Search Observations

[BigKat]

I am supposed to believe that AI is useful for business when biggest AI company (Google) itself can't make AI that can spot spam from real content.

It demonstrates AI is more hype than anything else. If AI were so great, all the states allowing AI data centers to be built would be using the technology themselves and they're not. I'm sure a lot of politicians are getting rich, along with the AI companies, but that's about it at this point.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:46 am (utc) on Jun 3, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[bgweb]

Looks like something has happened in the last few days. I'm seeing a lot of volatility again.

[Micha]

Traffic to the news site has continued to decline. There’s no competing with the World Cup. News in my niche is flooded with old articles about the weekend’s game, soccer betting, and articles that are reposted hourly (not updated). Traffic is so low that it’s not even worth publishing an article right now.

The shop, on the other hand, is currently generating good sales via Google, which, to be honest, surprises me quite a bit.

Overall: Search results are a disaster even outside my niche. More and more spam sites are showing up; they seem to be popping up everywhere right now because of the World Cup.

[RedBar]

Most of my sites have been hit from a new (for me) MSFT IP this morning supposedly emanating from Des Moines, the entire block has been added to my list.

There’s no competing with the World Cup.

Where I live there seems to be very little interest at the moment, most pubs are showing it however very few are taking any notice and there is a wide cross-section of ages and people. Maybe once we get past the first round it'll pick up. I haven't noticed an increase in football advertising.

Eurasian traffic in the mornings is especially slow at the moment and considering this area is where we do most of our business, it's way out of its norm. My question has to be has G introduced more localisation to many of these countries? If so do I need to consider revamping all my old country and language-specific domains?

[fearlessrick]

Put this in your weirdness pipe and smoke it. On Thursday, my sites had the lowest revenue possibly EVER. I complained through G's feedback widget on AdSense (I've done this before and seen positive results). Basically, I just said something to the effect: "I'm so sick and tired of this crap. Stop it." (I had a blogger site nicked for not having some EU consent form; fixed it and then...)

Friday was a little better. Saturday was the best day of the month, easily. Sunday, Monday normal... usual kind of sh--ty. Tuesday, today, already best day of the month at 8 am on very little traffic. Impression and page RPMs are 6-8X normal. Is Google fixing things or was it something I said (or lots of people said). Investigating, with fingers crossed...

Edit: One thing I have noticed, there is no new Adsense Observations for June posted. May had fewer than 20 posts. People have given up. Not me.

Correction: Adsense Observations for June posted this morning (not by me). I am the only poster since OP.

[not2easy]

The AdSense thread was finally updated earlier today. I normally update it as soon as a new post shows up for the month, but the May thread did not progress since May 20 so I started a new one here: [webmasterworld.com...]

OK, I see you've found it - sorry for the inconvenience.

[Micha]

Where I live there seems to be very little interest at the moment, most pubs are showing it however very few are taking any notice and there is a wide cross-section of ages and people. Maybe once we get past the first round it'll pick up. I haven't noticed an increase in football advertising.

I’ve no idea how much interest there is in this here (I certainly aren’t interested, anyway). Google, in any case, couldn’t care less. The news is full of reports on this topic.

[fearlessrick]

@ not2easy, Thanks for the thread.

[Martin Ice Web]

I didn´t think it could be more worse but then google changed something last friday.

Our niche are full of websites with AI slop and worse: totaly incorrect information.
google trust this domains because they are big resellers.

Meanwhile all the descriptions in my niche have the same look and feel and have the same information. All AI driven.
There is no difference between brand A, B or C.

What the heck our well written descriptions are burried down page1 to 3.

google doesn´t care about their customers. It is like the missleading AI-summaries. They just don´t care.

[RedBar]

For my global traffic it is now consistent at 50%, on its a$$ and dying.

Anyway G's classads is now in full force after a popular widget search I was presented with a block of image ads 5 wide, 8 deep, yep 40 image ads. So ... IF I were shopping I'd possibly be quite satisfied with the options but as an information seeker the results as presented were useless BUT the AI was spot on since it was mostly sourced from me with zero link through!

I have this feeling my tolerance is being tested to the limit for my most comprehensive site as-is.

[Micha]

It's getting really frustrating. According to Search Console, impressions for my news site have exploded, but the number of clicks is ridiculously low. At the same time, my online shop is doing extremely well and is generating significantly more revenue than at the beginning of the month.

The biggest joke, however, is my personal Discover feed. Google seems to be completely ignoring my interests. Besides political party press releases, I'm getting a flood of random articles that have nothing to do with what I read, search for, or click on. Many of them look AI-generated, and with others you genuinely wonder what the author was even trying to say.

Something clearly changed, but from a user perspective the relevance and quality of Search, Discover, and Google News have noticeably deteriorated.

[shadowlight]

Conducting searches on mobile yesterday.

Text on screen for organics was significantly smaller than the text used for AD's and all other G 'SERP Features'.

Has anyone else seen this before, I have seen it before, a few months ago.