July 2026 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

It must be the first of the month, I have MSFT 20.xx.xx.xx bots all over my sites with .php attacks.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:25 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

@chris More AI Overviews in search and Google has shifted into vacation mode. We see this mode every year around the same time (just for fun, compare your data with previous years).

[RedBar]

I am not sure yet, but I think yesterday something has shifted.

For the last 5 days, plus so far today, traffic has increased so that I'm "only" -33%. Traditionally this weekend is the first of getaways for several European countries for those who can afford to.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I find it funny how some websites are talking about SERP volatility as of yesterday, July 18th. I have been loosing traffic daily all month. Am I being purposely targeted? I say this month but my site hasn't grown at all for months. This month just happens to be the worst this year, so far.. Am I the only one on a constant daily drop for the past few months?

Anyway, I have taken others advice and lets admit it was long overdue. BUT I finally switched from Chrome. Feels great!

[Chris travel 30]

My observation so far since June 18: the amount of traffic is unchanged but the user intent is mismatched. The engagement is lower than low and as you can imagine, the sales look like that. Yesterday was pretty busy in traffic and normally sundays are good sales days for me, but the intent of the users that were send by G seemed not to match, so sales were way under normal.

[Micha]

Google Discover brought in a lot of traffic yesterday, which led to a new visitor record. Today is running quite well too. In general, the rankings of my news site, especially within the news section, have improved significantly over the weekend, and I am curious to see if it holds up. The shop, on the other hand, had a really miserable Saturday but managed to recover on Sunday.

However, I can absolutely confirm Chris's observation regarding the mismatched user intent and the drop in engagement. According to Matomo and GoAccess, traffic is up, but the bounce rate has shot through the roof. Just like Chris described, we had a very busy Sunday in terms of traffic, but the conversion into sales was way below normal because the intent of the users sent by Google didn't seem to match. E-commerce websites seem to be having a tough time in general right now; looking at Sistrix, I see massive fluctuations across dozens of online shops.

[Martin Ice Web]

My observation so far since June 18: the amount of traffic is unchanged but the user intent is mismatched. The engagement is lower than low and as you can imagine, the sales look like that. Yesterday was pretty busy in traffic and normally sundays are good sales days for me, but the intent of the users that were send by G seemed not to match, so sales were way under normal.

I was searching for a 9-piun extension cable. google presented me results from a pregnancy website, a police report and food website.
Further looking for a left angled cable. Results are full of top or bottom angled cables. Not one left angled.

Paid Ads show the right items i was looking for. But organics are complete disarranged.

[RedBar]

@Fluff_Nutz

I say this month but my site hasn't grown at all for months.

I have absolutely no idea what your site is about but unless you are dealing with FMCG, popular news / sport / celebrity sites consistently updating and competing with many others head-to-head, then the oft-quoted "build it and they will come" is one of the most over-hyped mis-statements on The Net.

20 years ago I had millions of page views per month as people searched for all variations of my specialised widgets and at that time I was also an AdSense UPS club member, that volume of traffic was clobbered in 2010, I think, and AdSense earnings fell below the minimum monthly about 10 years ago.

My realworld business has grown, I have realworld production exported globally and make acceptable profits.

I am not trying to tell you or anyone else how to run their online businesses, what needs to be understood by countless wannabees is that operating big profitable "online only" sites requires constant updating, maintenance plus a willing, hopefully global, audience. Specialised widget sites very rarely attract a constant large following, sure they may have huge ebbs and flows but unless one is a major shopping / news portal then expecting big traffic may lead to disappointment.

I'll give an example from the BBC last night's World Cup final. It's peak online viewing was just over 600K, within 10 mins of the end 30K.

[christianz]

my site hasn't grown at all for months.

What does it mean? No site grows, growth in this industry is not a thing. If your Google traffic is staying level or decreasing only slightly that's already incredible achievement and puts you in the top 0.1%.

[RedBar]

Is everyone, except myself, on holiday or heads down trying to fathom out what to do next?

[brightstone]

@ RedBar Yes, for 3 days now, I'm wondering where everyone is. Some views, a few clicks, a sale or two. But way, way below what is normal, even for the summer. I'm in the USA, e-comm. I have two shops. One harks back to 2015 with listings that I have not updated, or barely updated. That is the one that keeps me afloat. The 2nd shop, different niche, been running for 2-3 years now, slow, slow growth
(if any) and dismal sales. I wonder if they are training new chat models with each of these updates. They have to keep putting themselves in the news with 'release of 4.0' or whatever Gemini model is the new one. But it seems it's going somewhat backwards in the AI understanding of search terms. I just keep shaking my head thinking "whaaaat?"

[RedBar]

Something has definitely changed / been updated / messed-up.

I use GMail as a back-up for my own server mails and my phones however yesterday my phones received nothing therefore I went to GMail and there were a dozen valid mails in the spam several of which were conversational business mails but all of a sudden GMail binned them.

So far today it's been ok but wtf happened? I don't remember experiencing this before plus traffic was also notably down compared to this past week.

[jccsyd1]

I am experiencing the same across our 3 brands. We are in ecommerce in Asia. Never been so quiet and has been going on in the past 2 weeks- being more acute in the past 3-4 days with no orders coming in sometimes for 6-7 hours to sometimes 12 hours period. This is unheard of for us considering we are usually at the top of the rankings.

[Micha]

Absolute chaos again… One day you're drowning in traffic, and the next day it's a total ghost town. It's the exact same story for both my news site and my shop. Rankings are fluctuating like crazy.

Anyway, I'm stuck in Gamescom preparations right now, so at least that keeps my mind off the Google madness. But hey, at least the EU just slapped Google to pay 890 million euros. I'm curious to see how Trump reacts to this. Sorry, the link is in German only. [zeit.de ]

[RedBar]

Traffic slashed on my global site today especially this afternoon UK time.

[goodoldweb]

"BRUSSELS, July 23 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), was fined a total of €890 million ($1 billion) on Thursday for ​flouting European Union rules aimed at reining in the power of Big Tech, the European Commission said.

However, the tech giant is likely ‌to avoid fresh fines as EU regulators lauded good progress in its efforts to comply with the landmark legislation."

[reuters.com...]

Chickens have started coming back home to roost...

[Martin Ice Web]

Very, very big drop since yesterday. We are at 27% of normal traffic right now.
User engagement: Zero

Did you notice that queries that had about >300 or more results are now down to 30?
In my niche it seems that 90% of the former websites are gone. The ones that have surevived do have nothing in common with the query or with the topic.

Maybe google reracts like a little child and slpas down traffic because of the EU fine?

[Micha]

@martin It’s really brutal right now. Yesterday, for the first time since our launch, we had exactly 0 conversions on Google Ads; that has never happened before (and of course, the daily budget was fully spent anyway). As for the news site, I can confirm yesterday's drop. Rankings are allegedly down, and traffic hit rock bottom. Today isn’t looking any better either.

However, I don't think this has anything to do with the EU fine. In that case, the 5% clause would actually apply.

[Martin Ice Web]

@martin, did you look at the serps and the lack of websites?

Many from our webpages do not show up for certain queries. They are in the index but instead of the relevant pages other completly unrelevant webpages show up.

[RedBar]

@MIW

Did you notice that queries that had about >300 or more results are now down to 30?

Yep, several times and only a couple of days ago only 1 page with 8 results.

Yesterday I saw in G.co.uk the #1 result for my most popular widget was a very thin UK site with one small image plus 4 lines of generic text HOWEVER at #2 was the largest US import / wholesale company that does not supply anywhere but the USA.

Where did the localisation go? BTW the #1 result was hundreds of miles from me in the extreme south west. Something has been changed again, after 12 hours traffic is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Meanwhile my recently launched AEO site is picking-up solid traffic with, fingers crossed, no php brute force attacks as yet.

[Micha]

@martin Let me chip in on this: Unfortunately, I’m seeing the exact same thing, and it’s getting really bizarre. Yesterday, I searched for "cheap kitchen chairs," and the search results showed me medical stools instead. The same goes for topics related to my site's niche; completely weird pages are popping up. We're talking made-up stories, a ton of financial junk, and lately, even adult websites.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar, thin site with generic text (or manufacturer text) or even repeating 3 times h1-title are ruling our niche too.
What wonders is that really ALL of the former admittedly very good competitors are gone.
Pages with barely content are ruling for high quality products.

google has become the new yahoo.

@micha,

i wrote that same hing two days ago. Searching for 9-pin cable and a pregnancy site was in the results. Never seen something bad like this before.

[Martin Potter]

 9-pin cable and a pregnancy site

Maybe some AI trained in the Classics got it confused with novembilical.

{ noven --> novem = Latin for number nine ]

[danielmsv]

Here in Brazil, several publishers are experiencing massive outages on Discover! Anyone else?

[RedBar]

One qualification when I post this ... According to Statcounter this will be my global site's lowest-ever monthly traffic, -40% v July 2025 and -70% v July 2021. I do accept SC's metrics do not reflect the reality since I have analysed my raw logs and they do show valid traffic that SC is definitely not including.

As an observation our hotel venue's SC stats do seem to be more representative. Is this maybe because the hotel is 70% mobile, mostly retail or 90% UK traffic? Any opinions?

[seokees]

One qualification when I post this ... According to Statcounter this will be my global site's lowest-ever monthly traffic, -40% v July 2025 and -70% v July 2021. I do accept SC's metrics do not reflect the reality since I have analysed my raw logs and they do show valid traffic that SC is definitely not including.

@RedBar So with the raw logs, what is the decline of your global site? Rough estimate.

[ichthyous]

I have noticed that "how to" and "best of" articles are once again outranking sites (or landing pages) that are about the same topic. One section of my site ranked on page 1-2 for years...then I wrote a "100 top examples of X topic" relating to the same subject matter. Now Google ranks my fluffy article on page one and banished the actual category page on my site to page 4. As a result my sales of the related product has plummeted. I have seen this over and over...google strongly favors these silly repetitive editorial articles over actual sites offering services or selling the product itself.

Has anyone else faced this, and how did you get your site to rank again? Is it a matter of over-optimization?

[Martin Ice Web]

Has anyone else faced this, and how did you get your site to rank again? Is it a matter of over-optimization?

We are experience the same thing. I guess its how to pages are nothing that google looses money on and can display ads. But if they display the service page users do not have to click on ads.

Don´t you have a link from your "fluffy articel" to your service page?

[Chris travel 30]

IMO these observations are kind of correct. I also had the feeling, that especially since mid of July, google is actively suppressing pages that are meant to make money without them. Simple as that.

I was talking about that to my partners since 1 year when we noticed the tendencies. One of them got it one sentence: Gs final goal is, that no one shall make money online no more, without Gs consent or earning on it as well.

Thoughts on that are welcome.

[RedBar]

Mass .com attack by Oracle.

Last night through until 06.00 UK time Oracle, India, hit EVERY .com site of mine for at least 500+ pages, no other extension has been hit so far, all requests met a 401 / 403 / 404.

Anyone else?

[RedBar]

@seokees

So with the raw logs, what is the decline of your global site? Rough estimate.

Quite simply as yet I do not know plus, bluntly, I really don't care any more however what I did was very simple.

Whereas until a couple of years aoo or so I constantly had Statcounter visitors on my sites, now I can obviously see periods of SC inactivity, therefore all I did was check some supposed inactive periods to visibly see if there was any valid traffic.

Lo and behold valid 200s to regular pages. I checked further non-SC activity periods and again found similar valid 200s.

Honestly, I'm simply getting bored with these ludicrous games being played by, I suspect, the same people trying to offer protection against it ... I have zero evidence other than the top locales page requests for EVERY site of mine is the USA even UK sites that supposedly are 90+% UK traffic.