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]

[goodoldweb]

@RedBar
I've been having fun with these alternating-IP, one-page hit wonders for a while now. Turns out they're mostly AI training bots. Perplexity, DeepSeek and ChatGPT are the main culprits, sucking bandwidth with almost zero return.

I ended up building bot honeypots and redirecting the lot straight to hell. Works a treat: the bots get kicked the second they hit the server, main search engines stay whitelisted, and the logs are clean as a whistle.

It's a combination of PHP and JavaScript detection, the bots have distinct headers and screen sizes. Forget IPs; they alternate them by the second. Stat counter has become useless.

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday in the afternoon we had about 3 hours of good old traffic. Sales were floating in through google traffic.
In the lat afternoon the switch has been pulled again and the same odd traffic with very bad user metric was back.

[seokees]

Yesterday in the afternoon we had about 3 hours of good old traffic. Sales were floating in through google traffic.
In the lat afternoon the switch has been pulled again and the same odd traffic with very bad user metric was back.

Ooof..Luckily they switched back to the good ol' G way after a few hours..... That is G's money! You have to reimburse them for those three lost hours. :| (satirical)

[Martin Ice Web]

@seokees,

they noticed their error and made it even worse for today.

[Micha]

And as always, I can confirm Martin's observation. The only difference is: yesterday and the day before, the news site had two very good days and the shop had good sales days. Today, traffic dropped on both sites. So, the back-and-forth continues.

[goodoldweb]

Has anyone else noticed that Google Ads suddenly ramps up ad spend toward the end of every month?

We've made no changes whatsoever to our campaigns. Same keywords, same ads, same bidding strategy, yet around the 23rd of each month our daily spend suddenly starts climbing rapidly (in the last few months). It almost feels as though someone at Google turns up the tap to exhaust the account's monthly budget.

The strange part is that conversions don't increase, if anything, they almost die off while the daily spending skyrockets. We're paying significantly more but getting much less in return.

Has anyone else experienced this recurring end-of-month spike in Google Ads spend? Is there a logical explanation, or are others seeing the same pattern?

From where we're sitting, it feels like a plain end of month rip-off.

[edited by: goodoldweb at 7:34 pm (utc) on Jul 30, 2026]

[Micha]

@goodoldweb Yes, same here, conversions dropped sharply around mid-July. It was okay here and there, but most days we get nothing or perform well below our daily budget spend. Meanwhile, costs have increased significantly.

[goodoldweb]

@Micha, I think we should start removing conversion tracking from our website. Giving these sleazeballs access to our conversion data feels like a really bad idea lately. I don't see any benefit in handing them information that could potentially be used against us.

[goodoldweb]

@Micha, furthermore, after digging a bit deeper, I discovered that the spike is being caused by mobile devices. Whatever stupid changes they've recently implemented appear to be affecting the mobile SERPs. Can you check yours? Are you seeing the same thing?

[Micha]

@goodoldweb, as tempting as it sounds to cut off their data feed, removing conversion tracking would completely wreck our Google Ads campaigns. Smart Bidding needs that data to work, so our hands are tied there. However, you are 100% right about the mobile traffic. I checked my data, and the crash is purely on mobile. Desktop remains stable, but mobile SERPs are an absolute mess right now. Whatever update they pushed out, it clearly broke the mobile side.

Funny enough, Google just sent us an €800 voucher for Google Ads a few days ago with no strings attached. Talk about perfect timing; it’s almost comical how they completely tank your paid traffic and then hand you a coupon to spend even more with them.

[System]

New thread for August 2026 here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 4:00 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]