August 2026 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

That's it, I've had enough of all this MSFT brute force php garbage. It's the start of a new month and MSFT has unsuccessfully attempted thousand of PVs, over 1K per site ... I am closing all my sites but two plus a couple of clients.

BTW, some were from new MSFT IPs I've not seen before.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:03 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[ichthyous]

Clickthrough this summer is actually just a bit lower than last summer, but total impressions are far lower than last summer....I think that Google's ramming AI search results down everyone's throats is the primary reason, but also the current geopolitical climate and the surging cost of living...not to mention that literally NOBODY wants to buy from USA vendors now, so many foreign customers have gone...I get no inquiries from Canada, Australia, continental Europe or the UAE anymore.

Google is now sending a constant stream of delusional people with $50-$150 budgets inquiring about items priced 50x-150x higher. That has caused me to place notifications on my contact form to get people to check pricing before they inquire. I didn't have public pricing on my site for years, they had to inquire to get a quote. I will have less work writing pointless quotes for delusional people.

I do have to say that sales to corporate clients are holding up, even though they also have tighter budgets. Sales to corporate clients vanishing during the pandemic and took years to recover. Now it's the opposite.

[edited by: ichthyous at 2:28 pm (utc) on Aug 2, 2026]

[edited by: not2easy at 3:48 pm (utc) on Aug 2, 2026]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[ichthyous]

FYI...I have just seen for the first time huge ADS taking up the entire screen on mobile after a search. The two ads were at the top of the page and you had to scroll down before even seeing the AI results. To make matters worse THE SAME two ads at the same enormous size were repeated again after scrolling down.
Google clearly intends to just make it onerous and impossible to find any website anymore. They are really risking losing a lot of search business with all this. Nobody I know wants to be forced to scroll through pages of ads and pages of AI results before even getting to any outside results.
My guess is that Google thinks that it will train people to accept this as the new normal (which is what monopolies do). I suspect that some people may start searching for better ways to search that explicitly exclude ads and AI, even if they have to pay a subscription fee for searching now.

[breeks]

Welcome to 2026. Informational websites are like black-and-white TVs, dial-up phones, floppy disks, and 8-track tapes. They still work, but no one uses them or can find them with Google pushing AI results. Why scroll when you can ask AI? It searches hundreds of websites in seconds, takes what it needs, and spits out an answer. If you are lucky, the AI might give a tiny link to your site; one in 100 might click through.

[RedBar]

@breeks - Precisely my thoughts and observations.

one in 100 might click through.

Strange, that's the same number I came up with!

Why scroll when you can ask AI?

This last week I had to do some in-depth research for a specific subject which I knew quite a bit about, not my industry I must point out, but I actually did not know the correct questions nor where to start.

After a couple of trial questions Duck's AI got the gist and started delivering "answers" plus further add-ons connected to the subject. A lot of the answers were confirmation of what I already knew, which was good, however several of the add-ons were very, very informative.

The point I am making though is I did not go anywhere else nor felt the need to.

They still work, but no one uses them

Exactly and precisely why I am being very selfish by removing so much of my information. Over the last 30+ years it has cost me a lot of time, energy and resources to create what I have done and Google AdSense over the years has paid me a lot of advertising revenue BUT what do I do with this huge specialised informational resource of thousands of hand-curated pages plus 4X in images?

Simply feed the AI machine for free at my cost?

Obviously each site owner has varying reasons what they do with their site, good luck whatever decision you make.

BTW, just to make it clear, my business site remains on a new domain with a new template design etc however with about 5% of its info.

[Chris travel 30]

Does someone else notice bugs in the GA4 realtime view?

[Micha]

Nah, but I'm seeing a massive drop today starting around noon. The month started off really well for both sites, but around 12 PM today everything totally collapsed. Zero sales from Google traffic since then, and the news site is getting very little traffic.

[Martin Ice Web]

AI-Overview is just a information-bubble highly biased on just a few sites with same opinion/content. No sideviews, no risk assessment a.s.o.

I have begun to skip AI-views completly because i want to build my own opinion and stiil want to use my brain. I don´t want to get depper in that google bubble, keeping users away from thinking and don´t look for alternatives.

Only when i comes to coding AI is a usefull additional function.

[Micha]

Google seems to have the handbrake fully engaged today. No matter which site I check, they’ve all taken a massive hit—at least a 70% drop in Google traffic. Our shop is basically at a standstill, Google Ads isn't delivering anything, and as for our news site... well, let’s not even go there. Google News is a complete trainwreck right now. Looks like another algorithm update is rolling out, or everyone at Google is just drunk today.

[morpheus83]

Seems like a core update is underway. Traffic has plummeted.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, first time i can´t confirm all of your observations. Traffic is good today but sales are off.

But this is normal behaviour for a wednesday.

[Chris travel 30]

Since we managed to figure out a very big technical problem with our server, traffic today went up again. Had to go to a museum afterwards to calm down. Nearly no sleep in two days.
The days before were good, but the sites bugged, so conversions were not representative. But: All in all, traffic is up here for us. So as always, when Micha can report gains, I can report loss, an the other way around. Sorry for you Micha.

[Micha]

@Chris thanks, but no needed. Traffic suddenly surged around 6 PM, sales skyrocketed, and it actually turned into a highly successful day in the end.As of this morning, the news site has bounced back as well, since Google is finally showing fresh articles again

[EditorialGuy]

No drama here (at least not yet). For quite a few weeks now, I've been seeing modest growth in Google traffic, but the year-over-year Google traffic continues to erode as AI Overviews take over more and more space on many (most?) SERPs.

[ichthyous]

but the year-over-year Google traffic continues to erode as AI Overviews take over more and more space on many (most?) SERPs.

@EditorialGuy. Seen the huge new ads taking up the entire page on mobile now even before the AI results? Then again on same page at the bottom, same size. So Google is using our sites for training fodder and has zero intention of letting anyone find them or clickthrough to them anymore. My site traffic is a bit lower than last year this time, but I am not primarily an info site. People have to keep looking to find something if the intent is to purchase something. Even so, sales to individual clients (not businesses) is down to almost nothing this year...my sales are exclusively to corporations this year. The stream of private clients (individuals) with real budgets has been shrinking for several years.

[RedBar]

It's been an interesting start to the month with all my deletions, adjustments with a couple of re-inclusions and, plus, a major .htaccess tweaking. I've now had four full days of settling-down and it's already showing benefits.

Apart from December, August has always seen a huge European traffic drop for my trade however I am getting new customer enquiries from West Asia.

Like morpheus83 posted I thought yet another update was on the way but I'm not so convinced now.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar,

how many pages does your website have?

[Martin Ice Web]

I think there was an update last week but on thursday it was pulled back, since the same odd traffic.

[Micha]

What an extremely strange weekend: On Saturday, a quick article I wrote on the side drove record traffic (and record ad revenue). Yesterday wasn't bad either, and today is looking decent. Friday, however, was absolute trash. On top of that, rankings have improved; my news site is dominating our niche again.

As for the shop: Friday brought good revenue, Saturday was excellent, yesterday saw nothing from Google (yet it was still okay), and today is already turning out to be a very strong day.

If Google were a car, the driver would be completely drunk right now.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha, seems that we are now at different riverbanks. Today is absolute ZERO converting traffic. Went down to 25% of normal traffic again. So there was 100% an silent update over the weekend.

[Micha]

@martin i’ve also been suspecting that we just experienced an update. Of course, that doesn’t quite explain why Discover kicked in so aggressively. As for the shop, I honestly can't explain it any other way, especially today. Mornings are usually never this busy. And while writing this post, 5 big orders came in. Really weird.

[jccsyd1]

We have several brands. One brand had zero order on Saturday which has not happened for the 14 years we have been in business. Really weird behaviour, today being Tuesday and we have had no orders since 9am (its already 4pm), normally we should have half a dozen orders during the period.

[christianz]

Traffic is awful. The SERPs are awful and Google ranking brain is dumber than ever.

On slight positive side - some of the redirect URLs that systematically, over past couple months, got wiped out from "Page with Redirect" category seem to be slowly returning.

[danielmsv]

Guys, something really bad is happening! Especially on Discover here in Brazil! The drops are sharp, exceeding 70%... Meanwhile, niche-free sites made entirely by AI are booming! Some are appearing 8 times in the feed, which is outrageous!

[ichthyous]

Try checking how much of your site is actually being indexed. I noticed recently that for the first time since 2004 when I started dealing with Google that Googlebot is dropping indexing of a lot of pages out of the blue. Important category pages, etc that have always been indexed are now "crawled, not indexed".

On top of that for some reason in the last couple of months my pages that had been on page one for years are suddenly relegated to page 5+. Google has instead chosen to rank articles from my site and absolutely obliterated the category pages themselves. So nobody is going to buy a thing if they can't actually find your category pages with the products. Nobody jumps from an informational article to look at purchasable items, I can see that from my analytics.

[Whitey]

With "AEO increasingly being reported as a major growth channel while traditional SEO comes under pressure", some of what we're seeing may be a structural change in how users discover information, rather than simply another ranking cycle.

That doesn't make the SEO losses any less painful. But perhaps the more useful question is becoming: "where is search demand moving, and how do we make our sites visible there as well?"

SEO still matters. The opportunity may simply be broadening from "ranking in search results to becoming a source used in the answer itself.

So hopefully those above links will incentivise folks to focus on growth opportunities, and contribute their thoughts to some positive signs ahead. Good luck :)

[edited by: not2easy at 12:15 pm (utc) on Aug 12, 2026]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Micha]

@Whitey the problem with this is that it only affects websites that rely on conventions. News sites, blogs, and the like don’t stand a chance, because the AI just steals everything they offer and regurgitates it. And Booking Holdings is in a whole different league; people actually click through from an AI-generated response there because they want to make a reservation. (Or maybe Booking is squeezing the hotels even harder to compensate for losses).

[RedBar]

Or maybe Booking is squeezing the hotels even harder to compensate for losses

We actually allocate a set number of reservations we accept through Booking etc plus also advise users to contact us direct for late reservations.

I'm beginning to wonder just how many ads are they allowing on a page for popular widgets these days? I think I've seen 50+ which obviously drowns out everything else.

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday traffic went up 200% till late afternoon. It didn´t lead to conversions.
Since yesterday late afternonn traffic has reached a new low. Compared to January we are down to 25%.

Amazon sales picked up in this time by 244%.

Gues google is going to be a not noteworthy traffic source like yahoo.

[Micha]

@Martin I can confirm that. Traffic spiked significantly at first and then dropped off on both of my sites. Although the shop performed well yesterday, the conversion rate was pretty weak considering the high number of visitors.

At the same time, I'm seeing a massive amount of finance spam in my niche again. This is the exact same pattern I've been observing repeatedly over several days for weeks now.