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]

[Micha]

Update: Traffic has completely collapsed right now. I’m seeing this across all the sites I have analytics access to. Some are getting zero traffic from Google, and for all the others, traffic has dropped drastically.

[Martin Ice Web]

@martin, yes traffic today is the worst i have ever seen. Panda was a joke compared to this quality update!

[danielmsv]

Meanwhile, on Discover... instead of seeing a decent, interesting post, stuff pops up like: "Woman buys a brick and builds a $30 trillion empire"... or "After walking for 15 days across the backcountry, young person wins gold medal in something..." Discover is ceasing to be interesting and turning into a feed full of trash.

[bgweb]

No new core update is reported. One increasing problem for publishers is you can now say to the AI bot: summarise what site X is saying about topic Y, and it will go off in real time to mine site X. I don't see how this will work for most publishers. It was bad enough when the info in AI was stale, but now it is real time.

[Micha]

New day, same old Google mess. Weren't they supposed to get rid of those annoying top lists? Clearly didn't work, I'm constantly seeing "Top 10 whatever" sites today. Anyway, total chaos elsewhere, though at least traffic isn't bleeding anymore.

[christianz]

No new core update is reported. One increasing problem for publishers is you can now say to the AI bot: summarise what site X is saying about topic Y, and it will go off in real time to mine site X. I don't see how this will work for most publishers. It was bad enough when the info in AI was stale, but now it is real time.

Best content has to be behind login. Open web is going away, thanks to these criminal thieves.

[RedBar]

Best content has to be behind login.

Whilst I comprehend this point of view at the moment I do not agree and, believe this or not, this has happened to me in the last couple of hours.

Turkiye is one of the world's top six in my widget trade and, as I said, a couple of hours ago their trade launched a brand new portal therefore I went to have a look. Failure #1 its default language was Turkish however failure #2 was not even allowing a cursory look at what was on offer and insisting upon some sort of new Google account ... That was it I was gone and unsubscribed.

Ok, many may be comfortable with G, I am not, however bear in mind this "sign-up" is supposedly "free", how long could it be or how many members subscribed before there is a charge?

Just consider this, how long would it be for G to see millions of Dollars of transactions going through its systems before G decided it wanted a piece of the action?

Paranoid? Maybe so however am I going to risk it?

[Micha]

Login page or not, that doesn't fix the most fundamental problem: invisibility. What's the point of all this if Google doesn't display a site properly? The real issue now is that we aren't just fighting against Google's favoritism toward certain websites (I know they deny it, but we all see the reality). We also have to fight against extremely low-quality content, cheap AI translations, and articles that offer less value than a blank sheet of paper. Google keeps telling us to "write good content," but reality shows there is a massive, deep gulf between Google's words and Google's actions. Even a login page is useless against that.

[Ben_Arthur]

I hear you, and it is incredibly frustrating. When those Microsoft Azure IPs start aggressively scanning for PHP vulnerabilities, they can easily overwhelm a server.

Since this is malicious brute force scanning from their cloud network rather than the official Bingbot, adjusting your robots.txt will not help. Bad bots ignore those rules completely. Your easiest fix is to block the entire Microsoft data center ASN at your server firewall or set up a strict blocking rule in Cloudflare.

Do not close your sites over a bot problem. Just drop their cloud IP ranges at the network level, and your server logs will clear up immediately. Hang in there.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Ben_Arthur

or set up a strict blocking rule in Cloudflare.

Only if all else fails, I refuse to pay the tech mafia for their "creations". Those Azure php attacks are a pain if not handled. MSFT is aware of them but does nothing.

For the second time this week I'm seeing a new "probe" across my main global site. A changing random global IP address every few seconds to an individual specialised product page. The only two consistencies are middle of the night UK time plus macOS, Chrome 145.0, 1366x1366 across hundreds of pages.

Thoughts anyone?

[Micha]

macOS, Chrome 145.0, 1366x1366 across hundreds of pages.

Oh, I know that one; he’s a regular guest on my site right now. It's impossible to block him. He’s scraping my entire news site, and this is already the third time.

By the way, general traffic is absolutely terrible right now; the shop has completely collapsed, and the news site is down too. Meanwhile, my niche is flooded with cheap AI translations that are completely inaccurate, but Google seemingly loves it because they are all prominently ranked. I'm starting to think Google has completely shut off its already terrible quality filter.

[Chris travel 30]

@ Micha, Users that don't find the info they want, return to the SERPs. Thats what G likes. So, the worse the SERPs, the better for G.

My observ. today: Traffic is reeaally weird: It's a lot of traffic, but not converting. Some days are half the traffic and triple the conversions. I guess I am in the cycle of mismatched user-intend again. Makes sense with what Micha is seeing, I think.

[RedBar]

For me a MASSIVE MSFT Azure attack today including a couple of new IPs ... At the moment it looks to be well in-excess of 100,000 pages so far.

I've also noticed an increase from Oracle, Hyderabad too, not on Azure's level however noticeable.

[Micha]

What a strange weekend. Friday and Saturday: Search results were extremely poor, traffic declined, the shop generated almost no sales, and even Google Ads resulted in zero conversions. Sunday: A slight recovery began. Today, the shop is seeing a massive surge in buyers, and the news site is performing well again. I am currently wondering whether this volatility was linked to the introduction of Gemini 3.

@redbar Has it calmed down for you yet? I have a persistent scraper of my own right now. We actually gave up on trying to block them completely and switched to rate limiting instead, just to keep the servers from crashing.

[RedBar]

@Micha ... I'll know better in 3-4 hours when I get all my stats updated. All this garbage doesn't cause me any server issues since I have some simple .htaccess code that bats it all away to plain 400 page errors. I removed all my custom error pages on all sites but one.

I did find an intriguing piece of code yesterday I'm experimenting with therefore its first 24 hours will be interesting. I'm really fingers crossed on that since its potential is significant.

More later.

[jccsyd1]

Yes experiencing similar ecommerce buyer behaviour patterns as Micha and Im in Asia.

[RedBar]

@Micha

I did find an intriguing piece of code yesterday

That definitely did not work.

The Azure attack, mostly 20.000.000.000, series is continuing. It started Friday and today's attacks have been my heaviest so far, thousands upon thousands of attempts ... I assume the goons have returned from their holidays.

[gatormark]

Something has occurred over the past three days. While my page rankings have remained unchanged, Google AdSense is reporting a significant decrease in organic traffic. What makes this especially strange is that my ad clicks are actually increasing, yet my reported traffic has somehow dropped by roughly 25%.

Since Google revenue is tied to traffic and ad impressions, my income has decreased proportionately. The numbers simply don’t seem to add up: rankings are stable, ad clicks are up, but reported organic traffic and revenue have suddenly fallen sharply.

[RedBar]

Wow, the tech mafia are going for it like I've never seen before ... Yesterday an average of 5+K pages per site with today already at 3+K per site ... No one else?

[Micha]

And here we go: Google has rolled out a spam update. As usual, let’s hope for less spam, but we’ll probably end up with more again ;)

[status.search.google.com ]

[christianz]

Wow, the tech mafia are going for it like I've never seen before ... Yesterday an average of 5+K pages per site with today already at 3+K per site ... No one else?

I wish I only had 5k scrape requests per day...

And here we go: Google has rolled out a spam update. As usual, let’s hope for less spam, but we’ll probably end up with more again ;)

Not probably. 100% guaranteed there will be more spam after this update is done, just like after previous spam updates. Also let's remember that the biggest source of spam and slop is google themselves.

[RedBar]

I wish I only had 5k scrape requests per day...

These are solely MS Azure brute force WordPress .php attempts on each site none of which has a WP template nor any .php files.

[gatormark]

@RedBar

Wow, the tech mafia are going for it like I've never seen before ... Yesterday an average of 5+K pages per site with today already at 3+K per site ... No one else?

5+K pages per site is darn good! What are your CloudFlare security settings? I block China and Russia. I challenge EVERYTHING from Singapore. For users, I have certain trusted countries that I allow access without a challenge. Everyone else gets challenged. I also use the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset and a page-per-minute rule.

[Martin Ice Web]

OK this Anti-Anti Spam Update is not looking so good. All the niche sites that are strong focused have been replaced by big resellers ( germany: obi, Bauhaus, expert )
This are sites that are not known for our niche. They do not have additional information rather then the manufacturer description.

i don´t get it. if i am looking for a (used) car i don´t want to see big groceries resellers that do sell that cars as a side job. I want an expert site, a site where i know the owner has deep knowledge.

[morpheus83]

And finally an update is rolling out - [x.com...]

and yes, traffic is in the toilet. Discover / News all gone.

[RedBar]

@gatormark

What are your CloudFlare security settings?

Zero, I do not use it. I tried it on a few sites but after a couple of days realised I didn't have the patience nor time to learn and use it plus it was a challenge for me to find a much simpler and less-costly solution.

In this I have succeeded, what I am now experimenting with are various methods of stopping the generation of these plain 400 error pages. I removed all my customised error pages which obviously saved loads of bandwidth.

Just why MSFT cannot / will not sort out this issue includes themselves into the tech mafia scheme.

[RubicCubed]

And finally an update is rolling out

I just don't see the point of these updates. Organic is buried deep beneath the fold and are viewed by few. These days ranking at the top brings in about the same traffic as ranking at the bottom. Are these updates just meant to take the attention off of Google taking our content and traffic? Or are the workers inside Google search releasing updates to justify their roles within the company and remaining on the payroll? I would think those jobs in organic search will soon be axed because their work on algos is about as relevant as our sites.

[Micha]

Fuc**** scrapers. Last night we got hit by another Azure wave. It was manageable at first, but overnight they launched a massive scraping attack that completely brought the site to its knees. Still, this is just getting incredibly annoying.

[morpheus83]

I just do not understand how the rise in scrapers and bots is directly linked to an update.

We are also seeing a good amount of bots from Japan and India.

[Chris travel 30]

same here. bots, scrapers, crawler are on sky-high level in the last two days. By now, i have not made any attempts to stop them, but i may have to think about it in the future.