September 2026 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

Pretty sluggish since Friday. The news site is just trickling along. Discover is a total write-off once again. One thing that stands out: there seems to be a delay with headlines and news, as current articles can currently only be found from the major publishers. This has been going on since Friday, and I hope it stops soon because it's costing clicks.

As for the shop, it's pretty bizarre too; for days now, practically the exact same revenue amount has been coming in via Google traffic. Overall: rankings have improved, but it's not yielding anything. And the spam update doesn't seem to have achieved much either; still the same crypto garbage and cheap AI articles flooding everything.

So it's developing exactly as we've been fearing here for months: clicks are getting fewer and fewer...

[edited by: not2easy at 11:25 am (utc) on Sep 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[morpheus83]

Seems another update is rolling out as Analytics is broken for us.

[RedBar]

@Whitey
An encouraging start to September with my CF-enabled sites showing massive drops in garbage. The non-CF sites are still being hit but not as bad as the last couple of weeks therefore we'll see how things progress.

Real global traffic seems low today.

[Micha]

Is Google News completely freeze? Has anyone else noticed that Google News and the “Top Stories” carousels aren’t working today? No matter what general topic I search for (I’ve tested it with national news from Germany, Spain, Italy, etc.), Google only shows outdated articles that are 24 to 48+ hours old. The entire real-time index seems to be completely stuck in a time loop, and no current content from today is being displayed. The same thing is happening in my specific niche as well. None of my brand-new articles from this morning are showing up; only old ones.

[rustybrick]

Google News carousels seem fine to me?

[Micha]

I can only speak for how things look in Germany: Indexing works as fast as usual, even for news content, but the articles in the Top Stories carousels are at least 1 day old, in some cases even four to five days. The News tab within the regular search shows a fresh article here and there, but most of them are completely outdated as well. I'm monitoring a few websites right now, and there is practically zero news traffic today; same for my site. (By the way, the "For you" feed is also completely outdated.) Example: [ibb.co ]

[RedBar]

For me global traffic seems to be normal however it has not generated any new business leads whatsoever for more than 3 weeks now. This could be the trade holiday period or my more stringent contact page policies, I'll give it a few more days.

Of course, widget industry demand does appear to be massively down. I have my second biggest widget trade fair at the end of this month where I'll get a much better idea of the current state of realworld business.

[RedBar]

Oh, I forgot to mention ... My bulk international shipping rates to Europe have increased 500% and to the USA 600% ... I can't imagine what's caused that.

[Micha]

One day later, after tons of conversations with fellow webmasters and my own observations: Google's news system is completely broken right now. There is a massive indexing delay when it comes to article inclusion in Google News. It doesn't hit every single post, but a huge portion of them. Discover seems to be going absolutely haywire at the moment due to extreme feed volatility. Everyone I talked to reported that their feeds are filled with nothing but garbage, especially an insane amount of AI-generated spam. I'm seeing the exact same mess on my end. It's pretty obvious that Google is nowhere near fixing the bugs they had a few days ago. The system is still highly unstable.

[danielmsv]

We have this in Brazil too! Discover that by not delivering relevant content, websites built with AI-generated posts are thriving!

[rustybrick]

I documented the Google News issues at [seroundtable.com...] is this what you guys mean?

[Micha]

@rustybrick I've already read that. Yep, that's what it's about.

[morpheus83]

Discover traffic is almost gone since yesterday and search console reporting is also stuck. Just hope we are done with the updates this weekend.

[Micha]

The chaos continues: organic rankings are climbing, Discover is basically dead, and Google News is outdated. I'm starting to wonder if Google even wants to fix anything, because more and more issues are clearly popping up. By now, it’s not just affecting my news site anymore. My shop has also taken a massive hit in sales from Google traffic. And as always, Google Ads conversions dropped to zero on a campaign that usually always delivers… Yet, even here, organic rankings are up; it just doesn't convert to anything useful. On top of that, there's a flood of spam in the search results across many niches.

I don't think this is the impact of an update right now. It feels more like something is fundamentally broken under the hood.

Well, look on the bright side; at least now I have the time to redesign the news site.

[RedBar]

After the first few days of September I have to admit, at the moment, I'm quite surprised just how much garbage CloudFlare appears to be stopping and the most amazing metric, the one thing I was not worried about, it seems to have reduced bandwidth by about 66% so far.

My non-CF sites have seen Azure 20.xxx series return today, annoying!

at least now I have the time to redesign the news site.

I think I would classify my "updates" as consolidation:-)

[christianz]

I don't think this is the impact of an update right now. It feels more like something is fundamentally broken under the hood.

Oh yes. I can't even log into Google Analytics. It goes into "Internal Error" infinite reload loop.

[Whitey]

After the first few days of September I have to admit, at the moment, I'm quite surprised just how much garbage CloudFlare appears to be stopping

That’s good to hear and I’m experiencing the same.

The scary thing is how some bots are adapting to get around the challenges, presumably some use AI. So potentially a never ending loop of evolutionary attack can occur. That’s my uneducated estimate of potential harm that could occur.

[morpheus83]

Discover has died as we speak and search console reporting is stuck to Sep 3 for me.

@Micha are you seeing the same for your news site?

[Micha]

@morpheus83 Discover is not completely dead, but traffic is still massively down and new articles are only getting small test. Reporting looks mostly normal again, but one strange thing remains: the news sitemap itself is still being read successfully, while the “indexed pages” report for our news sitemap has been stuck around Aug 28/29 and isn’t showing newer articles, even though those articles are definitely indexed and appear in Google News.

Another thing I’ve noticed since the Discover bug started: our source page in Google News has been updating extremely slowly. Before this, it was usually pretty much up to date, but now new articles often take a long time to appear there. So the reporting and freshness/serving side still look broken here as well. I’m also still seeing the issue @rustybrick reported, where articles can appear in regular search and Top Stories but are missing from the News tab; I just tested it again.

[Chris travel 30]

Rankings went down on Friday, thats the last thing I can see in GSC. Conversions as well since the 02. September. We didn't change anything on the site. Maybe there is more going on and we are just observing the symptoms. Maybe another update?

[RedBar]

Everything looking steady here except for one CF-enabled site that was hit big time by Contabo GmbH.

@Whitey

The scary thing is how some bots are adapting to get around the challenges, presumably some use AI. So potentially a never ending loop of evolutionary attack can occur.

Yep, I've noticed new MSFT ranges coming through however CF seems to recognise those and within a couple of days seem to stop them. The amount of bots etc coming out of France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Scandinavia is very annoying and to what purpose?

[Whitey]

Bots are very active today. A particular attack is coming from Singapore with ASN: Alibaba (US) Technology Co servers on .com domain, so we're placing a condition to block their server ip ranges.

@RedBar

very annoying and to what purpose?

It beats me.

[seokees]

Since Friday something happened and is happening. Higher rankings, according to GSC, but traffic is way down and conversions are gone. The trend started already on the 2nd, but was not really noticable, but in hindsight very obvious.

[christianz]

very annoying and to what purpose?

The most obvious obvious-thing ever? They are AI thieves stealing data/content.

A particular attack is coming from Singapore with ASN: Alibaba (US) Technology Co servers on .com domain, so we're placing a condition to block their server ip ranges.

Whilte you're at it you can also ban the following ASNs:

24940,45102,45090,14593,20473,34984,37190,33771,27699,36925,8151,328275,216472,36924,271689,263812,9009,63023,16276,262287,212238,136557,45899,132203,90009,29447,35278,150436,14061,135354,203020,139341,174,62874,36352,396319,210644,34702,398781,59711,49770,34081,46261,18779,264617,51430,30058,396190,64286,11798,6079,19148,36183,7979,31898,62044,207990,21723,35297,210743,401560,203061,11404,395954

Which are all AI thief infested hell holes that will bring you zero human visitors.

[RedBar]

They are AI thieves stealing data/content.

Without me seeming to be stupid, really, to do what?

Make their copy of my sites? Why?

What could they do with their version of my hotel site? There is no database, no payment system, it's a plain vanilla brochure site, it does not even use the domain email. Ok, trying to find WordPress vulnerabilities and take the site down I comprehend however I never use WP.

So, 12 hours ago I launched a site on a domain unused since last year and parked on my registrar's server. I deliberately did not put it on CF simply to see what happened. Already 1,000+ pages with 50% of the bandwidth used by Amazon in one go and 25% by MSFT ... Experiment over, it's now at CF.

I really do wonder if even 10% of my traffic is genuine? For small specialist widget sites like mine that are not getting ANY genuine new business enquiries these days whether their days are truly numbered?

[Micha]

Traffic is slowly picking up, and the news sections are getting fresher again. While my news site is still nowhere near its usual Google traffic, at least the News-specific traffic is gaining some traction again. Overall, though, I have to say the index still seems completely messy right now. Some of those spam sites that disappeared after the spam update are starting to pop up again. Honestly, I don't really get what Google is pulling right now. 

On the bright side, the shop recovered pretty quickly; yesterday was a really solid day, but general traffic is slow.

[RedBar]

I am seriously beginning to feel that G is hardly driving any international traffic to my global sites whatsoever and after discussions with several of my competitors / suppliers / customers it is clear we are all experiencing dramatic drops in traffic and realworld enquiries.

This could be explained by both current "events" plus, especially, localisation of G's SERPs.

I also still have a few UK local sites remaining however all of these but two will be closed within 12 months owing to owner retirements and being unable to sell the businesses as going concerns. Of the other two one of them plods along simply to keep the owner "entertained". Of course the other is the hotel site which is doing very well in all departments and gets a consistent genuine traffic volume but it also received a huge amount of US garbage until I started using CloudFlare.

This has been a shock to all of us with its, so far, average 84% reduction in daily bandwidth!

I have zero conclusions right now other than localisation for specific businesses that have owner interest seem ok however I have no experience of large city sites and localisation. Regardless of the fact my main global site ranks top 3 for thousands of keyword phrases, it is plainly obvious that all the G classified ads etc have demolished my organic traffic.

Could it get worse? That's very doubtful since it's already scraping the bottom plus the fact I am even typing this situation indicates my apprehension.

[morpheus83]

@Micha same here, traffic is slowly picking up, I would say at a bump of 10%.

Interestingly we see a bump from discover but at around 10 am California time it again starts to drop to disappointing levels. Seems like an algorithmic penalty.

[Micha]

@morpheus83 same here, traffic spikes early on, then flattens out around noon. However, I don't think it's a penalty. While my rankings are dipping too, a real penalty in my niche would mean dropping like a stone, which isn't happening. That said, I noticed things started shifting again yesterday. Old articles suddenly popped back up in the Top Stories/Headlines. Plus, there is definitely still a crawling or index update issue. Google News (and consequently Discover) seems extremely buggy right now. I can even see it on my own phone's Discover feed; absolutely nothing matches my actual interests, and the "local" news is completely off-target, showing regions I don't even live in.

I asked around a bit, and it’s the exact same story for everyone else. Because of this, I suspect Google simply hasn't gotten its systems under control yet. Even during a major core update, Discover usually doesn't output this level of total garbage.

[MayankParmar]

Hey all, happy to see the familiar names!

Something is odd with Discover. The story is picked up, then quickly dropped, and I am 40% down versus August and 60% versus July. I see a bump for an hour or two and it just disappears. CTR is up too.

This started aruond 1st of September.

@micha. how is it going right now?