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]

[Micha]

@MayyankParma Same here, though traffic is slightly better today (still terrible compared to normal days). Since more and more people from different countries are chiming in and seeing the exact same pattern with Discover, I think it’s safe to say the system is just completely losing its mind.

[MayankParmar]

Here's my 24 hours graph: [ibb.co...]

The bump just disappeared, and Discover traffic is dead now. It'll pick up again, and disappear. Contributing to a major overall traffic drop.

Some large media properties told me that they've a similar issue starting 2nd September.

But then I don't think it's widespread. Many sites are seeing better traffic.

[RedBar]

Wow, thanks Oracle, not !

What did a 30 page site do to deserve at 22.56 last night a hit of 23,141 pages ?

IP: 140.238.157.225
Block: 140.238.128.0/19

I hope CF saw that.

[morpheus83]

@Misha seems like a penalty as we have never seen discover behave this way, the graph @mayank shared is exactly what we are experiencing too.
Either its been good traffic from discover for 48-72 hours or nothing at all.
Google news on the other hand has been stable for us.
But I agree, discover feed is all messed up

[Micha]

I still don’t think this is a penalty. The overall pattern simply doesn’t fit one. What we’re seeing looks much more like a Discover serving/personalization issue or some kind of ongoing system change, especially since several of us started seeing essentially the same behaviour around September 1st/2nd.

[MayankParmar]

To me, a Discover penalty is when we go to zero. In this case, if you look at my graph, we were doing great for 1.5 hours before dropping. That is a 24-hour graph.

Volatility in Discover is normal. One day can be 30K, another 5K. But now we're getting around 10K in a day, where 1-2 specific hours bring in 4-5K clicks, and the rest are spread across the remaining 24 hours. Overall it's a massive drop, but I don't know what is happening.

[Micha]

New day, and the saga continues. Today, I’m seeing massive delays with news indexing again. Old articles, some up to four days old. are getting pushed to the top, and outdated news is popping up in the headlines. On top of that, the Discover feed remains a total mess. 

I spoke with a few other webmasters yesterday, and they all confirmed exactly what we were discussing here. For me, the conclusion stands: this isn't a penalty. Something in Google's systems is simply not working the way it should.

Also, the shop is really struggling to gain traction on Google. Yesterday was already rough, but today, the only traffic coming from Google is completely useless. To make matters worse, Google Ads has been delivering exactly zero conversions since yesterday.

[MayankParmar]

i'm afraid it's the new normal

[RedBar]

What did a 30 page site do to deserve at 22.56 last night a hit of 23,141 pages ?

Addendum ... Further to this post, last night I decided to look into my raw server logs to identify the culprit and guess who I found?

https :// www. google [dot com] /search?hl=en&q=testing

23+K pages, 250MB of Google testing a 30 page site over and over again ?

What the heck is all that about?

[morpheus83]

This update is bringing back memories of the first HCU update.

[Micha]

There are just no clear signs that this is actually an update, but of course, you can't rule it out. Anyway, this is slowly turning into a business killer.

The shop made exactly 0 euros via Google traffic again yesterday; Ads is just burning cash, and the news site's traffic is at a 10-year low (with zero ad revenue). Discover isn't completely dead, but extremely flat.

It would be really nice if whatever bug or glitch Google is choking on right now would finally clear out.

[morpheus83]

True @micha, bot traffiic is high and CPMs have halved after traffic has dropped by 70%.

How old is your news site if i ask?

[Micha]

16 years old and this year has been very successful so far; traffic has gone up significantly, well, until August 29th.

[morpheus83]

Same here, we are 20 years old.

[Micha]

In my case, there's a unique twist: we are one of a kind in the German-speaking world, which makes it even more ridiculous. However, I’ve already been through this situation once this year: from January until about mid-February, traffic plummeted just like it is doing now, but after that, it really took off.

[MayankParmar]

how frequently do you guys post? I post like 2-3 articles a day, and my competitors are doing 25-50; maybe Google Discover prefers that

[Micha]

15-17 every day

[morpheus83]

@Micha, I can relate to that, Jan - Feb were slow and after that we had some of our best months. Unitil August stuck.

[Micha]

Hang in there, it will probably pick up again. Everyone goes through dry spells at some point, courage born out of desperation, I guess. ;)

Discover is pretty funny for me at the moment though. Google keeps sending notifications to my phone asking whether I'm interested in articles from my own website, roughly once an hour. But my actual Discover feed is filled with Chinese state media, local news from places almost 500 km away, and other completely irrelevant stuff. The topics I'm actually interested in? Almost nothing. And Google definitely knows my interests. My main Google account is very old and has years of search and Discover history behind it.

Anyway, last Monday I submitted the app for my news site to the Play Store and Apple App Store. If Google and Apple ever gets around to approving it, that's at least one more step towards becoming a little less dependent on Discover.

[MayankParmar]

well it just wont' go up. maybe the new baseline.

[MayankParmar]

potential update on sept 2/3rd - a big one [x.com...]

[Micha]

@MayankParmar That would be one explanation, but we can only guess. Edit: However, it seems like things are starting to move again. Yesterday afternoon, my Discover traffic started picking up, and early this morning (Sunday) is looking good too. On top of that, my private Discover feed looks a lot more normal today.

[RedBar]

potential update on sept 2/3rd - a big one [x.com...]

Call me old-fashioned if you like however didn't this used to be called the Black Friday / Xmas update?

The regular SERPs are irrelevant nowadays except for those actually knowing for what they are searching outside of their widget purchase. Certainly localisation can be used successfully but otherwise for "free" rankings the game's been over for quite a few years.

[Whitey]

I’d be interested to see reactions from anyone observing the SERPs in the EU
[reuters.com...]

[MayankParmar]

@Micha Hey, my Discover is coming back too! Started around Saturday/Sunday. Stories are no longer getting "dropped" off. I'm now down like 20%, but that's okay. Not brutal anymore, and it'll probably get better

Delayed console doesn't help tbh

[Micha]

@MayankParmar Glad to hear that! My numbers are looking good today too, pretty much back to normal. And the shop also really picked up again yesterday, Google Ads started delivering, and revenue was right back to normal levels. Let's just lean back now, take a deep breath, and enjoy a nice cup of coffee after this two-week Google rollercoaster ride.

@Whitey Honestly, it’s not as noticeable right now, but the search results were already pretty bad even before this

[RedBar]

I’d be interested to see reactions from anyone observing the SERPs in the EU
[reuters.com...]

Google's SERPs worldwide really depends on the type of search performed. For pro searchers using long-tail etc I still find Google ok for both commercial and evergreen content.. It's by no means perfect but the results are usually there.

However, insofar as the general SERPs are concerned, it's general results are totally dependent on one's perception. For short-tailed widget enquiries, in my experience, in general localisation dominate no matter how good a site may be, G, understandably, prefers to show local results since that is from where it derives its advertising revenue ... For FMCG one either sinks or swims with ad Dollars and branding / reputation and in many instances convenience. Everyone knows, or ought to, that Amazon is not usually the lowest cost but they do make up for it with, usually, quick delivery and service plus ease of purchase. Trying to compete with A these days must be a nightmare!

[slightly ot]The EU will screw-up, it does so on a very regular basis, and until it is dismantled it will continue its interference and blandness and never cease to amaze Europeans with so much of its ineptitude. I was a big supporter of the EU until I had the misfortune in the 80s/90s of having to deal with Eurocrats.[/ot]

[christianz]

I’d be interested to see reactions from anyone observing the SERPs in the EU

It's great that google will have to behave in this narrow niche and results there will no doubt be better than before, but this is not enough, this is far too narrow. All self-preferencing, monopoly-abusing UI features must be banned in EU. EU is not doing nearly enough but at least its doing something, however symbolic it may be. Thank God for EU, the only slight roadblock in the nightmarish US tech firm abuse of the WWW.

[Micha]

And the rollercoaster goes on. Right at 4 PM yesterday, traffic dropped, and today Discover is low again. The chaos in my feed is also back. But the funniest thing I saw today: over 2-month-old news suddenly popped up in the Top Stories box for my niche. Oh well, at least the weekend went well for a change.

The exact same thing is happening to my shop. Yesterday at 4 PM on the dot, Google traffic brought no more conversions, and Google Ads suddenly stopped converting as well, despite a really good run before. It's the exact same story today.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing that the only thing that has any decent rank on my site now are the articles. They have replaced the actual category landing pages from my site entirely...those were all highly ranking for 20 years. It seems that Google no longer intends to rank any site that has multiple categories...like most ecomm sites do. That implies that you would need multiple single-topic sites these days to survive.

The articles were supposed to add extra traffic, not replace what I had. It has gotten so bad that I am considering deleting or redirecting the articles back to my category pages. It seems counterintuitive to do that, and they took a lot of work to write.