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]

[ichthyous]

I noticed that GSC now has "Generative AI features Beta" as a separate data set...this is the first time I have seen it and it's almost 500k views in 3 months! My web clicks and especially impressions are down considerably from last year for this time period...is it just that the data sets were combined before or are these AI impressions replacing visits to the site? I suspect both, and also the general sense of anxiety since we now have a new middle east conflagration, higher prices, fear of stock market collapse, etc. People are not shopping much in other words.

[Micha]

It looks like a Google update might be rolling out. Semrush Sensor is showing major volatility across the US, UK, and Germany. At least this would finally be a confirmation that something is brewing behind the scenes, explaining the absolute chaos we've been seeing with Google search over the last few days.

@ichthyous better leave the articles as they are for now. Google is extremely unpredictable at the moment.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous, this behaviour started in our niche with the SPAM Update in June. google seems to classify (shop) sites with more than one topic as SPAM ( except amazon ).

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

That implies that you would need multiple single-topic sites these days to survive.

Bear in mind that my experience is with global sites, I have found the opposite this last couple of years, in fact only yesterday after several weeks of experimenting and analysis, I have closed all my specialised single-subject sites and incorporated that info all into one site.

Whether this is the correct course of action or not I really DO NOT Care!

I am sick and fed-up of all this deliberate manipulation by G and its cohorts. If all they want is a classified ads search with listed results dependent upon just how much someone is prepared to pay for the privileged top position, fine, then create that and if 75+% of people solely use that, again fine, but at at least we shall all then know if creating our sites, large and small, is a worthwhile effort whatsoever.

Honestly, I discovered some of my specialist sites' genuine traffic was almost zero.

[MayankParmar]

@micha can confirm Discover is back to dropping stories after 2-3 hours. well