Just dropped in to say Hi - haven't been here in months. Funny to see how all our "conspiracy theories" we observed as far back as 2010 are now being proven as true. Google search is corrupt, antiquated, and boring. Still looks like it did in 1997. I've switched to using straight-up AI to find what I need. [perplexity.ai...] is nice, but I can find more specific answers using ChatGPT. It won't be long before that's corrupted too. Human or machine, that's just how it rolls.

hey its samwest, haven seen you a long while.

AI "structured response" is going to take over search. Not today, or tomorrow, but in the next 1-3 years. Will Google stand against that paradigm change of the evolution of search? Too early to tell. They will put up a fight for sure.

Disruptions in such heavily Oligopoly niche like online search are not happening over night. But in a decade I bet you all my bullion gold that we will look back and wander how didn't that happen sooner. And some of us still fighting the good fight will reminise of the "good old day of man vs Google AI algo" .

Traffic is starting off stronger today than it has since Easter. Landing pages that have been blitzed since Easter are back to more normal levels...all except for the worst hit page. Anyone else seeing that?

AI "structured response" is going to take over search. Not today, or tomorrow, but in the next 1-3 years. Will Google stand against that paradigm change of the evolution of search?

That is a certainty, but I would not write off an almost trillion dollar corporation with 10,000 employees devoted to AI development. Google will be a leader of AI as well. This current model of search has been long overdue for the scrap heap, it's amazing that it has lasted this long. One way or another AI will be monetized...the US government doesn't invest in these technologies for the public good, they leave it all to the private sector to develop and monetize. We can debate all day whether that is good for society or not, but all of these tech monopolies will become more heavily regulated as AI is going to make a lot of jobs obsolete and that is going to apply a lot of political pressure. But not before the richest of the rich get even richer.

@Ichthyous, put your website on the free plan of Cloudlare, much easier to block entire countries. I block China and the Russian Federation by default on all my websites. I also block Linode, Amazon AWS and a few other ASN network numbers that are known hacker nests.

I already have the paid CF plan for years and use rules to target a but more closely. China is the biggest problem, I get a massive amount of Chinese attempts to hit my files without ever visiting the front end of my site. If you block referrers coming in from http 1.1 you block most of that crap from China. That leaves legitimate traffic from China which I want to permit. It has actually dwindled in the last year or so, which shows you the level of control the government has on the free flow of information there.

I do block Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria entirely. I don't really like doing that, but I won't ever get customers from these places and the level of nefarious snooping makes them more trouble than they are worth. India also gets a challenge, not a block. I rarely get legitimate inquiries from India and most of the traffic seems to be either stealing my images or going straight to my contact page to submit spam forms for services.

I don't block Russia anymore...I actually get much less traffic from Russia and fewer hacking attempts than a few years ago. I have done legitimate business with customers in Russia in the past, and had articles in Russian language publications etc... but it was quite a while ago. The climate has changed so don't think that will be the case again anytime soon!

Fyi...with the cloudflare paid plan you can set up a good number of rules blocking access by file type...very useful.

Definitely my slowest day this week but how much this has to do with a UK holiday and the Coronation tomorrow, I have no idea.

One thing I have noticed recently is that my post 18.00 UK time traffic from the US etc is much lower. How much of this is to do with various economies or G manipulation, again, pure speculation on my part.

@samwest

Funny to see how all our "conspiracy theories" we observed as far back as 2010 are now being proven as true.

Nah, they were always educated foresights :-)

@Redbar, Some of my website's are in a type of industry that causes me to receive spam emails from companies from certain regions looking to do (digital)projects. The past several months these emails have spiked immensely and it's obvious they are almost getting to the point of being really desperate to land a work project. There is certainly an economic downturn, also in western europe, no matter what governments are trying to hide, because people are complaining BIG TIME about the current inflation percentages.

Also I am convinced G at some time in the past definitely started favoring their home country in how they present the serp results for many industries. This has now become blatantly obvious to the point that it's picked up in one of the EU commission investigations about G.

@ichthyous, I will be looking into a paid plan now, because the first paid option already allows for many extra's that will come in really handy!

@Dooku

There is certainly an economic downturn, also in western europe, no matter what governments are trying to hide,

I know of several large wholesale bulk importers in mostly western countries that have cut-back purchases, their B2B sales demand is down simply because B2C demand is down. Some are also trying to re-balance their stock cost levels, what do I mean by this.

Do you remember the shortage of shipping containers not so long ago, well now they can't give them away, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of container ships sitting idly ... Remember the shortage and the cost? A 40'0 container was USD 20,000 from China / India to Europe / USA, now it can be had for less than USD 2,000 ... Just imagine what that does for inventory prices when transporting heavier widgets. I have one specific widget that only 100 widgets fit in a 20'0 container. 3 years ago the seafreight cost alone was USD 10, it then went up to USD 100, now its back at USD 10 ...

This widget only costs USD 150 FOB, imagine what these fluctuating seafreight prices do to stock costs etc?

Also I am convinced G at some time in the past definitely started favoring their home country in how they present the serp results for many industries.

I have been saying this for a long time now but, of course, G tries to defend it by claiming it's localisation which I could accept IF G did not promote those US companies to #1 in their SERPs in other countries which these US companies do not supply.

e.g. One of my main products for 50+ years I have produced at my own factory in India. I used to be #1 for several of these widgets however these days no chance. After several years of being #1 G blew me out and replaced me by the largest US importer / wholesaler, ok, fair enough in the USA BUT #1 in the UK and India where it is produced? BTW, I am not the only company in my industry that sees this, every company in my Indian widget-producing sector does and precisely why about 2015/16 most of them stopped updating their websites since no matter what they did they could not rank.

AI "structured response" is going to take over search. Not today, or tomorrow, but in the next 1-3 years.

I'm skeptical. Some queries demand answers ("the capital of North Dakota"), while others demand original expert knowledge presented in depth. Presentation matters, too.

Also, some people like to read, and some don't. (Our site has readers who bounce as soon as they've found basic information, but it also has a considerable number of readers who'll stick around for half an hour or more and read 20+ pages during a visit.)

IMO, the real value of AI (from a search engine's point of view) will be in helping the SE do a better job of separating wheat from chaff, personalizing results, etc., as opposed to emulating low-paid human drones who crank out copycat articles based on SEO keyword lists. There's plenty of fluff and crap on the Web right now without Google, Bing, etc. using AI to replicate the work of content farms.

To put it another way, the greater value of AI for search engines will continue to be in the back room, not on the SERP.

With Google pushing more ads into Gmail I’m sure they will load more and more into the search engine.
For now traffic here it’s rather « ok » let’s see next week.

There is certainly an economic downturn, also in western europe, no matter what governments are trying to hide, because people are complaining BIG TIME about the current inflation percentages.

We are hard-pressed to understand the true nature of it since most of our collective downturn for those posting here is really just Google destroying our traffic and leads little by little, month by month. As for me, it's both Google and the economy...but when my impressions/visibility increased for 6 months straight from early Sept 2022 - early April 2023 I at least had inquiries to respond to. From March 2022 - end of Aug 2022 there were no inquiries at all...it was stone dead. In my niche, the very wealthy continued to spend but the upper middle class and affluent that are my customer base stopped cold...in North America, UK, Europe and Australia all at the same time. I had a couple of sales to the Middle East, but even that wasn't as strong as I had hoped. I think all of the following contributed:

- End of pandemic governmental spending, so less consumption by the lower classes
- The fact that everyone sat home shopping in 2020 and 2021, and that pulled demand forward
- The big drop in stock market, bonds and crypto at the same time in 2022
- Ukraine war
- Brexit consequences (UK)
- 2021 and 2022 inflation and cost increases...now abating
- For the first time in a long time you can park your savings in any account and get almost 5% return now...so more saving is happening

Just dropped in to say Hi - haven't been here in months. Funny to see how all our "conspiracy theories" we observed as far back as 2010 are now being proven as true. Google search is corrupt, antiquated, and boring. Still looks like it did in 1997. I've switched to using straight-up AI to find what I need. [perplexity.ai...] is nice, but I can find more specific answers using ChatGPT. It won't be long before that's corrupted too. Human or machine, that's just how it rolls.

Haven't posted here for years. I've learnt to rely 100% on paid search traffic and it worked great till now.

Good seeing all the good old timers here!

Just wanted to let you know that whatever G is experimenting with (now) is affecting all my sale channels. 3 Websites (100% adwords traffic), ebay store, etsy store, amazon store. April was about 45% of sales normal, May is shocking at about 10% of normal sales to date.

It's a major (AI?) update compounded by post Covid bad economics, not to mention quite high interest rates.

April was about 45% of sales normal, May is shocking at about 10% of normal sales to date.

Layouts changed adding many more ads. Increased ad competition + an increase in paying for tire kicker clicks = a negative ROI for us. Jumping out quick was the only way to stop the bleeding. I'm surprised it took G so long to get to your niches, but I think the ad spam is here to stay considering Google is having a hard time pumping up ad revenue. Organic Google is worse with most traffic from G being bots. Other search engines are holding their own with the massive drop focused on Google and their gimmicks to produce revenue.

Yesterday my USA traffic started the day strong and then from 1pm dropped off a cliff and was down the entire rest of the day, ending the day -35%. Meanwhile UK was only -5%, even with the coronation. This morning at 11am USA is -66%. UK, Australia, Europe, Asia, Middle East are all higher. Clearly, Google is targeting everyone's USA traffic.

My ranking for top 3 terms has actually increased this week, but since Easter I have noticed that many of my lowest-level content pages that had been bringing in good traffic dropped from 25%-65% in a short period of time. Similarly, the interior pages of many categories dropped precipitously...so from page 2 to page X of every category lost a ton of page views. Checking GSC it's clear that impressions and clicks have diverged strongly now since the beginning of April:

[ibb.co ]

May has continued to be pretty much "business as usual" for us. No big ups, no big downs. Today's hour-by-hour traffic graph looks almost identical with last Sunday's. Still, I keep waiting for the hammer to drop one of these days, especially after reading this:

[searchengineland.com...]

especially after reading this:

"provide a more visual, snackable, personal, and human layout and interface designed to appeal more to younger searchers."

That will be the 2by4 that finally breaks the camel's back and ends Google's dominance in search. Google will shrink itself to some TickTock style lip-sync video aggregator for teenagers. And other companies will take over search. Finally.....

@ichthyous

Cool that you are facing this only since April. My website is stagnating since "helpful" updates and "review" updates for more than 1 year. Nothing helps: tried pruning, massive updating content, cleaning links through disavow. NOTHING happens. The website is going to zero week by week.

GA:
[imgur.com...]

Semrush:
[imgur.com...]

worst weekend for years. Sales from google are at 30%.
other sources ebay/amazon at 111%.

Our niche is
#1 amazon
#2-#10 rubbish

From a customer view i can´t find anything but amazon.
Shopping ads in most cases leading to iffy shops or marketplaces. Most of the shos from the ads are overpriced.

Summarizing the last updates since 15 april: very, very bad for users. good for google and amazon

My drop came around mid-week last week. Pretty horrendous weekend.

For all those who show since April -May their websites to sunk ...I believe is worth to check bellow..
Did you pass the test with green for both mobile & desktop here?
[pagespeed.web.dev...]
If yes no need to worry ...otherwise reshape your whole website/websites to mobile friendly..
and Bob's your uncle...
.no matter what the future will bring if you have an established brand with great value content and links I believe you will have no worries...

"provide a more visual, snackable, personal, and human layout and interface designed to appeal more to younger searchers."

Suuuure, for the benefit of the youth...and perhaps also to make it easier to mix in and hide what is sponsored content and trick more people into clicking it?

My traffic today is frighteningly bad...huge drops in traffic to most of my most important landing pages of up to 86%. USA is starting the day at -72%, UK is -40% I am preparing myself for the reality that Google will no longer provide any appreciable traffic to my website after all these changes take place...I think that is what's coming. So what happens once Google decides just to serve our content up without any links to our own sites...we all block Googlebot and move on?

Google Search to become more "visual, snackable, personal, and human"

So if Google are dropping the "ten blue links" (plus their deluge of ads) are they now finally admitting that they are no longer a "search engine" but an information provider? How dangerous is that?

So what happens once Google decides just to serve our content up without any links to our own sites...we all block Googlebot and move on?

I've seen a movement in that direction already. One of my more popular sites was listed in google SERPs with three drop boxes under it, each one focusing on a different page of my site and containing most of the copy on that page, but with no extra links to these pages. The writing is on the wall.

The writing is on the wall.

In the short term, I believe AI will provide an excuse for Google to push forward with drastic layout changes that consume more of our content to keep users on Google as you eluded to. I don't see how this will end well for any of us.

Being in the UK these last few days have been interesting with the Coronation celebrations.

My global site has been -5% v my new average however that's -36.7% v my average until end March / April and -62% v two years ago.

Insofar as the hotel venue site is concerned the first 8 days has seen a 148% traffic level, needless to say we feel that the next couple of weeks may be much quieter but we've been way under-estimating the business success for several months now!

In the short term, I believe AI will provide an excuse for Google to push forward with drastic layout changes that consume more of our content to keep users on Google as you eluded to. I don't see how this will end well for any of us.

That's exactly right...this latest black magic Google is working should be a strong hint that they have zero concern about what happens to the content providers. I've lost two thirds of the traffic on some high-traffic terms that I am still ranking #2-#3 on. I was ranking #1 for the same terms a bit over a week ago and the traffic was still not there.

There are few, if any, ads on the page and not that many widgets when I have checked, so I have no idea how Google has accomplished this feat of making traffic almost entirely disappear. But I am certain that this will spread to include more and more searches in all of our traffic is made to disappear...."oh sorry, it's our transition to incorporating AI into searches".

Has anyone else noticed how USA traffic just seems to stop cold for hours at a time now?

My USA traffic just sits idle for a good portion of the day, then suddenly comes back in the later part of the day. Non-USA traffic is steady all day.

There are few, if any, ads on the page and not that many widgets when I have checked, so I have no idea how Google has accomplished this feat of making traffic almost entirely disappear.

Personalization is likely the reason why you aren't seeing many ads and a different SERP layout then others. From my computer, I can see great visibility for our site in Google USA. Great as in only one text ad appears before the first organic result, we rank #1 with an expanded listing, we own the local pack with three of our products displayed, in the image block we hold 2 of 4 images, in the videos we have 2 of 3, etc. We should be rocking, but instead have sunk like a rock in Google. Now I do the same search from a different IP address located a few hundred miles away and the whole screen is just ads. Only when I scroll can I see we are still #1. Google is showing me everything I want to see from my IP and likely everyone else something entirely different and filled with ads like I saw myself using a different IP. We serve the USA and Canada markets directly, so this hit us hard. Those who sell/ship globally may have it better off since Google is not displaying as many ads in those markets as they are to those in the USA.

So if Google are dropping the "ten blue links" (plus their deluge of ads) are they now finally admitting that they are no longer a "search engine" but an information provider? How dangerous is that?

Google News moved away from old-school "blue links" a while back. The mobile version of Google News, especially, looks nothing like the Google News of old. Publishers whose stories get featured must be happy, because many Google News results now have photos, blurbs, etc. that are more enticing than traditional all-text search results.

I miss the good old days of "10 blue links" myself, but--IMO--Google News is a pretty good example of how information and attractive, visually rich presentation aren't mutually exclusive.

If yes no need to worry ...otherwise reshape your whole website/websites to mobile friendly..
and Bob's your uncle...
.no matter what the future will bring if you have an established brand with great value content and links I believe you will have no worries...

I don't think it's quite that simple :-)

Response to their problems is more of personalising buyer traffic to the few regardless of your better product and better prices and higher bids.

The hate the algo spreads now is shocking we even put a product that no one has and started well but algo attacked that too. It prefers not let the consumer see the product instead of making us a sale.

Not sure where is the hate coming from…