What do we do about these zombies? New administration seems to be busy with “Stargate” while we get charged for traffic that can not be proven it is real!

This 'administration' went from endlessly whining about how Google, Meta and all the others were persecuting them to being owned top to bottom by them. Even the supposed direct threat from China vaporized overnight and TikTok is still here as it's a useful tool for spreading disinformation to GenZ. There won't be any action against any of these companies in any real sense for the next 4 years. USA government is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Tech now. Any action will have to come from EU, UK, AU, etc and perhaps they will all act in concert against USA big tech. I do think that the public on average is now becoming much more suspicious of the power of these companies though...they were all sitting there at the inauguration like the old Soviet Politburo.

They switched to B set. Very, very, very worse traffic. Amazon & ebay are now our main selling channels. Before all this updates started it was google.

I am not seeing massive fluctuations...in fact since the beginning of January traffic has become much more stable and at a much higher level. Most of that is seasonal, but the number of actual inquiries and sales has increased quite a bit from the end of Dec to now. But we all know that that doesn't last for any of us very long. Google will decide to launch five updates in a row lasting 4-6 weeks where there is poor traffic and no inquiries at all.

We are seeing the complete opposite. Massiv drops in traffic. Today started with 37% of "normal traffic". Most of the traffic single page views ( no robots ). Traffic seems to be 100% mismatched,
Pattern with flowing traffic change with long times with no traffic at all. A pattern that we didn´t see for two years.

@Martin One thing I have seen for months now is a perpetually low amount of traffic from Germany. One day it seems normal, and the next day it drops like a stone. Are you referring to DE traffic, or is this all of your traffic? My DE traffic was stable for many years, but now it vanishes every other day. Canada is also very low all the time these days.

I have to agree with Martin again, there is only one difference: the traffic is high (only from Germany), but zero sales from what comes from Google.
The news page is also running strangely, today a bit better again, but the last few days have been terrible.

Have to agree with Martin Ice Web regarding A/B-like testing of two versions of results or SERP layouts. Yesterday the non-junk version was enabled for about half a day. During the night they switched back to junk version and today it stays that way (low traffic).

Micha, maybe you are getting so much non-converting traffic because Google assumes that you have super duper "authority" since you are a shop/ecomm site with street address and entity (business name), and it is sending some of the purely informational traffic to you instead of some random AI generated spam sites (because Google can't recognize legitimate info sites anymore).

@christianz I think you're right about that, because actually 0 sales are illogical with this amount of traffic.

Kind of at a loss.

In my niche, the sites grabbing the most amount of traffic right now are deliberate clickbait and turning a single sentence of value into a 700 word article.

I would not put my money on EU, UK, AU they know what is happening but sit and watch their small business being suffocated!

Only hope is Big Tech to start eat each other!

they were all sitting there at the inauguration like the old Soviet Politburo

A comment I read online yesterday:
" I was recently discussing this with a fellow Eastern European friend—the difference between us and our Western cousins is that we absolutely LOATHE our oligarchs, while many in the West don’t even seem to realize they have them!"

So I agree that we should not expect much, if anything, from governments, even in Europe.

And while we are fighting for survival, the champagne corks are popping on Google. [cnbc.com ]

So I agree that we should not expect much, if anything, from governments, even in Europe.

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

“ Alphabet shares close above $200 for first time on split-adjusted basis”

Also a crypto meme goes up in value without intrinsic value!

I am having a hard time to believe that “people” click more on ads these days considering how time wasting it is to find something better than amazon!

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

Yes, correct, this is one from list of ways how EU will make revenge, very easy

HUGE drop today!

Then again, if Trump launches "targeted tariffs" against an EU member because he thinks he's entitled to Greenland, Europe could tighten the screws on U.S. Big Tech.

US has proven to be an unreliable ally when Trump is in office...I think it will be more than just the EU. The UK is pretty fed up with US meddling in their domestic politics, and this admin does everything in its power to insult Latin America at every turn. A lot of these countries are already suspicious about the pervasiveness of US tech and can turn up the heat considerably.

@ renatovieira. Yes, huge drop here too...started at 8am sharp. Traffic was actually deteriorating the entire day yesterday from 11am, but today is a steeper drop.

DROP , here we go!

But i am sure they are cooking January or Feb Core update nothing else . The Goog engineers gotta prove themselves by making search better every day, isn't it.

Here, too: drop. It seems impossible to grow. On Google, there is only one direction left: down. @sj7411 Since Google just updated its search Quality Rater Guidelines, an update should actually come now, it always has when it has been updated.

Impressions are really really low too. Let’s see what will bring the next update. !

USA and Canada traffic are **very** low today...-35% and -85% at 1pm. Everyplace else seems to have recovered from the slump of the last two days

Thanks God I still have the pause button on my ads!

That may go soon without any regulators noticing it!

Massive drop continuing through today.

Bizarre, my Sunday ended up with my best day of the year at 194.6% of my 2025 average so far and my highest day since 26th October 2024. All traffic was what I woud describe as "normal".

Still dropping . Great going Goole , just rank whatever you didn't in 2024 just for the sake of freshness . They will all indeed be high quality SERPS, trust me !

deepseek.com is it checkmate to G?

A few search engines and how soon?

deepseek.com is it checkmate to G?

Open source AI from China already has been bench marked and is more accurate then the best the US has to offer. Google's downfall will be continuing to invest billions of dollars in their AI only to be repeatedly one-upped by open source AI from China built at 1/10000 of the cost. Google ruined their search engine, and I doubt they will ever see any success in AI because they have lost all focus and are concerned only about making money - not the people who rely on and who they expect to use their terrible products. IMO, Google greatest days are in the rear-view mirror.

There is an article here about the DeepSeek app release: [webmasterworld.com...]

This is just the start of major SEO and Google disrupters. In fact a large proportion of websites will not be required and distribution strategies will be turned on their heads.

Implications on SEO thread with OpenAI’s “Operator” here: [webmasterworld.com...]

The game’s shifting big big time. Hold on, learn and innovate.

February core update is going to be brutal given the trends we are seeing . Absolute win for the spammers though.