I'm seeing a drastic decline in RPM.

Do guys experiencing this also? It started in March 2025

MOSTLY - New post, indexed, not showing on search
RARELY - New post, indexed, showing on search

Urghh. A real headache.

@delorean Yes yes .. You are not alone.

@azlinda Even with the current geo-politics, tariff wars, G updates, AI and other what nots. Still there was a stability in RPM rates even when they fell to completely new low during last Dec. But something has changed since the last 48 hours all of a sudden RPM rates became 1/3 rd that of last week..

Back in December, radical economic steps and the risk of a recession were merely being discussed. That's changed in the last few days.

Is Google reversing the core update? No matter where I look, all I see today are massive ranking losses and drops in traffic.

@Micha, i think the core update is still in progress. Donīt believe a word that google is saying.
This night there was again a 50% drop from organics. We are currently fighting against bots ( especially from US ).

This care update is the worst update we ever going through. It is even worse than panda and panda was realy worse.
It seems that realy all of google guidelines and quaility factors went down the drain with this update.
If google wants to scare away their users. This is the right way.

@Goodoldweb, google has become very strict regarding email. I see too many errors in the DNS records when I check them. The SPF, DMARC and DKIM records need to be absolutely spot on, also relative to your domain and any third party or transactional email service you might be using(which is where it often goes wrong).
Else the best you will see is that emails end up in the spam folder of the gmail recipient or it gets dropped completely.

On another note, I already mentioned here a few years ago that I do not accept any customers with Gmail email addresses on a few of my websites. The customer sees a popup that gmail email addresses are not allowed and a few alternative email services are displayed. Some visitors leave a message on the contact form that we can stuff it, some ask why that is and some thank us for the info. On a few other websites I do accept customers that use Gmail adresses because it's less important and the info is practically useless for them.

Has anyone noticed that Cloudflare is now using google ssl certificates on their end. Talk about wanting to take over the world. Obviously some money has exchanged hands here. All of those small things that do not seem very important but actually are......no google fonts on my websites, absolutely no recaptcha and any no other google related similar "plugins" from them. All of these "plugins" make connections to google servers when pages on your website are loading......not to mention when they can correlate them with GA4.

@Micha It always happens on Thursdays and Fridays of every week. These days the number of search console links are updated and now I have fewer and fewer backlinks, we are talking now about less than 70 domains that link to me, all the other links have been lost because Google has either deindexed the url of the site for who knows what reason or the site has closed... Not to mention the backlinks that are not shown on GSC even if they still exist. Some of the sites that send me links are also penalized by hcu and could make things worse for the sites that link. In short Google has made a disaster that is unlikely to be solved

i think the core update is still in progress. Donīt believe a word that google is saying.
This night there was again a 50% drop from organics.

Also seeing drastic drops here. My search traffic was -18% yesterday. Direct traffic was -25%. It was already declining from the first day of the update, but the last week has been drastic. I think we have a confluence of a very poorly implemented update, Easter holidays for students in some countries, complete chaos in the financial markets, and normal seasonal patterns as warmer weather takes over. I read that the financial news channels are seeing huge surges in people tuning in, so perhaps web search is not a priority right now for many people. Not to mention the start of a completely self-inflicted recession. The economy just a couple of short months ago was spectacular, so we are witnessing a pointless economic vandalism on a scale never seen in modern times. That probably has a lot to do with it.

This care update is the worst update we ever going through. It is even worse than panda and panda was realy worse. It seems that realy all of google guidelines and quaility factors went down the drain with this update.
If google wants to scare away their users. This is the right way.

I am seeing single instagram posts, videos, etc all pushing out high quality websites now. There has been a big shakeup in which sites remained at the top, with some very obscure articles now in the top ten for no apparent reason. It seems to be changing on a daily basis, but my site dropped rapidly from top 3 to around #14 over the course of the last month since this update rolled out and there was no stopping it.

The latest update once again returned us to "How To" hell, as if users really need to see 15 how-to articles in a row on any topic. I have never seen single social media posts take over so many spots...it's ridiculous. When you add in the number of Youtube videos it really pushes websites way down. Of course, the traffic is now -70% for that page.

Yes 8th and 9th are bad and today is bad also. Interestingly, last week there was same type of drop on Tuesday also. Mirror image.

@ichthyous, yes quality has dropped dramatically with this update. I our nich even some big players dropped like a stone. Amazon was the big winner.
It seems like multitheme websites have been hit more than others.

Holy ... Google's traffic has completely collapsed since 1pm and not just on my website (the store is dead too). Many website owners I know have the exact same problem. What the hell is Google up to again?

Yeesh, what the heck is going on today?

Is another update happening right now? 20% drop again

@klicktalk We don't know, but we probably do.

Yesterday was really bad. My news site suffered a big drop in rankings and it continues. The site has been like dead since yesterday (which surprises me because the daily budget for AdWords is actually 200 euros, yesterday it only spent 30 euros).

Unless my tools are going crazy, all the sites I monitor have also seen a very sharp drop. It all looks like an update

Something is happening in the EU, several proceedings against Us-Tech groups are already underway and are about to be concluded. Action is also being taken against Google. At last. (Unfortunately, I have only found one source in German)

[tagesschau.de ]

Seems to be they switch between to result sets.
One good, one worse.

@Martin

Yeah, rollercoaster results every hour, if not per minute.

The adsense team telephoned me to increase my ads, so I did. Since I INCREASED them the traffic is worse its ever been, I am just leaving them as they are and take what happens. Why recommend something that kills your traffic?

@Samsam1978 Adsense will also be desperate because of these constant unnecessary changes that the incompetent search engine engineers are making. Maybe they should look for good engineers

Just saw a reddit thread on a group I follow from a higher power that's marked as an "admin" (gasp, the power), "DONT USE CHATGBT FOR QUESTIONS ITS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE" Rolled up my sleeve and pointed out Googles "AI" is a chatGBT LLM repackaged as Google, which it is! Course I got banned, admin power! I do think people are catching on that LLM aren't the don! Honestly guys I genuinely feel this LLM is a flash in the pan that will either die out or be banned, keep your sites alive it wont last IMO

I do think people are catching on that LLM aren't the don! Honestly guys I genuinely feel this LLM is a flash in the pan that will either die out or be banned, keep your sites alive it wont last IMO

It's true that people notice, but companies don't care. Google will continue to force AI on us because it's a way to make money, and it's not for nothing that Google (and now Bing) has linked terms so that clicking on them starts a new search.

However, I'm sure it's not about AI as such, it's just about keeping users on your website. Neither the users nor the websites are of interest to the companies. The former are there to make money and the latter to steal content. However, for Google and co. both are just a necessary evil. Only Sundar and Co. are so arrogant that they don't realize that this approach will blow up in their faces at some point. But I fear that by the time that happens, half the web will have been destroyed.

An overnight reversion back to more normal levels of traffic yesterday and today. Google made some sort of obvious change...either dialed back the March update or a new update is taking place. My traffic has been a disaster for a month and now suddenly this. It's very frustrating to see how eager Google is to just starve everyone out if it serves their purposes. No calls or emails for weeks...then suddenly yesterday customers again.

The traffic today:
News page bad until 6 pm, very high traffic since 6 pm
Store: many orders until 6 p.m., good traffic. Since 6 pm, no traffic.
Could it be that Google is now rolling the dice as to who gets how much traffic?

Very quiet weekend, daily orders back to 0 or single digit and lots of window shoppers.

We sell unique aquatic live products, the chances that all of a sudden no-one, in the entire contry needs our products is 0.

Conclusion: Google is obstracting our trade again, "algorithmically".

I still see seo talking about keywords, first position, backlinks... They remind me of those at Blackhatworld who sell SEO services that worked 20 years ago and now only make you penalize 100%

I still see seo talking about keywords, first position, backlinks... They remind me of those at Blackhatworld who sell SEO services that worked 20 years ago and now only make you penalize 100%

Are you absolutely sure about that? Because I find that good quality links still work to increase rank. The problem is that position in search is almost beside the point when nobody can find the search results anymore. Of course if you hit your site with 10,000 low quality backlinks all at the same time it won't be pretty. But good quality links from very high authority sites still move the needle somewhat.

Yes, strong links can still improve rankings for sure, but it doesn't help much if the first page is occupied by ai overviews, people also ask, YouTube, reddit, brand sites, sites placed there at random, correlate search ...

Really strong links are not that easy to get. Most SEOs are therefore well paid to place links on rather small websites that have little effect because they let their clients believe that this works. Strictly speaking, Conro is right, the industry talks a lot of nonsense and there are few who really understand the current situation and are honest with their clients.

Let's add a very unclever thing that many seos do, they give you a list of sites with the price, the problem is that this list could easily end up in the hands of Google, with a whole series of consequences and where if it goes well those expensive links will have no value