7 messages were cut out to new thread by not2easy. New Google vs. Bing vs. Duckduckgo thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 12:28 pm (utc) on Apr 23, 2025]
[edit reason] corrected link [/edit]

What's up with traffic? I thought perhaps it was the Easter holiday, but my USA traffic is still crap today. It's -44% this morning. Certain search terms have been blitzed and traffic is down to those pages by half. I ws demoted for one from #2-#4 to #10-#14 for no reason and never recovered. Yesterday and Monday search was also down on the day about 8%, while direct traffic was down even more...

@ichthyous

Same here in USA. This morning my traffic is about half of what it was yesterday with no changes in my rankings. My Adsense traffic has plummeted too. This is very strange.

Big drop in G traffic today (-40%), and it's not because of the supposed GA reporting bug either because we don't use GA. Google reports earnings tomorrow, so they are probably moving into their next phase of destroying the internet. I'm thinking the loss in traffic is because more AIO has been released into the wild and also an increase in Google double serving ads that bumps out those who were getting some traffic from their free product ad feeds. Despite what Google is doing, our sales are ok since some people are searching elsewhere and are still able to find our products.

It’s time for Google to squizz at much users as possible, double serving ads etc etc, they have 2 years pretty much before getting crushed by the DOJ.

This WIRED article about Google AI Overviews and large language models is delightful, if disturbing. The examples given are hilarious.

[wired.com...]

Google search is undoubtedly dead. Dead, not in availability, but in relevancy of results. Before, when I searched a game guide [it is a blogspot blog and is very helpful] for my favorite game, it is easily on top. Now, the blog is nowhere to be found on search results. Luckily, I still remember the blog and visit it manually.
GOOGLE = DEAD
GOOGLE = DUMB

And another big drop since yesterday evening. Meanwhile there are more and more complains on reddit about how bad google has become.
Normal users seem to catch up with these bad serps and the annoying ads all over the place.

Bitcoin overtook Google market cap…

The only difference is that you don’t work for free

Huge decline since the early days of April. We're a news website . I don't remember something like this over the 8 or so . Ranks didn't get affected surprisingly. Only Google News and Discover .

It's hard to move on, but the Google Search team pressed the button and made up its mind that AI OVERVIEW CRAZINESS and BIG "MAX AUTHORITY" SITES are the only way forward.

It's hard to move on, but the Google Search team pressed the button and made up its mind that AI OVERVIEW CRAZINESS and BIG "MAX AUTHORITY" SITES are the only way forward.

For the informational queries that I watch, our main competition in the organic results is from small sites (some featuring skimpy or outdated information) with exact-match domains. This has been true for quite a while now. Maybe it's a matter of correlation and not causation, but from where I sit, EMDs are a long way from dead.

There must be some update happening on Discover! It's not normal, and when you look at it, you see that only older posts are showing up!

My traffic shot up this week from Monday the 21st onward and has stayed higher since them...it doesn't really coincide with much of a bump in ranking though. I'm still coming in at #12 for terms I was ranking #3-#4 before this last March update. Nothing has helped those demoted terms to recover.

I am seeing a big jump up in impressions at GSC, but clicks are not going up. The CTR is slowly dropping again so the gap between the two is wider than in Jan, Feb, or March. Anyone else seeing that?

I have to admit that I can't complain at the moment. My news site has been on a rollercoaster ride this month, with constantly changing rankings, but overall visitor numbers have been significantly higher than in recent months. Advertising revenue has also increased (significantly). The last few days have been really mixed, with one or two days of very little traffic followed by days of extremely high traffic. In addition, my podcast, which is part of the website, got a boost from Google this month.

So I can say that I'm happy at the moment. We created a content plan over the last few weeks and are currently implementing it, so it's nice to see that it's paying off.
The shop had a huge slump over Easter, but since then, revenue has stabilized and the ranking is similar to the news site: up, down, up, down, etc. But at least there hasn't been a day without sales (via Google traffic) so far.

@ichithyos That's the same for me, by the way. I've come to believe that the data is incorrect because my main source of users is still Google, unfortunately, and my website statistics say something completely different.

Huge drop on Saturday.

@ichithyos @Micha, I agree. The data is incorrect. I have seen that before. All the other metrics look about the same, no jump in traffic.

I don't know which data you are referring to...I don't use Google analytics. I have two other analytics apps and both showing much higher traffic since the 21st. In my case it has resulted in more real world inquiries from clients too, but not like January, February and early March. All the craziness with the dropping markets, tariffs, etc has put a real damper on spending too.

I did notice that yesterday traffic was super high until noon, then dropped ans stayed down the rest of the day. Overall search traffic was up but USA ended -14%...UK, CA, FR, AU, UAE all dropped in tandem and ended down for the day. Just a sudden worldwide plunge...very odd

Today traffic +32% from the previous 3 Sundays. So my traffic was really in the doldrums from the march update until April 21st basically.

The CTR is slowly dropping again so the gap between the two is wider than in Jan, Feb, or March. Anyone else seeing that?

Yes many of us are experiencing this because of AI Overviews. Ranks can improve and the CTR continues dropping because AI O is spreading to consume the top of every search.

A site of mine that had been almost completely deindexed just before the release of the latest Google update, has now been indexed again, but I can't find the articles in the serp. The mysteries of Google

Is anyone having indexing issues?

I'm beginning to wonder about this traffic bump...traffic is up 40% compared to the last four Mondays. It seems a bit over the top.

One thing I did do is go through cloudflare and delete numerous blocks on /16 and /24 ip ranges that I had blocked over the years due to form spam being submitted on my site or suspicious crawls. Could it be that a lot of this increase is just unblocked bots? I didn't save the ranges I deleted to check it, nor do I have the time and energy for that task. But I wouldn't think it would increase my traffic by 40% and my analytics purports to weed out the bots.

If anyone's struggling with visibility in the new AI era, including AI overviews, this post might provide some encouragement with structuring content better : [webmasterworld.com...]

@Whitey How many visits do you get from ai citations? Is it comparable with Google traffic?

Last weekend i was searching for some css sytel problem. Naturally first place to search is bing. bing gave me some descent results but didn´t realy solved my problem.
Said to me: give google a try and it allmost thrown me from my chair. g-results were full of websites from 10 years ago and even from 2003 with 100% outdated information. 100% useless.
What did they do to this SE?

Back to serps:
yesterday: +50%
today: -50%

g is just crap

Traffic is down bigly since this weekend. Ahrefs reports tanking top 3 positions as well. All the other positions are going up but anything below top 3 basically brings in zero traffic.

What about bot traffic? It's up. The only thing that is up. Approximately 300000 requests from various bots yesterday in my access log. And this is the new baseline. The abuse of creators by Google and other big tech corpos is absolutely horrible.

Ad revenue per impression is also down about 30% compared to 2024.

@Martin Ice Web Now that there are ai overviews and Google must have Dismembered have more sense that the serps are made as useless as possible, this is because in this way users will get used to using AIO and websites will no longer be looked at because they already know that they will not cover the topic they are looking for. At that point Google will An excuse, such as "users prefer our artificial intelligence, we will put a prompt to facilitate its use, we will leave only the sites most loved by users (the big sites that would otherwise sue them) + Google communities" at that point they will have gotten what they wanted, users who use Gemini and control of information

Got AI overview for a commercial enquiry! How do these people make money?

@Conro, this will be fun in future if g relies on outdated content for AI answers.

Got AI overview for a commercial enquiry! How do these people make money?

allegedly, the AI overviews bring them more clicks on ads. That what Pichai said on last quarter report.

I don´t know how this works.
But wait. I do know. Make the organics even worse. Kill all compelling websites.

@Martin Ice Web I'm one of those who has improved thousands of articles, which took a year of work on my website to update it, I listened to Google and "guru" of seo, but everything got worse. Consider that I have always been skeptical about updating old, well-ranking posts because the end result could be too variable because the ranking could improve or worsen. Google has eliminated us, but it is committing suicide because no one will write anymore without traffic and earnings.