Wow, RPM is going down every single day.

Today USA is -60% at 10:30 and UK is -37%. Search is -33%. This is compared to the previous week, but if I average it out over the last four Mondays the decline is much smaller. So that means that the elevated level of traffic of the previous 7-10 days was a total aberration and it has reverted back to the lower level. Very odd...

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:26 pm (utc) on May 5, 2025]

I think most of the problem is the “zero click” results because AI overviews.

@gatormark

As AIO continues to increase in the USA (41% personalized results) [advancedwebranking.com...] our traffic continues to fall.

ChatGPT is so much better than AI overviews and no ads! Ai overviews are educating the searchers against clicking on websites that is against own model of business!

Very difficult to understand how they grow in revenue?

@mosxu

Yes, I’m trying to figure out how this benefits their revenue as well.

After having a good April, all of a sudden the rankings are sharply declining on my german speaking travel site since 01.05. The key point in this: Its all transactional keywords like sim cards, creditcards, rental cars, onward tickets and so on. I am using mangools for keyword tracking and the performane index went from 39 to 30 and the visibility from 13 to 10. So all in all my most important rankings declined by aprox. 30 %. I know this up and down, have known it over years, but this time the hit is more pointed.

The only thing I changed is, that I changed the visible date of posts from "last modified " to "published on XY, last modified on XY". I don't think this can be the cause, because in html both dates were allways displayed. I only did it for the readers to have a better idea if how "old but well maintained" a post is.

@Martin or @Micha, any similar experiences from your german sites?

@mosxu

Totally agree — ChatGPT is miles ahead of the rest. It’s insanely good and impressively smart. Gemini proves quite dumb too often.

I just hope ChatGPT launch a full-on search engine soon. Hopefully the big bad G doesn’t try to buy them out.

@Chris Reisen 30 Yes and no. According to Sistrix, the ranking has improved slightly. BUT since most search queries are personalized anyway, I don't think that's really important. In other words, the ranking is no longer meaningful; everyone now sees something slightly different on Google. Travel is a topic that Google has been trying to dominate for some time through AI responses and its own links. Car rentals, etc. will probably fall into this category. My site also deals with travel, but in a very specific way (only in relation to one country and no general tips), but it also covers normal news (politics, economy, society, etc.), which is probably too specific even for Google. And most of the traffic comes via Google News/Discover anyway.

@Chris travel 30 Check that the date does not appear in the serp now. Maybe it wasn't shown before, but when it appears again in the serp I always noticed a worsening of the positions even if the articles were recent.

Problem is AI started free and it will stay free especially with Chinese models needing 90% less energy for training!

Doing own research is 10 times more time consuming! It is the end for search!

@mosxu Search isn't dead, that's because search engines aren't having any traffic crashes, this means that people still like to visit websites. It's not AI that's killing us, because people could use search engine and ai, it's Google that wants to kill the web to make users believe that using AIO searches are faster and better. The enemy is Google

@Chris,

it is a rolercoaster. But we are seeing a slight trend upwards while sales not realy pick up. I noticed that google is using heavy localized serps. So no tools realy can relieable say your positions.
But back to your question. I didn´t see anything new since first may.

Google has way too much control over the internet. With search completely dominated by one company, the open web has suffered. Websites live or die based on how they rank on Google. It is time to break that monopoly and open things back up

@Martin and @Micha, thanks for your kind responses, i really appreciate that :-)
It's very interesting that Micha emphasizes the highly personalized and localized serps. Personaly I still believe that the average rankings are a quiet reliable indication of how well a site is performing, but it is probably more than true, that we are all seeing slightly different results based on - I really dont know what. I have the gut feeling that something is happening today: Sales have peaked at around noon today but the traffic is the same low level as it is since first of may. So maybe something is shuffeling again. Maybe just different traffic than the days before.

@conro thank you - I will check that!

@Conro

Bing has incorporated AIO now as well.

@gatormark Bing has had Ai overviews for a long time, I've lost count since they were implemented, but unlike Google it hasn't penalized sites in the index.
Google, on the other hand, has penalized sites in the index creating a mess with articles that do not answer the query, where it's hard to find the things you're looking for, so users will find it easier to consult AIOs, they will know that to find something in the index they will have to try harder, in the end they will prefer to rely on AIO. This is the end of web.
It's pretty much the same thing Google did with Shopping advertising at the top of serp, where the user more easily finds what they're looking for with photos, prices, shipping, etc. at their fingertips, discouraging access to the websites below the shopping ads.

users will find it easier to consult AIOs, they will know that to find something in the index they will have to try harder

Or try something different. When it comes to AI chat bots, Gemini doesn't lead and is far behind ChatGPT. According to FirstPageSage [firstpagesage.com...] Google's Gemini is growing much slower than their competitors, and Google hasn't loaded theirs up with ads yet (coming soon). Not that I'm a fan of any of these AI chat bots, but Google chose to chase the others down this rabbit hole and they should pay the price for what they took from us and imposed on users.

I dunno about you guys but I notice LLMs are getting progressively worse!

Have any of you seen what some sites are doing to fight back? Search up "AI tarpits", there's also some good YT videos on them if video is more your thing!

People are using them to fight back and degrade the LLMS, I think it could be working because they got pretty good but going downhill fast recently. Even CHATGBT had to rollback! This could be why!?

Please go check it out...... Maybe we as webmasters here should join these AI tarpits before its to late, it maybe our only hope?! I'm a firm believe of strong together or die apart?!

Googles Code of Conduct in 2000 - to organize the world’s information
Googles Code of Conduct in 2025 - to monetize the world’s information

We could indeed make this more difficult, maybe impossible for all LLMs if enough of us band together?!

Interested to hear your thoughts on "AI tarpits" either way my friends!

OpenAi, Google, Meta, Microsoft...none of these companies intend to compensate anyone for the scraped / stolen IP used in their AI. It's clear that they plan to cozy up to the thoroughly corrupt admin in power now and try to influence both policymaking and the courts to allow the theft under various excuses...i.e. it's beneficial to humanity, they have a right to copy and use the copyrighted work if it's available online, they are somehow transforming the data (fair use etc).

First they will try every excuse under the sun to be allowed to steal the data, and only then will they drag their feet endlessly and offer such low compensation that it amounts to nothing. The courts will validate that last approach and allow low levels of compensation to make the issue disappear. That is how I see it progressing.

@ichthyous

Did you see what the judge in the Meta AI training case recently said? ( [pcgamer.com...] )

"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," said Chhabria to Meta's attorneys in a San Francisco court last Thursday.

"You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person… I just don't understand how that can be fair use."

There was a new Google Creator Summit, this time in Washington DC , it seems with 7 "lucky" people who had the chance to talk to those who work for Google, here's what one attendee wrote, I don't know, but they seem to me to be things we've all heard somewhere before. Unlike many other users who complain on "X" and have asked to be invited by Google, I don't remember a single message from this Tomiko [tomikoharvey.com...]

@BigKat

Thanks for sharing the chart of AI bots market share! It looks like AI overviews are introduced to take on Open AI and that is done on the graves of already cooked small businesses!

The politicians are so bad, they think they need roll with AI to compete with China or to advance technologically at the expense of millions of small businesses!

Google must be dismantled as soon as possible

@conro

How do you see this going? What does dismantling of Google mean to you?

Google has already been found guilty and will be dismantled, as we don't know, but already selling Chrome, providing data to other search engines and preventing Google from buying the role of default search engine should allow competition to emerge. This is an advantage for us because we will finally no longer depend on a single search engine and the more different search engines are used the better it is for the web, users, companies and also for us, Because in this way, even if Google makes its crazy updates on our sites, there would be a much less intrusive impact. If I were in the judge, given the seriousness of what Google has done and is doing now, I would proceed by dividing Google into several companies:
1 Google search
2 YouTube
3 Google ads
4 Chrome browser
5 Android
It would no longer have to pay anyone to be the default search engine. Its data obtained from the illegal monopoly should be accessible to all to there is again competition between search engines. Google It shouldn't use any content copied and transformed with artificial intelligence of the sites in the search engine or AI in a self-referential way, basically it should be a search engine, no aio, no paa, no snippet 1 position etc.

The devil is in the details and time will tell. Don't forget that however it is sliced and diced the devil we know will become a bunch of new devils each setting out on the same path g originally took, resulting in devils we don't know! Not sure how sharing g's data will be anything more than g on either steroids or diluted---but since it is the same data I doubt we will get much different results.

g created the current difficulties when it first tackled the ad side. Played loose and easy (bait and switch) for a few years creating a few millionaires, building a myth of gold in them thar hills, then changed the game when sufficient uptake had occurred then tightened the screws to eek out every penny. What was originally a free to play Ponzi has become indentured publishing and desperation that is beginning to fail, so the introduction of AI and LLM and unveiled copyright theft to keep the cash machine doing ka-ching!

OR, JUST IGNORE all the above and wait to see what the courts ACTUALLY DO. No matter how it turns out I predict that nobody will like the end results! :)

@Conro, sadly, none of that helps us.

@gatormark

I have to disagree. Breaking Google into smaller parts would absolutely loosen its stranglehold on the internet. Right now, they control so many key pieces—Android, the Play Store, Google Pay, Chrome, YouTube, Maps (and Waze), Gmail, and most importantly, Search and AdSense. That kind of dominance gives them a vice-like grip on the web.

We’re looking at a massive data-harvesting machine operating across nearly every major online channel, and it’s openly abusing that power—crushing countless businesses along the way. For the average person, it's almost impossible to use the internet today without running into Google’s data collection tools or gateways.

This data-guzzling behemoth needs to be broken up—and the sooner, the better. Doing so would be a huge win for the health and fairness of the entire web.

@gatormark instead it is the only solution, only that it will probably take years before Google is divided because they will appeal. The only hope is that the appeal will be rejected because the evidence is overwhelming and in this case the effects of the judge's decision would be much faster