Rock bottom real time traffic today. I've never seen such low number of visitors during most of the day.

Rock bottom real time traffic today. I've never seen such low number of visitors during most of the day.

It's glitched out. I am more worried about rock bottom rankings and increasingly being outranked by pure junk.

yesterday was the first day in two month with "normal" traffic. it reverted at 5pm and did stay junk since.
If someone would have turned of internet today ;) we wouldn´t have known it.

So, lovely people...I've rolled out an AI tar pit for my own site over the past 2 days, as a programmer it wasn't hard. If your not a programmer hopefully that wordpress garbage many of you use will get a "plugin" going on soon, else they are done as well!

This is the only valid fightback method other than moaning about it on forums )Hows that working out!? BARRY can you highlight AI tarpits on your site, see video below, else your done 2 my friend?). The other choice is, of course, waiting for really old men in the USA to ignore some extremely large cash kick backs and do something about (is that gonna happen?)....

please watch!

[youtu.be...]

We have a method against ALL LLMS (not just Google), all we need is enough of us to stand up to the LLMS, i think this will be the future of the web and all sites will have AI tarpits installed as standard else LLM will replace us and all the moaning about it in the world wont touch the sides....Click that like button, I monetise WebmasterWorld and get a couple quid per like! Joke I get nothing, click it anyway, it makes me feel slightly better about my day :(

@saladtosser Isn't it the latest craze in the SEO world to optimize everything so that you show up in AI responses? With this post, you'll make poor SEOs cry. Shame on you ;).
That's an interesting idea, by the way, but let's be honest: what's the point? Sure, your content won't be used by AI companies anymore, but there are plenty of other sources. As long as the big companies don't start using it, it won't have much impact.

@martin I can confirm your observation; traffic also dropped off at 5 p.m. at my shop, and it was really slow today. Strangely enough, the news site is still performing quite well. Even though news/discovery traffic has declined, the overall daily results are satisfactory.

@saladtosser If you use it, however, the site may disappear completely from any search engine and may be labeled as malware. For example, Google's llm bot is the same one that is used to index page, It is true that bots come into a maze with no exit, but the site will also have serious consequences if search engine bots are affected

anyone noticed that bots from US are back since yesterday? We had a week of bot silence but now they are back. Maybe it is a constant fight google/bots?

@ Martin, yes - bot activity is high on all our 3 sites since two days. crawling like there is no tomorrow ^^...

Did anyone notice a bug in GA Real Time, that no useres from mobile are displayed? For myself, I only see the realtime pc users but have tested it with 3 smartphones. Mobile users were not displayed.

@Conro + @Micha yea agree, don't add this to your life's work site! Should have been more specific, I implemented it on a junk domain that was hit from back in Penguin 1 days! If I had more aged junk domains and sites laying around I would have put it on all but only have the one! Good catch buds and worth pointing out!

I feel I have more conversion with Bing & Yahoo, traffic sent by Google is really poor quality.
My last few orders show an increase number of these search engines.

AI and LLMs are "smart" enough to know when they hit a tar pit ... and will continue to adapt in that regard. Much like ad blockers there will be a constant ebb and flow on effectiveness either way and the "combat" continues.

MEANWHILE the copyright infringement WILL continue as the LLM is a ravenous creature that cannot grow without MORE of our stuff. THAT is the part that needs to be addressed:

COPYRIGHT

It will take something a whole lot larger than any single---or millions of---webmasters with tar pits to defeat. Nation States will need to be involved, Copyright in general will have to be updated across the board both domestic and international, and infractions will need financial penalties (at the least!) to correct this out-right THEFT.

AI is changing the end result of "search" in that "search" no longer actually works as it historically did. Users are instant gratification creatures and AI tends to bypass the sites with sufficient answers... THIS is the search observation that should be made, though freely admit the nickel-and-dime stuff is extremely important!

That's exactly the point: copyright law must finally be enforced. Seriously, if we watch a movie illegally, the film company will hit us hard in the pocket. But OpenAI, Google, and the like can do whatever they want because... because they're big companies? Because they have power? Something is seriously wrong here.

a rather frightening reading recommendation [thenation.com ]

I feel I have more conversion with Bing & Yahoo, traffic sent by Google is really poor quality.

Agree that Google traffic is very low and of a very poor quality. Even when the little traffic we get from Google traffic converts, we find a high rate of returns from them. Maybe the high rate of returns from Google is because they are doing very badly at helping their users find the products they are looking for? Our orders are increasing from DDG and Chatgpt with a low percentage of returns. Google has become more of a headache then they're worth.

Thiis month my global site is experiencing a massive change in popular pages.

For almost 30 years 15 of my top 20 pges have been specific widget product pages however so far this month only ONE specific page is there and at #20!

Traffic level is about normal however genuine web-generated enquiries have stopped completely, spam bots from the USA have increased dramatically therefore I am considering IF I can successfully block US traffic since I no longer do any business there.

spam bots from the USA have increased dramatically therefore I am considering IF I can successfully block US traffic since I no longer do any business there.

I see elevated bot traffic in the USA too. Our belief is that Google is taking so much traffic from us in the USA with AI O they are now allowing bots to pass-thru to our website to make us believe Google is still sending a lot of traffic. Bot activity not coming from Google is up too, and I think in the lawless USA it has become an IP theft free for all.

For almost 30 years 15 of my top 20 pges have been specific widget product pages however so far this month only ONE specific page is there and at #20!

I am seeing the same thing. Two months ago Google demoted one of the most popular and important pages on my site for the last 20 years, and one with the most links. It went from #3 to #11-#14. Since then it has stayed in the lower range. In the meantime, new sites appeared that are shifting around at the top, along with a lot of really stupid junk like people's individual instagram accounts! From what I see, once again Google has demoted sites with interior (landing) pages about multiple topics...in other words, the section of my site about that specific topic just can't compete with the home pages of other sites that are bout that one topic. This may revert again...I have seen it flip flop more than once over the years.

Today I read the AI overview for the topic in quiestion, which is enormous...it takes the top third of the page. My own name and website were mentioned THREE TIMES in the AI Overview. Once in the opening paragraph without any link (three of the five people mentioned were linked to their website, two were not). Mentioned again in a list below the paragraph...this time my name was not linked but the small link icon was next to my name. The same sites that had their names linked in the opening paragraph also had their names linked in the list. Finally, my site was listed in the block of sites with images at right, in spot number one...and that is clickable.

So, to make it short...I was mentioned three times in the AI Overview for a search where I used to rank #3 and yet my traffic to that page has dropped so low that it is now the 14th most visited page on my site, below many less important pages. Losing the Google search traffic has completely removed any business for that search for two months now. So I really don't see how AI Overviews will help to drive any real business to a site, even if you are mentioned prominently.

I am wondering...is there any relationship between the sites that are linked in the AI Overview and their adwords spend? Has this been established yet?

But in fact it is not true that Ai overviews increase clicks, I don't see why I should click on the links if I have already gotten the answer. The only ones who say that people click on it the most without showing it are SEOs looking for someone to rip off and Google because it wants it to continue to create content that can be easily rewritten by its "ai".

Just an FYI for everyone out there...I have been noticing huge surges in AI Bot activity on my site, reported by Cloudflare's AI Audit tool. In a short span my site is being hit thousands of times by ChatGPT-User bot....always this same bot. You can see this in the image: [ibb.co ]

I did some research, and GPT-User is used for retrieving data from websites in realtime when the user performs a query. However in this article it states that it can also be tricked into launching DDoS attacks on sites -
[theregister.com ]. There are other links out to discussions about it in the article.

This article was updated to state that OpenAI resolved the issue...but clearly it has not, since the latest spike on my site was three days ago on May 7th, and another one on May 1st. Is anyone else seeing this? I am hesitant to block bots that are active in searches and which could provide legitimate traffic...but I'm fairly certain that spikes like this are not legit. Anyone else seeing the same spikes from ChatGPT-User?

Very expensive zombie traffic here!

RPM has been at rock bottom for two days now. If it goes much lower, it will be just a few cents per thousand! I've come to the conclusion that almost anything is better than AdSense now.

The past 2 days I have been getting thousands of bot hits from Singapore. Anyone else seeing this?

@gatormark Same here for the past several weeks. I ended up blocking Singapore (SG) at the server level which helped immensely.

Could it be that Google is reversing its March update? The news site had really good numbers in recent weeks, but today it's suddenly dead. The shop: suddenly good daily sales again, just like before the March update.

@Micha this was what I had in mind since a week or 10 days. The travel site did pretty well in march and april. Starting from 25./26. April onwards it went down the drain. I think its a pattern: Algo overreacts in one direction, algo is getting pulled pack, algo is overreaciting in the other direction, algo is pulled back and gets new orders, algo overreacts in this new direction, and so on.


In the last two days there have been such low leads and sales on our site like we haven't seen in three years. It is devastating.
(We do not use any blackhat methods, never bought any shady backlinks etc. it's all organic growth so no manual actions.)
They can't be serious about that: A site is doing all it can to maintain a reliable source of information over years (!) keeping a balance to monetization, everything is fine and all of sudden G acts like "it's the worst site of the internet"? Come on G, you can't be serious about that. And when I have a look into what keywords were targetet: It's 95 % transactional keywords. In Germany we would say "Ein Schelm, wer dabei böses denkt." - "It would be mischievous to assume ill intent."

Meanwhile in Australia, G's sick zombie traffic charade continues.

@chris Yep, something's definitely wrong here. The Discover feed is also going crazy right now. It's full of topics that I have absolutely no connection to (I certainly don't know why I need flight tips for a Cesna). Relevant topics are no longer available; it was different on Saturday.

Looks like Google realized, “Oh, the March update pushed small websites, that's not going to work.” It would be nice to see some stable growth, but unfortunately that seems impossible.

Man,

It is never been that bad AI overviews plus zombies it is killing us!

Google is once again putting its foot down today. The news site was practically dead all day, and at 1pm the traffic in the store collapsed. So the weekend update was once again just there to squeeze out the small providers. Other website operators (with whom I spoke today) are also experiencing a significant drop in visitor numbers.

Yes zombie traffic is crazy actually, no inquiry, no orders, nothing.. And all metrics dropping