Insofar as my Awstats and Webalizer are concerned everything looks to be "norrmal" however Statcounter has just rendered itself as pointless.

I have the Singaporean Huawei bot blocked yet Statcounter is totally incapable of doing so. My first 12 hours today initially looked old-school normal until I delved into them and found 61.5% of it was Huawei's bot ... Yes, 61.5% !

Today zombies was AI not supposed to send quality clicks?

My stats magically bounced back Thursday and I ended up with the best day of the month. This happened in a rush, around 4-5 pm ET after I once again chastised Google - via the feedback link on my Adsense dashboard - for being an evil monopoly. I said, to wit, "what's the use in having a monopoly if you can't share some of the profits with the people whose data you stole?"

I suppose the irony made a staffer or two - or maybe even an AI bot - chuckle. It's all very tiring, unnecessary, and frustrating for anybody trying to create a business on the web. The analogy of having an elephant sitting on your chest is appropriate here, I believe.

Things are somewhat back to normal for now, but I'm dead certain that Google will find means to make us all crazy again soon enough.

[edited by: fearlessrick at 3:47 pm (utc) on Aug 15, 2025]

@Fluff_Nutz, Excellent post. You made many good points which resonate. I might add that at some point, Google realizes that it is cannibalizing the business that makes them oodles of dough. They probably don't want to do that. Clicks on their search or AI pages are small compared to the views they get from ads on participant's websites.

Good grief!

98.2% of my Statcounter traffic today is from Hetzner, Germany.

I'll be checking my server logs shortly.

@RedBar happened to my server yesterday. Just black list all their network IPs helps.

@chuviie ... I thought I had already done most of them however every visit is individual with a completely different IP address plus I am talking about thousands of pages.

I'm very hesitant to block even more since I do a lot of business in Gemany. Fortunately many clients there already use VPNs.

Is there any other resolution?

New record lows since Friday.

@RedBar -

Is there any other resolution?

Even the free CloudFlare account can help to slow down bot traffic with a single 'click to verify' link, a non-"click on all the bicycles" captcha. You can use network numbers like AS132203 rather than IPs.

@ not2easy... Thanks, I've had a quick look at CloudFlare and whilst it's interesting I'm seriously beginning to wonder about yet even more financial expense but for what?

I have an excellent and affordable server plan and never get even halfway to my monthly allowances, am I being a bit self-obsessed with attempting to keep everything squeaky-clean maybe, since with so many bad actors about this will never happen.

Also, at the moment, this activity is only affecting my largest global site, none of the others have been hit ... so far!

Ecommerce Site (3 brands). All did exceptionally well last Tues/ Wed/ Thursday- best 3 days months. Then last Friday, yesterday and today down to almost nothing. No sales for more than 24 hours for all our brands (unheard of). Any ecomm sites experiencing the same?

Traffic generally fairly strong this weekend, but UK traffic is far below the norm today. This is following a recent pattern of sudden, very big drops in UK traffic about 2-3x a week. Sometimes it recovers later in the day, sometimes not. Perhaps this is result of AIO being rolled out in the UK? Or summer vaca?

Perhaps this is result of AIO being rolled out in the UK? Or summer vaca?

I thought the UK already had the AIO?

For various reasons, no I'll not be specific, there is a general malaise in many areas of the UK with an almost flatlining economy yet inflation still very evident in the grocery sector ... It's static / stuck, it's neither good nor bad therefore possibly many are simply holding-back all kinds of purchases.

But, yesterday I uploaded the Christmas menu for our hotel venue, today we have received enquiries:-)

So far, august will be the worst month in history.
There was def. a update last weeks. Since then traffic is down 70%, user engagement 0%, google spam 100%

Ecommerce Site (3 brands). All did exceptionally well last Tues/ Wed/ Thursday- best 3 days months. Then last Friday, yesterday and today down to almost nothing. No sales for more than 24 hours for all our brands (unheard of). Any ecomm sites experiencing the same?

confirmed

According to Semrush, things have finally calmed down in Germany. The shop has finally been generating acceptable sales again since Friday, and I hope it stays that way, but I've also taken some measures because Google is just annoying me. As the summer holidays are slowly coming to an end here, I'm hoping for rising sales.

It's strange with the news site, especially when it comes to news and discover, my niche is dominated by large publishers who throw around agency reports. In general, small publishers, regardless of niche, seem to be filtered out by Google. And the AI responses are causing my news site a lot of trouble. So I can forget about traffic from Google at the moment, it's been very low for days.

AI Mode is full Gemini mode and actually shows live how many websites it scraps to give the answer!

The search business model is done as it seems people prefer no ads competitors like Chat GPT or Grok

And to be fair there is no traffic from the last two but when there is it seems to convert for some reason!

It will be impossible to not compare with ChatGBT and Grok quality of traffic so competition will sort a lot problems in the next 2-3 years!

There's no rhyme or reason for the traffic fluctuations I am receiving. My traffic on Saturday and Sunday was higher than on Monday. That's ridiculous and never happened in the past. I used to be able to predict which days would have the most traffic, what the increase or decrease would be, but now there is some underlying control or throttling that is manipulating traffic day-to-day.

@Redbar,

1. Add your website to CloudFlare FREE acount (enough for most of us)

2. Go to [2ip.io...] or go to [tools.iplocation.net...]
and copy paste several of those IP addresses of Hetzner in the above websites.
You will see that almost ALL of those ip addresses have the same ASN number or maybe 2 or 3 at the most.

3. In cloudflare, select your website first, then in left menu click Security->click WAF->click Custom Rules->Click Create Rule and give it a name.
Then in that new rule under "when incoming request match" filed select ASN, in operator field select "Equals", in the Value field type the ASN number you found at step 2 above.

4. Repeat for all other shady "Hetzner" type of traffic like OVHCloud, Amazon, Microsoft Azure......etc....etc.... because NO normal user traffic will come from those networks.

Your hosting server will love you for it :-)
(many good youtube video guides available also)

This is not optional anymore, it's mandatory and will also provide better insight in your actual traffic.

@Alligatormark Does anything Google has done in recent months make any sense at all? It's all just a terrible mess.

Pretty sure another core update is about to kick off, seeing the same sort of movements that proceed a core update announcement!

There's no rhyme or reason for the traffic fluctuations I am receiving. My traffic on Saturday and Sunday was higher than on Monday. That's ridiculous and never happened in the past.

I'm a believer in the theory that Google is spreading out traffic among many pages because more than half of all searches result in zero clicks. Some say zero click Google searches have risen to 60% or more and the 40% that remains Google sends out to pages within the rotation. Supporting this theory are the many reporting pages dropping in and out of the index along with highly unnatural traffic patterns. How else would Google entice us to keep creating content for them to take if we didn't get a few good hours of traffic every few days, week, etc.? It's all deliberate and by Google's design IMO.

What I find even more interesting is that one of my competitors seems to be doing very well. They have increased in traffic significantly in recent months; taking marketshare from many websites in our niche. However, they are not displaying ads on their high ranking pages. So, Google is ranking them high, but Google’s not benefiting from that ranking. Puzzling…

I do believe, and this may be a hard thing for us long-timers to acknowledge, that searching in a traditional “Google way” is dying. I don’t think the current generation finds information the way that we did 10 years ago. I don’t have any information to support this theory, but with the advent of AI, I know the younger generations have transitioned to AI as their “search engine.“ SEO and traditional search are going the way of the dodo bird.

it seems that google penalized shops with large selections.

So searching for an item google shows shops with the item but the shop does not have a selection of this item.
The shop itself doesn´t have much in common with the item. Like looking for an apple and google shows only shops for autoparts or ip cameras that sell this one kind of apple.

I do believe, and this may be a hard thing for us long-timers to acknowledge, that searching in a traditional “Google way” is dying. I don’t think the current generation finds information the way that we did 10 years ago.

It depends on what is being searched for. For informational searches, yes. Nobody wants to sit collecting information from ten sites by hand when it can be handed to them. That is not just the current generation, the people I know who are the most avid users of AI search are older...they just love it. Now instead of "Google it" it's "I AI'd it". That is already done and never going back to the way it was...AI is revolutionary in that sense.

With regards to product searches...AI may replace regular product search more over time, but people like to comparison shop and get exactly what they want. They also want a response from a human confirming what they are ordering. At least in my field, which is selling very high priced items. Nobody is going to simply depend on AI to make the purchase...website is still crucial for that.

I'm a believer in the theory that Google is spreading out traffic

^ This

We sell to commercial customers who browse and shop during normal business hours Monday - Friday. We may, at best, have a half day during the week where Google sends us this type of traffic while the rest of the week Google sends us next to nothing. It's so heavily manipulated by Google they shouldn't even try to pass it off as anything but their own manipulation.

It may be that younger users are shifting their focus, but it is often forgotten that this is only one user group. What about the rest? There are many critical voices calling for a search engine rather than an answer machine, and not without reason. Google is focusing too much on just one user group, looking enviously at TikTok and co., but forgetting that its role is completely different.

@Micha

There are many critical voices calling for a search engine rather than an answer machine, and not without reason.

Those voices will soon be gone. They are decreasing rapidly. People, inherently, are lazy. They are being trained to be lazy.

The Singapore bots are back today. They maneuvered around Google's blocks.

The Singapore bots are back

Yep, on my Statcounter they are now averaging 10% of my daily PVs however I have them blocked in my htaccess and both Awstats and Webalizer hardly register anything from Singapore. At one time Statcounter was ok for deleting these sort of visits however it's been flumoxed with these for at least 18-20 months.