[ibb.co]


Thank you Google . Never in my life have i seen such a drastic algorithm tweaking .

I know some sites have been wiped out completely, so I’m not pretending I’ve got it worst, but this 95% drop is so extreme.
Is anyone else seeing this kind of collapse, or is it just me? I’m starting to wonder if there’s something else going on with my server as i never seen anything like it. For info, my site was built in 1998

Is anyone else seeing this kind of collapse, or is it just me?

All my specialised widget sites have been hit, some have zero traffic whatsoever, oldest is 1993!

Our hotel venue so far is down 50% this month, fortunately not the tills.

Rankings do not appear to be affected.

Do you think this is AI overviews or people using LLM's when I look at the numbers it is only 1 million a week using LLMs and billions using search. Can someone tell us what is going on? Why are we seeing our traffic gone?

To update an old expression, don't blame Artificial Intelligence for Natural Stupidity. AI is little more than machine learning at the moment and it makes mistakes. For some of the results, it is GIGO without any error checking. (Dealing with a traffic loss and scrapers from Oxylab and Code200 at the moment.) A paywall is looking like a more viable option.

Regards...jmcc

Why are we seeing our traffic gone?

It will all make sense on February 3, 2026 which is when Google is expected to report earnings. AIO and ads are at the top taking almost all the traffic. The few who scroll a couple pages down the SERPS get tripped up by those refinement boxes so Google can trick them into viewing another set of search results with more ads and AIO.

@samsam I was thinking the same way "there must be somethin within my control". To be honest: I think its not. I mean, it might be, sure. But: There are so many out there reporting a significant and sudden drop. I feel sorry for you that it hit that hard. Only thing I can do at the moment, is taking the history in concern, knowing there have always been ups and downs and in most cases, traffic came back as sudden as it left. Lets hope it we be the same this time.

@Chris I hope you're right, because if things stay this way, half the internet will soon be dead.

By the way, the EU has launched investigations against Google and its AI for unfair competition and training with data without consent.

[t-online.de ]

I’m starting to wonder if there’s something else going on with my server as i never seen anything like it.

No it is just google making as much money as they can.
I think this is a test at how far the can go with ads without users start to jump off google.
Out niche is 3 organics (rubbish, unrelated, NON EAT) only on page #1.
They even put just a "sponsored" above a line and all entries after that line are ads. Are they ads? Are they organics? Normal users doesn´t know!
In germany this is against rules. Every ad has to be signed as ad.

Sideview: On sunday i was looking a YT Video (first and last time i did that). It was 90 minutes long and google put EVERY 2 minutes an ad-block in it.

Google hit with EU antitrust investigation over use of online content for AI
[cnbc.com ]

The problem wth the EU is that the European Commission will announce things like this but will take years to do anything about it. By then, more websites will have been obliterated.

Regards...jmcc

I am more afraid that the AI tech companies will be making deals with bigger EU publishers to use their date/info. So the publisher lobby will be less vocal and the EU feels it is a level-playing field again.

FORGETTING the smaller publishers who will disappear en masse and be forgotten in the AI race to the bottom.

My tolerance threshold has been reached regarding MSFT 4.0.0.0/8 range ... All my sites except two have been deleted this morning.

This is more than a farce, my conspiracy theories are racing.

The thing about AI and LLMs is that it needs to scrape large amounts of content. Google does it via identified crawlers. Some of the other AI ops also have declared ranges and UAs. The problem when it comes to China is that there is no such respect for websites and copyright. Some of the scraping is probably for such operations though there are some search engines which have declared ranges and UAs. There are also Chinese website generators that can churn out websites built from scraped content (SERPs, Social and Web) in a very short time. The New gTLD business model of some gTLDs enables this webspam activity by having low price registrations and promotions. Some new gTLDs simply would not survive with those this heavy discounting business model.

The combination of AI scraping and webspam generators may is probably causing site logs to mushroom. With the ranges from known Cloud providers like Tencent, Aceville and the rest (there is a lot Cloud operations in mainland China) that can be blocked by ASN or by IP range. This has forced some of the scrapers to use ISP and mobile phone Internet connections to scrape content.

This is the 2025 performance for one of these discounter gTLDs:

Month -- Total -- New -- Renewed -- Deleted -- Blended Renewal %
| 202501 | 928315 | 38927 | 555 | 32674 | 1.6702 |
| 202502 | 930590 | 34558 | 347 | 44474 | 0.7742 |
| 202503 | 871441 | 85252 | 476 | 148582 | 0.3193 |
| 202504 | 913259 | 144751 | 445 | 115982 | 0.3822 |
| 202505 | 1024961 | 153979 | 674 | 50851 | 1.3081 |
| 202506 | 1068028 | 140538 | 618 | 61925 | 0.9881 |
| 202507 | 1008773 | 49420 | 625 | 111779 | 0.5560 |
| 202508 | 980175 | 63083 | 591 | 94056 | 0.6244 |

|
The blended renewal estimate is the estimate of domain names renewed in the month. The .COM has a blended renewal rate of about 72%. The first renewal rate (domain names being renewed after their first year) for .COM is around 52%.

Regards...jmcc

OK, since today i started to see a little bit of land at the horizon.

I can confirm that Google traffic is increasing again, albeit slightly.

Yesterday and today the hotel is having its two busiest days in three weeks. This is unusual for a Monday and Tuesday.

@Micha

Now all we can do is hope that the idiots realize that what they're doing is nonsense and at least start cleaning up the mess in the news section...

There is much more that we can do...here's a good start: adding "We recommend DuckDuckgo or Bing for search search" on all footers and customer emails. The more publishers do that the merrier. Google made an executive decision to kill the web, the web should defend itself.

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.
Bots 100% - google traffic 0%

Traffic, of course, continues to go down like it has for the past 13 months, but I am seeing uptick in Australian visitors. No doubt because of the wonderful ban on social media "concentration camps" for teens. Normally I am very strictly against any kind of censorship and limiting of digital freedom, but the issue with those sites is that they themselves are limits to digital freedom - they don't play by the rules and they trap users in their ecosystem.

Google traffic is still recovering, but slowly. Of course, bots are also on the rise again. Oh, and now spam emails too—my inbox is exploding today with requests for guest articles...

@Micha, do you have the same pattern?

google traffic - OK and converting : no bots
google traffic - so lala and not converting : some bots
google traffic - no traffic : 100% bots

Yep, I see exactly the same pattern in my shop. And it's similar on the news site.

Touch wood, so far today my hotel site is seeing a steady improvement in its UK traffic which, considering the time of year and how busy it actually is, seems acceptable.

My small but global specialist widget sites still have very low traffic volumes and I am wondering whether they will ever recover / have any.

My main global site also seems to be showing genuine traffic improvement however I know from experience that from next week the following four weeks my graphs will look like the Himalayas because of so many industry holiday shutdowns.

I've checked and tweaked my htaccess for all sites and learnt this from the CPanel WHM Docs:

Currently-Blocked IP Addresses

The system separates the IP address ranges that you enter into subnets in CIDR format. Then, the system adds the addresses to the .htaccess file.

Therefore no point in doing both it would seem?

@MIW

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.

Africa not so much for me but about a month ago South America lit up with visitors all requesting very old / dead urls and ALL using Win 7 ! They're still coming but not so many as in November. Methinks someone was selling old contact lists / databases.

Attack of the bots since noon. Mainly africa, brasil, argentinia.

And broadband IPs from major US ISPs...
Fresh Chrome useragents but malformed referrers.

I take it back, traffic has dropped again at lunchtime today, so today is another bad day... I can probably write off December, the news site's revenue isn't even 10 euros, RPM is already digging a hole in the basement. I'm slowly starting to hope that a core update will come soon, which will hopefully bring some improvements.

Oh, and I'm seeing the same drop today on dozens of other websites... at exactly the same time. So Google continues to play its game.

Brazil has some MSFT ranges. They were acquired some years ago. The South American mobile ISPs have been a problem for a while.

Google traffic and Adsense still suck. The graph is like a step function or November being somewhat "normal" with December falling off a cliff. Difficult to be diplomatic about Google and its activities. Still remember the damage that Panda did to the Web.

Regards...jmcc

I'm slowly starting to hope that a core update will come soon, which will hopefully bring some improvements

Absolutely no chance. We will have to wait until at least 2028 before any hope of improvement.

It is going downhill, so fast. Traffic is quite bad, but more importantly the conversions are none existent. It seems to be the law, that when the traffic and positions are in decline, it doesn't hit the conversions in equal measures, there are not less conversions, but just gone.