Matomo now shows more traffic from bots than from normal users. At first, it was bots from China, now they're coming from the US, which is just annoying. Traffic from Google is decreasing day by day, and Discover seems to be playing nothing but nonsense. I'm slowly starting to get really worried about my news site. The new site, which I launched as a test a few weeks ago, is growing extremely fast. Even my agency's site, which isn't actually maintained, is currently inundated with visitors. To be honest, I don't understand it.

Well, on the other hand, the shop is doing surprisingly well, with very good sales figures every day.

At first, it was bots from China, now they're coming from the US, which is just annoying.

You're only just getting US bots? For many years the US has easily been the top source of my trash bot traffic by a huge margin. At the moment I seem to have most of this bot traffic locked-down but, of course, a new one came in on one site this weekend with a new IP range ... It was Amazon, why?

It was Amazon, why?

Amazon hosts bad bots: [webmasterworld.com...]

US bots are new to me, but they don't come from AWS, and they only call up old URLs that no longer exist. It's just annoying...

Yesterday I had zero visitors from Google, but endless bots. The ranking is okay, but as we all know, that doesn't mean anything these days.

By the way, DuckDuckGo has launched a survey on AI, and the result is clear: 93% are against it.

[voteyesornoai.com ]

US bots are new to me, but they don't come from AWS, and they only call up old URLs that no longer exist. It's just annoying...

If you see that URls what not exist are still in your google webmaster so is clear google sending them.
Google want to be sure that you do not earn some dollar from that links, so need check all time if exist like secret URls

Amazon hosts bad bots

Thanks, I do have quite a few Amazon IP ranges blocked, in fact this is my first "new" one in several weeks and it stood out like a sore thumb!

@universenet The URLs appear in Matomo, but not in GSC. Therefore, it cannot be Google. According to goacess, the hits yesterday came from kepler9-g9.opoint.com and were extremely aggressive.

Is it just me or is it slow today? Davos, geopolitics, economies, weather, holidays?

Emails for links exchanges are directly related to an ongoing google update. The moment we get these our traffic dips in the coming days.

I've just had 7 days of bot quietness and was thinking my new measures had everything "under control" however overnight the rogue MSFT bots decided to pay a visit to several sites boosting page views. As yet I am not at all sure what page views they are but I do have thousands of "empty user agent string".

Would this be MSFT?

MSFT is a host, they are not usually MSFT bots, but many do have "empty user agent string". You can block that too in .htaccess - again found in the Apache Forum: [webmasterworld.com...] ;)

Aha! Checking my analog stats programme it would appear that all these MSFT visitations are creating 404 page visits.

You can block that too in .htaccess

Funnily enough when I did some research on this WebmasterWorld was the first result, the only problem was I didn't have a clue what they're talking about :-(

It is just a rewrite rule - for blank UAs (^-?$) - I did not link to a specific example because most of them are in old threads with no further participation possible. I'd suggest you ask a question in the Apache forum and probably have an answer today. That way any questions can be answered.

@Redbar.

i can confirm the MSFT bots. But they do have user agent strings.
I donīt know why MSFT doesnīt block this bots. It must cost a big amount of bandwidth and computing power.

@MIW ... I re-checked mine and 75% of mine have empty user agent strings!

I also re-checked what was being generated on my most hit site and 404s were #3, at #2 with about 25% were 403s but at #1 at 50% were 401s ... Do these "bots" actually learn anything ?

Traffic volume looking normal today with the USA down a bit, is this in anticipation of the imminent winter storm ?

They are seeking weak spots, usually with a list of requests (often with a wp- prefix). They are just looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.

My website (which averages 200 visitors a day) has had 200 visitors in the past 30 minutes. Almost all of it is coming from bot traffic in appomattox, USA.

Bot traffic is really insufferable these days. It likely ruins ad revenue too, advertisers don't want to bid on fake traffic. So not only are these "AI companies" harming us by stealing our content and traffic, they are also making it harder to generate any revenue from whatever traffic we have left.

This is really bad at the moment, the bots have been overrunning my website for days and there's just no way to stop them. @christianz you're right, my RPM will soon slip into negative territory if this continues...

Yes and US bots are now #1.
I had to block large IP range like 23.108.64.0/19 from Leaseweb in US.

I donīt have a 100% working method just right now. Blocking requests with no referrer seems to be dangerous.
Some do have google.com as referrer.
It would be good if google would do something about it. Like append a secret ID ( not the google WMC-ID ) , so we could distinguish between real google traffic and bot traffic

The problem with Google appending an ID to the referrer is that it could be faked unless it is something like DKIM. It would also increase the load on the server if every webserver had to verify the referrer.

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones. A quick check shows 10 countries.

Regards...jmcc

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones.

yes, but currently it is only us bots that are going creazy.

If it is only US bots, you are lucky. Deepsix (IP level block) the entire range without any hesitation.

Regards...jmcc

@MIW

I donīt have a 100% working method just right now. Blocking requests with no referrer seems to be dangerous.

Show them a simple captcha (2 buttons like human/bot).
My situation is harder - already banned leaseweb/ms azure/amazon/google appengine 7 years ago, but thinking about blocking comcast/t-mobile ISPs.
I didn't see so many bot requests from US broadband and mobile nets before.

@haramamba

You can block requests from comcast/t-mobile ISPs without referrer. However I notice lately that half of the bots (global minus China) have now a referrer (google.com), it is still easy to spot them because you can see IP level blocks with a referrer for every request and they are not crawling the website.

Google (or another company) could create a code (script) that we would add in the header of a website (html, php, ...) and it would check if the IP is a bot, if yes it would be sent into the void. It would be a good alternative to Cloudflare. For the moment the bots are present on a page for less than a second, so an IP could easily be flagged as a bot if it does that frequently. The goal would be to have one unified database of bad bots and stop wasting our time with this task.

Such plugins start to appear for Wordpress.

AMZ bots are feeding Rufus (AI that appears on AMZ, without any reference to your content). They are also trying to get rid of the middleman.

Leaseweb has many more ranges than its US ones.

Leaseweb is a terror...it took me weeks to block all of their ranges in USA, Netherlands, and the rest of Europe. These are all just spambots. Block via AS number and take all of the IPs down together otherwise you'll be at it forever.

January 2026 Google Search Observations


1 - Traffic up considerably compared to December. It's clear now that Google knocks out anyone who isn't paying for ads so their paid sites get the business before the holidays.
2 - Traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI sources up a lot. Now 8% of my total traffic...up from 1-2% only six months ago
3 - A lot more AI bot traffic, as defined by CF. It's outrageous how much bandwidth they suck up...especially Google AI
4 - Backlink count is dropping like a stone. Google does not want to count or report backlinks like they used to. I don't think they have dropped them though as my visibility is same as last year.

Some of the botrunners and scrapers try to evade AS blocks by getting spaces on other AS networks. Some of the work I've been doing is on grouping websites by Web Hosting Providers and at the IP level, the Web is a lot more complex than at DNS level. Godaddy's main DNS provides DNS service for approximately 12K diffferent web hosting providers.

The idea above of Google turning into a Pay To Play search engine seems right. The problem for Google is that it is built on other people's data and if the other people don't supply that data, Google's busienss model is in trouble.

Regards...jmcc

Google's busienss model is in trouble

In more ways than one, that is why they are extracting as much value from the ecosystem as they can, while they can.

Their unchecked monopoly and manipulation is coming to an end and they know it which is why they are no longer concentrating on long term sustainability in search.

Emails describing how the SERPS could be engineered to increase searches and revenue in user negative ways were published during previous trials [justice.gov ]

"We could increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page)."

This has now been done, aggressively. PAA, PASF, RP&S etc all over the page, irrelevant organic results that don't match search intent. They have lost the Monopoly case, remedies have been imposed and regulators are looking into further remedies and what has G done? Rolled out AIO aggressively worldwide and drastically increased zero click searches while blurring the lines between ads and results. Harming publishes further by starving them of traffic & revenue while at the same time posting record breaking revenue.

Regulators are looking into remedies to prevent AI and AIO in G search harming publishers. G have appealed to try and postpone current remedies, there is no chance that it will be overturned.

Look at the state of the SERPS, mounting court cases, publisher revenue and traffic drops. Its no longer a case of is Google a monopoly, are google causing harm, its a case of what can be done to stop them.

Recent Mobile SERP

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PAA
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Is anyone else seeing crazy ups and downs? I'm seeing the average position in Google Search Console yo-yo.

There are about 5,500 indexed webpages. Over the past six months, AP has ranged between 6 and 19.

I've stopped sweating when I check Google Search Console and see it's at 11.7 llike it was this morning, because it's happened so often, only to settle at around 7.5 within a week.

But it's still annoying as heck. Not only do the ups-and-downs mess with the view count, but I have no idea if I'm "really" moving up or down. Like, is a certain site design change good or bad? Who knows!?

It's kind of extra annoying because my site is resource-oriented (think: unique downloads), not info-oriented nor a review site, so I'm not really impacted by AI.