First impressions of the "March Core Update" are very bad.

The rankings are fluctuating, but Discover has been on fire for the past two days, my news site has never had this many visitors before. The shop had a great day yesterday, but today has been slow; Sunday and the Easter break might be the reason.

Are people even buying/spending right now based on the uncertainty of the war, the current petrol/gas price (with higher prices to come) and forthcoming food/product/everything Trumpflation?

Never mind Trumpflation. The bigger issue is Google completely being unable to rank websites. They have never been this bad. Even the AI overview content theft and erosion of clicks is nothing compared to total inability to rank actual websites/webpages.

I am seeing some people are, currently, unaffected by this recent ''profitdate''. Sadly I cannot say the same over here. As of, exactly, March 27th our site has been on, another, daily traffic drop. Funnily enough that is exactly when this new headache began.. We have quite literally been dropping traffic, like some kind of waterfall, non-stop, since Jan/Feb. Currently a -45% drop as of this one alone. I dread to count how much traffic has been lost overall this year, so far..

Very, very worse update again. with every core update the serps relevance drops further. This is going for over a year now.
I donīt know where google is heading to. For me this SE is completly useless. Two years ago I would never ever thought that bing would be so much better than google.

The outstanding features that google standed for have now been vanished. Chaos and complete useless serps with SPAM, outdated and low content websites are now on daily order.

Such a shame.

Very, very worse update again. with every core update the serps relevance drops further. This is going for over a year now.

Correct. Google is dead.

I am having record high bandwidth use with record low traffic - it's all AI theft bots stealing my content like crazy. They are much smarter than Google, they know where the good stuff is.

Correct. Google is dead.

it's all AI theft bots stealing my content like crazy.

Absolutely correct Google is dead. I wonder how long it will be until businesses start blocking Google since they are also stealing content? That's a discussion that we actually had in a meeting because Google is using content they stole from us to promote ads of competing inferior products.

I am having record high bandwidth use with record low traffic - it's all AI theft bots stealing my content like crazy. They are much smarter than Google, they know where the good stuff is.

Same here; I receive over a million requests a day from Comcast, Frontier, Charter, AT&T, Cablevision, and Verizon. Last week, my server was crashing constantly for several days because of these bots. I doubt even Cloudflare can block them (maybe with the Enterprise version and a bot score below 30). Nowadays, a captcha is required for each U.S. user. The number of actual visits continues to plummet.

What is sad is that if you search for "web scraping", you will find services that propose to rent thousands of IPs (from western ISPs) to scrape the web. You will also find a lot of advice on GitHub and Reddit about how to scrape websites efficiently. And of course, practically no help on how to prevent it.

At a certain point, it will be pointless for them to harvest data as most of it will be AI.

Bless their little google heart, never thought it would be possible to muck up their organic and ads with one update...

April Thread found here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 3:06 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]