Like @shawnb61, I operate one of those enthusiast communities too (guitars involved, too), with a voluntary subscription/supporter setup, so, I am happy to read from someone from that forgotten part of the web.
I also feel this segment of internet might eventually re-gain relevance, seeing that social media is drowning in AI slop and also starting to be treated/regulated by governments who notice the toxic impact it has (think youth protection laws).
I do have some doubts people are aware sites such as ours still exist, if you are a TicToc-Kid and have never seen these enthusiast web projects, you might not go looking for them, so, that's the obstacle to that return of this community driven web.
We are not too far from the public realizing how calm & cool those communities are compared to what else is out there, who knows, there might be a nostalgic turnaround in some niches at some point, and maybe a search engine able to surface these sites might find an audience - but that is all wishful thinking.

Now, regarding CF: I'm on a paid plan for about a year now, and yes, configuring CF without ChatGPTs help will drive one nuts @RedBar. I can only state that the $25/month are saving me roundabout $120/month in bandwidth. I am hosting Terrabytes of audio on S3 instances, and AI crawlers loved to download heavily until I stopped that by CF, hence the savings.
The MITM concern is real tho, if you are dealing with truly sensitive data, CF might not be the tool of choice.
I did wonder about the same concerns when it comes to using free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates, I would not be surprised if we all found out these were door opener No1 for any government activities some day. That's a wild theory, admitted, and I chose to ignore both concerns for my main project.

@shawnb61 - CF can handle exactly the mentioned scenario of "I have valid users on bad ASNs" quite well by its "managed challenges" - those require solving some captcha like thing if the ASNs reputation is too bad or other factors indicate this might not be a human, so this is exactly what covers your scenario, minus the manual effort chasing ASN and IP changes.

Last, @ichthyous mentioned claude code, and he's right. I am a heavy claude user and churned out the long missing apps (iOs+android) for my community using claude. Took six weeks, cost around $500. If you can describe what you want in detail, this tool is able to speed things up and reduce cost so dramatically that it turns all your former cost&effort evaluations upside down.
If you have been around for some years and invested time & sweat upgrading php versions, servers, mobile requirements and whatnot, be aware tools like claude are capable of doing these tasks from now on. We are entering a new ballpark here, with lots of opportunities if you have some ideas. This really should be noted as a golden opportunity for enthusiast or small budget projects, the thought "this is going to be too much work for little return" really needs to be revisited with AI tools in mind.

I do feel the pain of those whose projects/businesses are going down the drain with the recent development - getting rich on organic + ads has been over for long now, and as Martin reports - doing ecommerce based on organic results must be a bad rollercoaster, too... good luck to everybody out there.

I think what a lot of people are seeing here is not just ranking volatility but traffic redistribution.
Pages might come back to similar positions after updates, but clicks do not recover the same way. That points more to SERP changes than pure ranking loss. AI overviews, ads, and other features are likely absorbing a big chunk of the clicks.
The “conversion spike before update” pattern mentioned above is interesting and I have seen something similar. It feels like during testing phases, results are cleaner and intent matches better, then once fully rolled out, things get diluted again.
Also worth noting that some businesses are reporting stable or even improving revenue despite lower traffic. That suggests less but more qualified traffic in some cases.
Overall it feels less like everything is broken and more like the rules of where traffic comes from and how it converts are shifting.

Let's just say it like it is: Organic search is as good as dead. Anyone who relies on it is in big trouble. However, there are differences. Here in Germany, the situation isn't as bad as it is in the U.S., at least judging by the comments here in the forum

What i see in serps is fully amateur websites from years ago. Never been visually updated. Code is like from 90s.
That rises my opinion that google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it.
I can go into ervery vertical. It is a mess. Coding, examples, shopping or information.

@MrSnuts, I never said that we a only relying on google organic traffic. We are selling on amazon too. And since the last update the sales have shifted towards amazon.

rises my opinion that google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it

They are TERRIBLE at it.

I've removed Cloudflare completely for several reasons however easily the number one reason is its blocking of perfectly valid US VPN traffic. How do I know?

Because it was myself testing it and received the same unathorised attempts from all three sites.

google tries to fight the AI spam and is not good at all with it.

I don't think they even try because their own AI spam sits atop of the search results. Few people look beyond AIO, and if they do then they are distracted by PAA, PASF, etc. I think eventually there will be no organic results for most info searches, which is why they don't even try to deal with spam now. With universal commerce protocol, I think Google will also try to deprive stores from traffic too.

Whoa I had to check my server was working!

Coming up to 12 hours of my Googleday and traffic is at 10% of average. At the moment I can't see anything untowards, anyone else seeing similar?

Emails, valid and spam, are also well-below average.

Yes, two days ago there was an outage, the news site and the shop both went down at the same time. Other sites whose stats I have access to also went down. And it’s true, the spam has noticeably decreased.

Same here, I'm also seeing a note able downward shift in traffic/conversions since a couple of days.

@Martin & my previous post - I had no intention to offend or suggest you were solemnly relying on organic traffic, sorry if that was not clear

Also seeing a drop in traffic here, started noticeably on Wednesday, down around 20% compared to the same days last week.

Something appears to have happened on Wednesday. It's too early for me to tell whether it was a blip or more fundamental.

@bgweb is your traffic down from Wednesday too?

@Maleda I could see in Search Console that my average position declined on Wednesday. That said, it’s not yet possible to say whether it’s a blip or not, or what impact it may have on traffic. I’ll try to give a more definitive update in the coming days. Past experience has taught me not to worry when these “twitches” happen - give it time before reacting.

@bgweb we're seeing the same here... keeping an eye on it for now.

Sunday's email across all sites ... One (1) spam, nothing else! Site traffic low again.

Lowest traffic today. Someone pulled the plug?

I think the plug was pulled a long time ago!

This morning I had to check all my email addresses were working since the only thing I had received were 6 spams ... This afternoon genuine mails started coming through but not the volume I am used to ... Strange.

They get it worse with every update.

That's really strange. The shop has been recovering since Sunday. But the news site is acting very oddly. Visitor numbers are rising slightly again, but according to Sistrix, the ranking has dropped by more than half and seems to be falling further. Only the ranking for the main keywords is okay, but Discover has been severely throttled. That's really strange, because up until Wednesday, Discover alone was generating record numbers.

I really don’t understand what Google is up to again.

@Maleda last Wednesday appears to have been a blip. Site traffic is now consistent with recent weeks.

Same here, getting less google traffic and drastically reduced conversions for a couple of days. GSC was stuck without refresh for 32hours, too, which used to signal they allocated compute for somethigng more important in the past.
Traffic seems slightly better by now, but still weird compared to two weeks ago.
Might be seasonal slow down as the weather gets better & end of month playing into this,
but it might as well be emergency patches done in the face of the mythos model leak that stirred security concerns all over... news have been relatively calm on that since the breach, but it might play a role in this recent odd behavior, who knows. They are definitely doing something.

My observations so far for this month:

The update: before and during the update, traffic and conversions have been good. To me it seems like, when there is heated volatility in the serps, my sites are performing better.
Why do I assume this?
After the update, at around 9 April, the conversions have been decreasing sharply all over the place for all my sites. We all know, that mostly after updates, there is kind of a rollback, kind of a second update they do not talk about. We have been observing this many times.
Yesterday I checked Semrush and noticed that the sensor shows very low vola since 9 April.
It might be coincidence, but so far, whenever vola was high, I had no problem with traffic or conversions on my sites.

Right now: I am trying to figure out what is happening since 9 April:
- Is the traffic different/ are other people with other intents being sent to my sites (low quality traffic)
- for the travel site: Is it because of the war that people are just browsing but don't want to book?
- is it because of the nice weather in middle Europe, so people do not feel the urge for holiday (I doubt it :D)
- or is it a different layout in serps that does something to the behaviour of people that come my sites that they are not interested in making conversions

All speculations. But I know: If it goes on like this, this going to be messy for me.

@Chris Don't forget, Semrush recalibrated its sensor at the beginning of April, and it's currently only showing very rare spikes. All other trackers have been showing spikes for several days.

@Chris,

if something changes withhin seconds it is clearly not weather or anything else. It is google.

Remember AI-overviews kill clicks on adds. google has to do something to replace this missing add clicks by worsen the results with no AI-overview in particular shopping results.
This is what we are seeing right now.

Hours from now, Google are expected to announce their Q1 earnings and release their latest financial statements.

Do not be surprised if another major update is already underway, or about to begin, as they look to make the next quarter outperform this one by squeezing even more juice from the dried up husk of the lemon that was the www. Maybe they will blend the remains and dry into a fine dry powder to make sure they got everything before it blows away like a dog fart in the wind!

'Tis Wednesday, normally one of my busiest traffic days however, so far, at 50% of my Googleday gone, my traffic accross all sites is at 20% of "normal".

I hesitatingly type "normal" simply because there is no normal now, the www may as well be renamed the authoritarian Google Empire, comply with its demands or die! I've spent the last 33 years webmastering, the last 10 years have mostly been nothing but misery as G, with much govt assistance, took a stranglehold of information access.

Just what would Dilbert make of all this manipulation?

Hours from now, Google are expected to announce their Q1 earnings and release their latest financial statements.

"AI continues to drive search usage and queries are at an all-time high."

"In Search & Other Advertising, revenue grew 19%. People love our AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews, and they're coming back to Search more." - [blog.google ]

No surprise their revenue from search continues to grow.

I have no doubt queries are at an all time high, although very doubtful that people love searching so much that they are coming back to search more.

Obviously the SERPS being plastered with search query refinements & ADs has nothing to do with the above.

"Obviously the SERPS being plastered with search query refinements & ADs has nothing to do with the above."

Is there actually a ceiling on how much profit Google wants to extract, or are they doomed to keep “refining” everything until the internet is nothing but AI summaries, paid placements and ads?

Now we’re seeing what looks like a mass demonetisation of YouTube creators this week, but let’s be honest, you can bet your ass Google will still happily run ads on those same demonetised videos. The only difference is the creators get cut out while Google keeps the money.

I suppose now the wider web has been bled close to dry, they need to turn their attention back to YouTube and squeeze the creators over there. After all, why share ad revenue when you can keep the platform, the traffic, the ads and the income?

Well, if I’ve read this correctly, Google now generates 91% of its advertising revenue through its own services. That means Big G no longer needs the web, and I bet we’ll see exactly that in a few weeks or months.