I'm finding that traffic is dwindling and sales are non-existant. Even inquiries are almost zero, and the ones I am getting are submitting budgets of $20-$100 for items that cost $1000. They get deleted without response. The only viable traffic from Google anymore comes during the 24 hours before an update starts through about 24 hours after it has started. Then it snaps back to comatose. I do believe that this is not only Google at work though, but people are not spending because they do not feel secure right now.

On another note, I used Claude to rewrite a plugin I used for years on my site and I did not check carefully enough after implementing...many of my categories on my site were not accessible beyond page 1 (so page 2 and beyond were all 404 errors). I only caught it a full week later. Google removed some categories almost entirely from the index except for the first page. I have re-submitted everything Google removed through GSC and nothing...still not indexed. Is it taking Google a long time to index requested pages these days? I have never had this issue before.

My global sites are doing almost nothing, very low traffic and hardly any new enquiries but established clients are still sending through big project specifications.

On the other hand our hotel / music venue is doing extremely well but I have to ask a simple question.

It averages 63% direct and 35% organic traffic. Does anyone know how this compares since I have some sites on 40% direct?

I feel we've gone past the "whatever G did effect" and are experiencing a serious lack of confidence by both consumers and most businesses alike scaling back their regular and future planned expenditures. I've seen this trend several times since the late 60s and this could be a deep one. Market gardening right now looks a good idea:-)

@ redbar

Could you explain this a little more: "I've seen this trend several times since the late 60s and this could be a deep one. Market gardening right now looks a good idea"

thx :)

Maybe we should start a thread called “What do you need to go self-sufficient?” But seriously: things are getting tougher and tougher for shop owners. Google is acting up as usual, the economy is stalling, and politics is a mess.

By the way, a lot of sites saw a drop in rankings on Google yesterday, did anyone else notice that?

@Chris travel 30

Trend: I started fulltime work in 1968 and have worked and lived in several European and Asian countries in my industry and have seen quite a few downturns in trade resulting in recessions, some confined to one country, some semi-global. One of the first indicators is the lack of confidence in the construction sector starting with planned investments in new projects of all types.

Market gardening: Food shortages are fairly inevitable owing to the current geopolitical situation.

I'm not starting a who's right or wrong post, simply my experiences, YMMV :-)

@redbar thank you, now I get it :D my brain just refused to find a connection between recession and gardening xD I will keep your words in mind! Next website will be about homegrowing veggies.

You asked about the direct traffic: Maybe its brand-recognition so people beginn to search directly for it? I mean, if the url is easy to remember. When someone is in a plannings-phase, they remember the sites and names very well. For very specific things I always type the direct urls, bc I know them.

ontopic: The last days have been pretty good for my travel site. It somehow feels like people are finding confidence again to book their holidays, after the Near-East-news are beginning to "bore" people, i think. Always interessting to observe human behaviour: first panic, then back to normal, even when the situation has not resolved yet. But for many it's the new normal now I guess.

@ micha I would go all in on a shovel-online-shop ;-).
Yesterday in the city, there was a small handcraft-shop, with wooden brushes made from all natural materials, high-quality soap-bars, shoe cleaning utensils and so on. This shop was packed with people! But seriously, many people in Germany dont think the Gov will last their legislation period. So all together, I am up with redbar: Gardening and shovels it will be! *sarcasm off*.

Rankings: I have not yet noticed a big downfall, but GSC is still hanging on 4 May, so I cant be sure about that. But I heard some first hand chatter about big movements, even a competitor reached out to me about it.

@Chris She definitely won't last until the end of the legislative period, but whatever comes next will be even worse. So yeah, a shop selling shovels would probably be a good business idea.

The fluctuations on Sistrix are continuing, though I’m not sure anymore if the tool is just going crazy. The shop lost almost half of its Visibility Index yesterday, but had record sales for the very products that are supposedly no longer ranking?

And as for the news site: it’s running smoothly thanks to Discover.

Our vertical is replace with untrustworthy and limited professional competence ecom-shops. All the professionals are gone. All the real and trustworthy informations are gone.
What left are shops that just sell the product without any knowledge about it. (Completly false information)

And a regular seach for a product (without brand) will only show nonbranded items. So ecoms that are customer friendly by giving the manufacturer information are getting hit hard.

This CU was very bad for users because they will now get low quality or false items.

@Chris

You asked about the direct traffic: Maybe its brand-recognition so people beginn to search directly for it?

Undoubtedly a well-known brand "hotel name town" co.uk, 200+ years old, website 25 years, live music every weekend, three restaurant areas, many repeat room bookings, ranks on every first page along with travel site recommendations. It does very well since there is a seriously good management with a great team of staff, it's an all-round effort by everyone.

Is 63% a norm for this type of localised, market town business?

@redbar
since searchresults have become more and more localised since a good time, I guess this could be one of the reasons. But I don't do local seo, so i am sorry to say that I have no reference for that value. It's just a guess of mine - I know this helps just a little (if at all).

Traffic is terrible once again. We ended last month really well. Then at the start of this one all growth has been lost. RPM is also down too. Bots? or something else? This has been happening a lot since the start of the year. Goes well, then, suddenly a huge downward waterfall. From out of nowhere. Could be down to trend change but why can I not cling to any growth? Instead I'm heading back to March levels of traffic. Losing an entire month's growth. Why? Anyone know? Is it an unannounced ''update?''. To loose an entire month's worth of traffic just doesn't seem right.. So tired of this...

Bots? or something else?

I've had a whole new load of MSFT IP addresses rejected in the last 48 hours supposedly from Des Moines. New IPs from Dallas have appeared and been rejected plus Amsterdam is becoming a centre for probe attacks, all rejected and hardly any bandwidth consumed.

I've had a noticeable increase in USA retail enquiries this last couple of weeks trying to source less well-known widgets. Fortunately I have a link to a USA widget trade database which I send out. The last time I had this many requests from the USA was in the noughties, strange.

@Fluff Nutz
Traffic is terrible for me as well. Small E-comm, USA, in business 15+ years. Seems like update behavior every 2-3 days, this last one lasting 4-5 days. Traffic seems to begin to return a little, then the next day, 10am to noon hits and it's crickets. Then 8-9 in the evening, traffic comes back a little. Sales have been very low making me think it's bots instead of actual customers. I've been following other sellers in my niche, they suffer the same lack of sales when I do. BUT, interesting thing, my sales seem to follow good days for Micha. When Micha's shop's sales pick up, mine pick up about 12 hours later. And I'm always glad to see Micha's posts. Seems to predict what I will see occur soon. Why it would begin in Germany, then loop around to the US, I can't explain.

For the past couple of years we've been experiencing a decline in organic traffic; admittedly, the LLMs are now better at repurposing the content that was taken from us and other websites. For a very brief timeframe - while we and others still try to fight it - this is good for the users. But the information in our niche has a limited half-life, and when we and others stop providing high-quality content, AI results will get worse.
The sad part is that over the past 16 months, according to GSC, we increased our average SERP ranks from ca. 11-12 to now (April/May) around 7.5 to 8.5. An insane improvement, yet traffic is down significantly. Anecdotally (we have no hard stats) we also regularly see that we're among the top 2 or 3 sources mentioned in AI mode and ChatGPT, only nobody will click that anymore, of course.
Linkedin shows that our larger competitors seem to be shedding workforce. The writing's been on the wall for a while.

@longjohnbronze ... Excellent summarary.

Here's an observation from my global site and bear in mind that we do a lot of business throughout all of Eurasia.

Our long-term overall weekend traffic average used to be 75-80% of Monday to Friday however over the past few years it has now declined to 50-60% maximum and with today's first 12 hours down to 20%. Our actual realworld trade in Eurasia has not declined whatsoever, solely website traffic.

My conclusion is that for bulk import / export businesses that the www no longer drives much new trade therefore G is possibly correct to focus on localised retail competition ... Could it be that simple?

Since friday there is a new wave of bots. Complete different IP-Ranges ( most African and US ) than before. It lines in with a drop in google traffic.
I had to tighten the rules again after about 4 weeks of relative calm bot activity.

Either google is under LLM attack too or this is pure intention.

Things are pretty chaotic right now. Sistrix is showing extreme fluctuations; the store was practically at a standstill yesterday. Good traffic from Google, but zero sales. The news site is still performing well on Discover, but its ranking keeps fluctuating.

Fortunately, we aren’t seeing a new wave of bots, but we’re starting to feel the effects of the economic situation

This is month 4 of having the same amount of traffic. Literally, despite trying to stay somewhat consistent and diverging the overall daily traffic has not moved. There is way too much frequent and on-going fluctuations that growth just isn't happening. It won't stick so each month ends the same.

I have also seen the ranking fluctuations. This feels like the start of another ''update''. As said, there is way too many of them now.. I often feel like I'm wasting my precious hours per day editing and writing articles. Does any of it matter any more?

You start doing well and are given a small bit of hope. Then, suddenly, traffic drops and falls back to where it was a month or more ago.. Fun...It makes me feel like I'm old and, maybe, lived too long, seeing what was a good company turn evil.. Also, I took a few days off as this is giving me a headache. Both Sunday and Monday ended on high. I go back to it yesterday, Tuesday, I, then, wake up to a 20% drop in both traffic and revenue. Why? So, I ask again is any of this worth it any more? There should be a protection of some kind in place. There is for other industries but not the internet?

I hear Ebay works in a similar situation. Only pushes new accounts. Older ones get less visibility. Problem is, with both sites, no one wants new accounts. They are less knowledgeable. Whilst on Ebay new accounts cannot be trusted and seems even more fishy. With actual money handling and product reliability. I refuse to purchase anything from new accounts. Long story short, new accounts cannot be trusted and should work for their visibility and not instantly be given it. But, I do see the strategy and it seems to work too. Give new accounts a sight of what is meant to happen, a view of success.. Then bam its suddenly taken from you without any real error on your part. For no real reason for it. But you have, now, been captured into their trap as you continue to fight for what you once had and, now, lost. Only a miracle will bring it back! If its even possible..

This is month 4 of having the same amount of traffic.

This is month 18 of Google consistently reducing traffic to valuable web resources and promoting useless trash instead.

Google consistently reducing traffic to valuable web resources and promoting useless trash instead.

Same "trash" definition can be said for those rare Google users who convert into sales. Talk about heavy returns! Google must have their users so disoriented with all the garbage in the serps that they just order everything and return what doesn't work. These ridiculous return costs are growing by the day and MUST be passed along to customers.

I don't check these forums as often as I used to, and for the same reason that I see messages here declining. Google has managed to choke off traffic and people's sales for years now and it has reached a point where traffic never grows, new customer inquiries are non-existent for weeks at a time, and substantial sales are so sporadic that they basically just cover costs if that. Google is a dead horse for everyone other than investors in Alphabet stock. I feel fortunate that I entered early on and rode that horse when it really was kicking back in 2004 onward. I feel bad for younger people who don't have as many options...they are stuck between monopolies. Become an influencer and sell your stuff to fans or have deep deep pocketed investors, that's about it these days.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:53 pm (utc) on May 14, 2026]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

@ ichthyous

you got it right. I'm in my 30s now and begann doing this stuff 5 years ago (man, thats like a second ago), so I was very, very late to the party and I really wish I would have learned all this 20 years ago. I could have had the chance to become a "script-kiddie", but to be honest, back then I would have never believed what computers might be able to do 20 years after. I really thought "get a nice office job and no one can ever kick you off". Then, when I came to the conclusion having your own business will always beat any corporate-job, I did not know - no, I did not have any clue - that some years later the whole web would be compromised by and be "governed" by very few companys that 90 % of the users believe in to be "the web".
My deep, deep hope is, that people at some point will understand what is happening before it is too late and the open web has already died with all that is left by now.
But nevertheless: I keep going, hopefully until exact this point. It's a struggle every time when setting up a new project. But there are people out there honoring sites that do a good job. And these people will find what they are looking for (even if its qiuet hard for them at the moment).
Thanks for checking in here and since I see, that your have been doing it since at least 20+ years, I salute you.

I tried Claude Code in January 2026 to build 3 slop websites that generated 0 visits so I ended up deleting them last week...
I have a blog that is manual, no AI whatsoever that still gets traffic from Bing...

Also I think the reason behind the HCU is simple, Google wants to promote sellers that sell products using Google Ads, so if your site have a store or if you published a book in Amazon they will promote you... If you sell nothing you get zero traffic...

Okay, this is honestly one of the most absurd examples of Google's current quality evaluation I’ve seen so far. An automated system apparently published an entire internal error message, including placeholders, production notes, and AI policies. And that page is now ranking prominently in Google News.

It literally contains things like:

“{{PRODUCT_OR_TOPIC}}”
“Search results: None”
internal generation rules
SEO/Discover optimization instructions
and explanations that no article could be generated.

And despite all that, Google indexed it, ranked it, and even pushed it into Google News alerts. At this point it’s hard to deny that Google’s quality systems are currently extremely chaotic.

[url] [ad-hoc-news.de...]

At this point it’s hard to deny that Google’s quality systems are currently extremely chaotic

Not really chaotic. Consistently upside down. The worse the site and the page, the higher it ranks. Complete brain death for the ranking algo.

Maybe they vibe-coded the whole thing from scratch.

Hi everyone, I found this valuable discussion about ranking and traffic fluctuations over the last couple of weeks. I’m also facing the same issue—my site has lost traffic and keyword rankings, even though we have done everything according to Google’s guidelines.

I am 100% sure this is the pre-impact of an upcoming Google algorithm update. Things are getting worse day by day for SEO professionals.

I tried Claude Code in January 2026 to build 3 slop websites that generated 0 visits so I ended up deleting them last week...
I have a blog that is manual, no AI whatsoever that still gets traffic from Bing...

Using Claude or hand coding has nothing to do with how much traffic you get. I would never start a new website now, what's the point? Even powerful links are being discounted more and more, if you can get them. I used Claude to update my site recently and it did a very good job...saved me a lot of time and money. You just have to check and recheck that it is implemented correctly.