Conducting searches on mobile yesterday.

Text on screen for organics was significantly smaller than the text used for AD's and all other G 'SERP Features'.

Has anyone else seen this before, I have seen it before, a few months ago.

The UK is getting serious. Google will have to be more transparent about how search rankings work. This could get interesting.

[seroundtable.com ]

I would love to see google have to shut down AIO because of anti-competitive practices.
Stealing content is not a business.

Therefor it would just be right if google has to share all its data. So they can see how it feels when someone gets data for free, make money with it and you can do nothing about it.

My hotel and other localised sites are continuing with steady / average traffic and my main, plus all other global sites, are continuing at 50% and not generating any NEW project / bulk business enquiries whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure G's data is driving their ad model even more towards localisation.

The local sites are all public / retail, the global are all bulk / projects therefore make your own conclusions as to what the last 3+ months have done to specific sectors of the global economy. This isn't a political comment, it's a factual reality of what is affecting many of us.

In a world first, publishers will be able to opt out of their content being used to power AI features in Google search

To boost consumer trust, Google is also now required to make sure that publisher content is properly attributed, using clear links, in AI generated search results.

Source: [gov.uk ]

Noticed today that google page speed is now giving warnings if your site doesn't include llms.txt.

If your llms.txt file does not follow recommendations, large language models may not be able to understand how you want your website to be crawled or used for training.

Maybe in future, this will be used for UK publishers to opt out of AIO.

It seems that something is going on again. Traffic to the shop has virtually come to a complete standstill, and the news site is just limping along. Other websites are also reporting today that they are receiving little to no traffic from Google.

Have email spammers been laid off? It must be the weekend since I only received three (3) spams this morning !

After 11.5 hrs my global site is at 10% of average, most likely this in-depth site will be replaced from 1st July with a much lighter site containing possibly 10& of the information. Precisely what has to be decided however simply leaving this out there for occasional fleeting visitors is no longer tolerable.

BTW, I am 10 years behind the curve here, the vast majority of my bulk / manufacturing industry gave up in 2016.

Ai is improving day by day, am sure it will be very useful in future as it should be

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Peter_John, soon to be PJ :-)

It definitely has improved however, as the owner of a 33 year old widget industry comprehensive reference site, from where will AI "steal" its information if / when sites like mine are removed / disappear? A Google AI query says this:

Yes, Google AI stores and processes factual information, but it does so as a probability-based model (Large Language Model) rather than as a traditional database. It learns patterns from billions of texts to generate answers, but it can sometimes make mistakes, known as "hallucinations," and present incorrect information confidently.

Therefore IF sites were to be removed en masse AI may turn into a "guessing engine".

Those who have great and accurate reference sites may decide to leave that information there but how many will ask themselves "Why should I do this without any thanks or recognition"?

My 2 cents on AI. I began using Claude (Anthropic) for background on articles about 6 months ago. Two months ago, I turned the entire content generation over to Claude, now known as Claude AI, Assistant Publisher. The site in question is a three-year-old monthly magazine format with general topic pages, Sports, Food & Drink, OP/ED, etc. Claude writes better articles than I can, generally, in a fraction of the time. We always include sources and disclose articles that are AI generated. What used to take me 20-30 hours to produce 12 pages of content now takes about 4, thanks to Claude. I give detailed prompts, ask Claude for suggestions, and act upon them. Claude gives me completed, formatted pages in minutes, whereas it would have taken me hours. I double-check sources. It's freed me up to do other tasks, like solicit advertising, add items to my online store, etc.

Sure, AI has wrecked my Adsense revenue, now 1/10th or worse of what it used to be, but I'm also using it to become more efficient. Claude costs $20/month and does the work of a $40k per year writer/editor. Needs no benefits, breaks, maternity leave, etc. and there's no tax burden (SS, Medicare, etc.). People are either going to embrace AI and use it towards their own ends or reject it and, in my opinion, suffer the consequences of being left behind emerging technologies. When cell phones became the standard, who insisted on having a land line? When personal computers became standard, who kept using a typewriter and snail mail?

AI is just the natural progression. I've learned how to use it to my advantage. It's exceptional for coding, writing, publishing and many other functions. Like the Bible offers, paraphrasing here, "light a candle or curse the darkness."

People are either going to embrace AI and use it towards their own ends or reject it and, in my opinion, suffer the consequences of being left behind emerging technologies.

I think we will all eventually suffer from those who have created and embraced AI. IMO, our loss in traffic is just a small sample of the bad that's quickly coming our way. A couple days back Wired posted a story about a website data leak from a group called Dialog. This secretive group is invite only and consists of very wealthy/powerful people in technology, politics, military commanders and more. Members include current executives of Google's Deep Mind, past Google CEO Eric Schmidt along with many other familiar names. Member signup responses to questions were also captured by the data leak. They said (quote from the Wired story):

Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption.

“Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”

It's the people in this private group called Dialog, with an event called "build a cult" scheduled at their August retreat, that are reshaping the world with AI. Be careful for what you embrace, because AI is likely going to be used to embrace (squeeze) everyone. Even those producing this technology, and politicians in power supporting it, suspect the outcome will be bad.

From a story [miaminewtimes.com...] about this group, they say:

The leak, first reported and independently verified by WIRED, offers a rare glimpse inside one of the most exclusive networking circles in technology, politics, finance, and national security. Dialog has long been compared to the Bilderberg Group (described by the BBC as “perhaps the most controversial clandestine organisation of our times”), hosting off-the-record retreats that bring together senators, governors, military officials, hedge fund managers, tech founders, academics, and media figures. Unlike many elite conferences, Dialog does not publicly disclose its membership or attendee lists.

I'm with fearlessrick here, also in the claude camp for over a year now.
After letting it take care of the technical debt of a 15yrs old code base, I had it churn out the long missing apps for my project, and am by now orchestrating several skilled agents to do stuff like:
- do a daily db backup, read forum posts and mail inbox and fix user reported bugs - a task I never handled half as well, my service response rate has never been this good
- it checks my Matomo analytics and adjusts CF rules if need be - no more manual ASN whack-a-mole
- points out UX improvement options based on log analysis and A/B tests different approaches
It's like working with a team of professionals, and despite the dreaded "hallucinations", my honest impression is: My human coding colleagues are wrong a lot more often than these agents - and way more stubborn to admit a different approach would be better.

As for the skeptics and doomsday predictions - it does come down to what you do with the gained powers. AI will shift the global powers balance similar to what happened after other technologies were introduced. Whether those who will come/have come to power will be fond of humanism and/or humans is indeed a worrying topic - it is unrelated to the technology tho.

Reading RedBars continued posts, I am wondering about the following (this is interesting to me, as I do not sell physical goods, but a service):
RedBar seems to be selling some unique B2B product, which is somewhat construction related from what I understood. I'd assume there was a steady demand for this type of product, maybe influenced by standard growth/recession waves, but not endangered by becoming outdated or no longer demanded.
If that is the scenario, and google fails to send you the customers, are they not going to continue searching untill they find the needed product? Be it via other search engines, yellow pages or whatnot? If the product is in demand, people will seek it and eventually find RedBars offerings - there might be phases of confusion of "can't find that product on google any longer, hmmm", but as soon as some competitor has managed to order the demanded good, even the confused will realize it's still available and start seeking again.
Why does this matter? Because I feel for as long as you are one of the few who have some item in store, none of the AIO stuff should really bother you. You have the stuff - if some LLM can reproduce all the info on the stuff, so be it, it will never have a warehouse full of the stuff tho, so in the end, it will have to either fail its customers, or send them to you so they get what they are after. I'd consider providing LLM-scraper-optimized pricelists, that will not hurt at all, and those arriving at your warehouse will be better informed. If google AI is any good, it will benefit google by keeping the info-seeking-phase on google, and it will end up sending you sparse, but well-informed and ready to purchase visitors - you may have only 1% of previous traffic, but the same net revenue as ever - is that really a problem? Did anyone enjoy having to do SEO to rank well, or are we all better off if AI eventually ends up recommending the best matches to users intent?
I am aware the current state of AIOs is not there yet, and sure they'll use every opportunity to take over the informational web + some services which can be automated - and yes, I feel the pain of those getting disrupted. For those with a warehouse full of rare stuff or other ideas which can't simply be reproduced by some LLM... these might be good times when things have settled.
Sorry for the longish post, would be interested in your thoughts.

Not seeing traffic changes lately, conversions have slowed down a bit compared to Aprils numbers, but that might as well be seasonal, so, nothing new on my google traffic.

Not everyone sells products online. In my opinion, AI will lead to more and more information disappearing behind paywalls, and not just at large publishers, but also at smaller websites. Many independent projects, artists, and other creative ventures will find it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves financially. Over time, that will push human creativity further and further into the background. Another problem is that more and more content is being created by machines, and many users can no longer tell the difference. A good example is Bob Dominator. The artist is very successful on social media and Spotify, even though the music is entirely AI-generated. If you read the comments, it's obvious that most people don't even realize it. The same thing is happening with websites that publish AI-written content. Some of them contain completely false information, yet people believe it. Just yesterday I received an email from a reader who had read that people in Japan commute to work using jetpacks. He even sent me the link. The entire article was one giant hallucination, but people believed it.

I don't think AI is inherently bad. I use ChatGPT regularly myself. What bothers me is that the technology is constantly being marketed as a productivity miracle. The reality is that more and more companies are starting to ask whether that miracle is actually as impressive as advertised. Yes, AI can take over certain tasks and make work easier, but the results still need to be checked carefully and often reworked. In my opinion, that won't fundamentally change, no matter how much the technology improves. The actual time savings are often much smaller than the marketing promises. Of course, there are areas such as programming with Claude or ChatGPT where it works extremely well. But in many other fields, the results are far less spectacular.

On top of that, the current AI boom comes with real costs. Companies are investing billions in hardware and data centers. We're already seeing the consequences. Hetzner, for example, has significantly increased prices because hardware has become much more expensive. Similar stories are coming from other industries as well. My problem is not the technology itself, but the way it is being pushed forward. The large corporations behind AI are primarily interested in their own business models. That is becoming increasingly obvious. To put it bluntly, Google and others look to me like a herd of wild boars charging through a forest at full speed to reach a feeding ground first, with very little concern for what they destroy along the way.

A quick update on my own situation:
Yesterday was the worst day for my news site since 2019. That could be partly due to the World Cup, but Google News is an absolute mess right now. I've never seen so many spam sites in there as I did yesterday and this morning. A lot of Arabic websites are copying articles, rewriting them with AI, and ranking well with them. Discover is not much better at the moment. It feels as if Google has completely thrown user interest profiles overboard. In my feed, I'm seeing websites that I blocked years ago, including far-right sites that spread hateful nonsense. The strange thing is that rankings remain unchanged. According to Sistrix, there is hardly any movement at all.

On the other hand, the shop had another very good day yesterday. Starting at around 6 PM, one order after another came in through Google traffic. We are currently optimizing our product pages, so I'm not entirely sure what caused it.

@MrSnuts

RedBar seems to be selling some unique B2B product, which is somewhat construction related from what I understood.

Ok, a very brief explanation. A family business coming up to 190 years old, I joined in 1968 and started creating the "bulk export" side of the business after working in my Italian industry in the mid 70s and experiencing the massive benefits to Italy the oil crisis generated. Until then Italy was easily the #1 bulk exporter however I could see the opportunities opening up and decided to expand an Indian factory I had created for my family's traditional widgets.

Why India? The availability of my raw widgets, incentives and, to me this was very important, to avoid shipping waste products to processors initially in Europe. Bear in mind 20% of what we shipped was processed and wasted. Over the ensuing decades factories in other countries came along and globally the industry expanded.

I have personally gone from cold door knocking, presenting sales leaflets to architectural offices, to national trade fairs to the biggest trade fairs worldwide. The www arrived in 1993 and I immediately realised the benefits for my entire industry and by 1995, yes 1995, stopped my 250K flying and 60K driving, we went all-in 100% www plus 3-4 major trade fairs per annum. Like many business sectors the early adopters tended to dominate the SERPs however G knew that their big money-spinner would be "high tech" sectors that relied on international databases (think travel-related) plus easy direct to Joe Public sales. Many industries are like mine, large but niche and requiring proven experience.

At out various factories we try and only hold raw widget stocks since, especially large project work, they are mostly massive bespoke contracts for all involved unlike a McD's franchise cabin for example! We have two very distinct sides to our business. Obviously one is project work, think hotels, shopping malls, office blocks, huge street re-developments and the other side is my traditional bulk supply of widgets to wholesalers worldwide. The two sides very rarely overlap.

Believe me, that was very brief!

How do I see what my business needs to do? We still do fairs plus we have a global contact DB which generates interest / enquiries and places new widgets directly in front of decision-makers as and when needed. Our websites will continue however since many of our clients have been using us for decades only newbies to their businesses need hand-holding.

</enough?>

In our niche many started to use AI for creating or rewriting content. As we are selling the "same products" AI writes the same description for all the shops. Including the UL feature-list and some pretty text that you think you could fly with it to the moon.
All the AI-description look the same.

Yes, we did it to. But realized very soon that this will result in DC across many sites. We didn´t just copy the AI text but refined it.
Since two month we did a roll back to write more humen text again. As AI are biased to write more positive and just put all vertical-items in one bucket without clearifying that there are big differences between the items.
As most of our suppliers switched to AI too, that mass resellers copy the manufactures description without any rewriting.

my 2 cents is, that self-writing or rewriting AI-content will be the only way to survive.

A lot of the AI generated content is full of unnecessary commas and em dashes. As long as that remains the case I would view it as a crutch rather than a replacement leg.

I think the problem that AI will feed itself with AI-content will be sooner as expected.
Millions of old good written human content has allready be removed from webpages in favour of AI-content.

Thanx to google and AI the internet will be a desert in short time. With only cactuses, no flowers no trees.

Thanks Martin, for opening the file "Human written vs. AI written content".
My two cents on that: If your customer is human, write like a human.

For example: we are selling a very special niche ebook for a fairly high price. It was selling from the very first moment we published it. Then, we rewrote the copy and sales texts with AI. Guess what: The sales stopped. For over weeks and months.
I then fine-tuned everything, turning it into human content. With real emotions, natural language and shortly after, the sales came back. I think people already know when something is AI written. When a text is completely softened, flat, with no edges, in my opinion, the text is mostly useless. And that's basically what AI does. It wants to cut out all the edges and everything that has a real opinion. People buy from real words that tell what they are thinking themselves. And ask yourself: Are your thoughts always politically correct, softened and with no hard words? Then one might be Gandhi. And I think even Gandhi wouldn't have bought from AI texts. Real, natural language, to my mind, is the real skill in all this AI era when it comes to selling goods to people, not to agents. So if the customer is human, write like a human-being. Please excuse the long text, I was in a hurry.

@chris,

we are selling a very special niche ebook for a fairly high price. It was selling from the very first moment we published it. Then, we rewrote the copy and sales texts with AI. Guess what: The sales stopped. For over weeks and months.

seems a copy to our experiences!

And AI does not care about errors. On the top it says e.g. 220V and 10 sentences later it says 110V.

Looked at 10 sites i have gsc access too and not seeing so much as a blip.

@Martin, I do agree about the results you get when letting any AI be it Chatgpt or Claude do any writing....but the prompt does matter... A LOT.
Yes, we can all probably see if some content has been written by AI. That is exactly why I set out to try and improve this or see if this even could be improved at all?
Prompts can be classified in many different levels of sophistication.....but most are crap in the end (and they even sell those prompts LOL).
You need to move away from even the most sophisticated and detailed prompt to a self-learning prompting system.

I now use this to write the product description pages, and they are WAY WAY better than any competitor and the pages rank very well for search intent, but more importantly dwell time(and conversions) on those pages is very good, which is the ultimate proof.

Anyone else currently seeing major ranking drops? Everything was running great. Traffic was improving. However, something happened last Thursday/Saturday and traffic is, now, at its lowest. Back to last year levels. Anyone seeing this? Is it a me issue? An unannounced ''update''?

I'll admit I am starting not to trust the Google Site Kit. Its meant to help with site speed and I need it for Analytics. However, it could be a coincidence but.. I tried to remove it a few months back and doing so completely killed my Analytics report. This was before I realized what it was for. Stupid of me? Maybe.. but I really dislike Google and I want to Degoogle.. Alas, as said it damaged my Analytics report and my revenue provider relies on it. Whatever..

Now, this is where it also gets weird... My site was doing well.. Finally growth, or so I thought.. The Google Site Kit, then, performed an update.. Since then traffic has dropped, along with rankings too... So, long story short. I'm tempted to think that this so-called Google Site Kit is a form of traffic manipulation. How does my traffic go well, the site kit then updates and practically destroys my rankings and traffic. The timing is too coincidental..

Also, I have noticed that whenever a Google ''update'' hits the same, said, Site Kit updates.. I have, now, disabled its auto-update option. I have no plans on updating if its going to have a negative impact on traffic. But, as said, we could very well be having an unannounced Google ''update''. I could also be paranoid because of this whole traffic manipulation. Either way site is wrecked right now..

It is slowly getting a bit better. Traffic has been increasing again since yesterday. Not dramatically, but at least it's moving in the right direction.

However, I've noticed that more and more impressions are coming from search queries my site really shouldn't be ranking for. In one case, I received 188,358 impressions for the keyword "weather" (98 clicks), even though the article shown in GSC has virtually nothing to do with that topic. Naturally, hardly anyone clicks on it. This is now happening on different days with different keywords. One day it's "Trump News", another day it's "football", then it's "weather". All topics that we either don't cover at all or only touch on briefly. At the same time, rankings for the site's actual core topics seem extremely stable. Visibility metrics also show no major losses. Because of that, it looks to me as if Google is currently associating pages with much broader topic clusters than it used to. Other site owners I've spoken with are reporting similar observations.

In addition, I'm seeing sources appear in Top Stories and Google News that I normally wouldn't expect to see there. The most bizarre example so far: an Arabic website that appears to have used AI to copy an article from a Vietnamese website, which in turn used AI to copy content from us. That's the kind of source I wouldn't normally expect to find in those sections.

Is anyone else seeing similar patterns at the moment?

@ Micha, as always, when you see an increase, I see a decline ;-) and it is just like that now.
So, if you ask me, there is def something going on right now and it began around 2 or 3 days ago

@Chris I'm slowly starting to feel like a reverse indicator. Oh well, I guess everyone has some kind of purpose. &#128516;

By the way, that's true on my end as well. The shop is performing worse. Visitor numbers are still stable, but purchase intent from Google traffic has dropped sharply since yesterday. On the other hand, the news site is doing better again. So it's the usual back-and-forth.

We're probably suffering bit less compared to many on here but we've seen two big jump downs, first in feb/march and then another big one about 3 weeks ago.
currently traffic is probably 20-30% down compared to same time last year.

A reasonable bounce back Monday and so far today looking completely normal levels plus genuine business enquiries especially from the major construction project regions ... How long will this last?

Wow, massive revenue and traffic drop yesterday. Once again, I'm so tired of this.. There used to be a time where publishers would comment on Google 'Taketh' and 'Giveth' traffic. Used to be a popular slang term over on Reddit. Depending on where traffic was at the time. Now its just the annoying 'taketh'. I haven't had much traffic for so long now. Most of the year, so far, I'm just stuck back in February levels. Now I'm October 2025, literally last year levels.. Guess, we are never going to be allowed any stable growth any more..

But since I'm not alone in whatever is currently happening. It seems to almost be confirmed, yet another unannounced Google ''update''. Might put site on hold once again.. Sorry, but I'm not exactly a fan of working for nothing..

My other investment is going to be a slow one, sadly, but if these traffic fluctuations keep up and there seems to be no stopping. Then I really hope it can replace the site, eventually... I'm finding it to be too much work for so little gain..

RPM has been good this month but visibility keeps dropping. No wonder Google messes on a good RPM month..

Anyway, in other news people seem to be leaving Google for competitor companies. Apparently, Google is not doing so good in the AI race.. But I have also read the same about other companies too. None of them are making profits, just stealing revenue..

[cnbc.com ]

Anyway, in other news people seem to be leaving Google for competitor companies. Apparently, Google is not doing so good in the AI race.. But I have also read the same about other companies too. None of them are making profits, just stealing revenue..

Their dominance is cracking not because they are behind in AI (they aren't) but because over the past 1.5 years they have chosen approaches to ranking websites that do not surface best websites in each respective niche and keyword. They are just really really bad at calculating reputation, trustworthiness, relevance and UX of websites and their search has become garbage as a result.

So true, some of that article covers both their AI and lost staff. Alongside slight marketshare drops. Sadly they still have roughly 90% of the market still but I'd love them to topple. Even if its the last thing I ever see. Really dislike the company. But I can't imagine many being a fan with the economic damage they have, now, caused worldwide.

In other news I have also worked out why revenue fell so much yesterday. Finally done my research. Apparently the Singapore bots are back in full force. So, welcome back to the ban hammer. I have, now, once again, blocked them. This time permanently..