I noticed that GSC now has "Generative AI features Beta" as a separate data set...this is the first time I have seen it and it's almost 500k views in 3 months! My web clicks and especially impressions are down considerably from last year for this time period...is it just that the data sets were combined before or are these AI impressions replacing visits to the site? I suspect both, and also the general sense of anxiety since we now have a new middle east conflagration, higher prices, fear of stock market collapse, etc. People are not shopping much in other words.

It looks like a Google update might be rolling out. Semrush Sensor is showing major volatility across the US, UK, and Germany. At least this would finally be a confirmation that something is brewing behind the scenes, explaining the absolute chaos we've been seeing with Google search over the last few days.

@ichthyous better leave the articles as they are for now. Google is extremely unpredictable at the moment.

@ichthyous, this behaviour started in our niche with the SPAM Update in June. google seems to classify (shop) sites with more than one topic as SPAM ( except amazon ).

@ichthyous

That implies that you would need multiple single-topic sites these days to survive.

Bear in mind that my experience is with global sites, I have found the opposite this last couple of years, in fact only yesterday after several weeks of experimenting and analysis, I have closed all my specialised single-subject sites and incorporated that info all into one site.

Whether this is the correct course of action or not I really DO NOT Care!

I am sick and fed-up of all this deliberate manipulation by G and its cohorts. If all they want is a classified ads search with listed results dependent upon just how much someone is prepared to pay for the privileged top position, fine, then create that and if 75+% of people solely use that, again fine, but at at least we shall all then know if creating our sites, large and small, is a worthwhile effort whatsoever.

Honestly, I discovered some of my specialist sites' genuine traffic was almost zero.

@micha can confirm Discover is back to dropping stories after 2-3 hours. well

Discover is again dropping stories.

Good morning. Since it's only 7 AM, I can't tell yet if Discover is going to drop the stories right away again. Currently, my traffic is still very flat, better than the last few days, but far from what I would call normal. What I do notice: Top Stories in my niche are more up-to-date again, and the 'source profile' in Google News is showing fresher content as well.

One of the things that’s really helping me with SEO and search engine rankings is getting legitimate AI engines to see and learn about my website. Training AI engines to learn about my websites has been a huge boost. For instance, now ChatGPT knows the details of my primary website and provides SEO enhancements, which actually work.

And Discover traffic has disappeared overnight.

Good morning everyone. Around 5 PM yesterday, my news site suddenly took off and hit a record traffic day. Four articles got pushed into Google Discover simultaneously with massive reach. The strong traffic is actually still holding up this morning. But at the exact same time, the start page of my shop completely vanished from the SERPs for all major target keywords. It was completely gone; even the AI Overview didn't show it. Fortunately, it popped back into place this morning as if nothing happened. Truly strange.

@gatomark I agree with you there, ChatGPT is pretty good when it comes to optimization for shops. I use it myself now, but (as a general little warning) you should definitely never rely on it blindly.

Training AI engines to learn about my websites has been a huge boost.

That sounds crazy to me considering that AI engines bring zero traffic even with millions of "impressions".

German bots from Frankfurt especially have been going nuts on my sites this weekend, CloudFlare seems to be lagging catching these otherwise local hotel site fine, all global sites have now been trashed after 30+ years as being worthless / pointless / inaccurate / not worthy of anything.

What a strange world they seem to be trying to create!

I'll not be partaking in it.

5:1 ... or to be more precise 40:8

I was just checking some popular widget keywords of mine and one result came in with 40 Google image ads v 8 regular organic.

Ok, I have seen worse, I think 50:8 however it's simply a reminder as to why the SERPs do not really matter any more when faced with odds like this ... even when ranking extremely well.