Users are reporting significant drops in organic traffic following Google’s October 2025 update. WorldIsMine saw nearly a 70% decline despite clean SEO practices, suspecting site speed (failing PageSpeed tests) may be a factor due to their 100K+ member base. eisammy noted stable top-page rankings but a disconnect between rising impressions and stagnant clicks, while gaining members rapidly (800 → 1,100 in a month) and hitting 1.1M lifetime pageviews — attributing growth partly to AI searchers and lurkers. They shared WebmasterWorld threads highlighting regional traffic disparities, with U.S. traffic down 56% and non-U.S. surging — possibly tied to broader societal factors like government shutdowns and user caution. WorldIsMine confirmed similar U.S. traffic patterns. Kaushik_Jivani reported a similar drop for an e-commerce client starting December 1, 2025, seeking advice on remediation. The consensus suggests the update may disproportionately affect U.S. traffic and site speed, while AI-driven search behavior and user engagement patterns are evolving.
Just wondering if anyone else was hit. I don’t resort to any unnatural link building whatsoever, and my instance has been solid in search engine rankings since it opened in 2017. However, this October we got hit, nearly a 70% decline in organic traffic. I am wondering if it’s just me or did anyone else here expirience the same? The only thing my instance is lacking lately is speed. Nearly 100K members now, and Google page speed test show a ‘Failed’ speed test. I know how much Google loves speed, so I wonder if that could be the culprit.
Here at top keywords, my instance is on the first page. Even after blocking all AI searchers, last week I opened everything again and my impressions went up, but my clicks didn’t.
About new members, I gained a lot.
For example:
12 September: I reached 800 members
7 October: 900 members
17 same month: 1000 members
I’ve reached 1.1 million pageviews all time, and especially this year with 800K pageviews and 20% more unique visitors than last year.
I also realized that my lurkers are huge, and I guess AI searchers are the main sources.
USA traffic is back to being perpetually weak again, while non USA traffic is zooming. Today USA is -56% at 10am. Could be the government shutdown is also distracting people. I recently sent a marketing email to about 12k recipients total and not one response despite an open rate between 13%-54% on the lists. People are very very cautious these days.