November 2025 Changes In Google

Why & How Google is harming your site

More on recent changes in Google that have negatively impacted:

-1- performance metrics
-2- organic pages
-3- indexed urls

Starting around mid September 2025, Google stopped permitting us to see rank data 100 deep. This has impacted rank reporting tools significantly, especially tools that once showed relatively accurate results past 20 positions. This has directly impacted reported traffic and keyword metrics. If tools can't see deep results, traffic to pages that hold ranks in positions 20 - 100 can't easily be reported. Most tools that previously reported keywords ranking in the top 100 now show results that no longer reflect accurate reporting of actual traffic.

When looking at the search performance charts in ahrefs every site experienced a clearly defined top in Organic Pages in mid August to early September 2025 and a relatively steep drop following that top. This may be a "data visibility" issue as some have suggested, but subsequent research suggests it's more than that.

Most alarming about this drop is that it appears to correlate to a decline in urls indexed by Google. Google is becoming far more selective in what it indexes. Many SEOs have reported that previously indexed pages are quietly being dropped, even if they’re still linked and crawlable. In some cases, a very large number of urls have been dropped and they appear to be shorter content, product pages, promotional (coupon, affiliate, marketing messages), or content that is factually repetitive (even if not redundant). So the impact may be a noticeable drop in conversions, lead gen and traffic in general.

From GPT5: "Google’s changes to crawling, indexing, and ranking behavior in mid-2024 through 2025 (especially post-August) have led to widespread de-indexation patterns — particularly for low-traffic, low-link, or AI-like content."

We've been running experiments to see if indexing requests are honored and so far they appear to be, but it's much too early to conclude that indexing requests will permanently fix this. If a page that was dropped from the index is valuable, a better fix may be to make that content more robust.

To see if an important page is indexed do a search for:

site:domain.com (shows all indexed)
site:domain.com keyword (shows indexed urls related to keyword)

To find pages dropped from the index:

In Search Console, go to Pages -> All known pages
Then, under Why pages aren’t indexed -> Crawled - currently not indexed   and   Discovered - currently not indexed


I suspect all of this is related to Google being overwhelmed due to the massive influx of AI generated content, and they need to relieve the pressure by lightening the load on their servers, even if the consequences of this effort causes harm.


-- 
Bob Sakayama
TNG/Earthling, Inc.