Google Traffic Just Dropped 45%

We’re finally starting to see fall weather here in Florida. Fall and winter are the best times in Florida. You just wanna find reasons to be outside. The summer? Surface of the sun hot. 🥵

Anyway, AI is everywhere these days. And this very issue is an example of both the positives and the negatives.

Because, I’ve seen a 45% drop in my Google traffic in the last couple weeks. AND… I spotted patterns in my form responses across my site that I hadn’t found before (using AI). I’ll tell you about both… and what it means for you.

So, let’s get right to it.

My Google Traffic Just Dropped 45%. Here’s What I Found.

So, my traffic dropped. And I know I’m not alone. You’ve probably seen the same thing. I even saw a Facebook thread where people were comparing notes about it and… yep, pretty much across the board. Site owners have been seeing big drops.

Over the weekend I finally hooked Search Console up to my AI setup and pulled the real numbers. And, it isn’t great.

Clicks from Google fell about 45% when I compared the last two weeks of September with the first two weeks of October. My average position slid from around 8 to somewhere between 11 and 12.

So, let’s talk about what’s going on. And whether it actually matters as much as it feels like it does.

First… check yourself before you blame Google. My first suspect was… me. I just moved the BMA blog over to Astro, and it went live October 1st. So when traffic falls off a cliff a week later, you have to ask whether you broke something. 😜

I hadn’t. The pages are indexed, Google’s crawling them fine, and all the SEO stuff carried over. And the slide actually started before the move. The steepest drop hit October 9th and 10th… right after Google finished rolling out its September 2026 spam update on October 8th.

Still, always rule out your own stuff first. A botched redesign or a plugin quietly noindexing your pages is the one cause you can fix today.

So what IS going on?

Two things at once.

The update reshuffled rankings, and some sites lost. Google hasn’t said what this one targeted, so anybody telling you exactly why is guessing.

The bigger one is AI answers. When Google shows an AI Overview, studies have clicks on the regular results dropping anywhere from 30% to 60%. Pew Research found people clicked a result just 8% of the time when an AI summary showed up, versus 15% without one. Chartbeat found Google search referrals to news sites fell about 40% in a single year. And plenty of people now skip Google entirely and start in ChatGPT. Frankly, I’m guilty of this, too. I usually head off to Grok when I’m looking for info. I pretty much only use Google when looking for local businesses.

The update is a short-term shake-up. The AI shift is the slow drain underneath it.

Look at WHAT dropped

My site didn’t drop evenly. The biggest losers were my older reviews… Beehiiv, Divi, Rocket hosting.

Think about who reads those. Somebody searches “is Beehiiv any good,” skims, and leaves. Now Google’s AI just answers it for them. Pros, cons, pricing, done. I use Grok all the time to see what people are saying about tools like that.

That’s low-intent traffic. Drive-by readers looking for a quick answer. And honestly? I think that’s most of what’s disappearing across the board. The people still clicking through are the ones who want more than a summary.

Here’s the thing… my revenue didn’t drop. Not one bit. In fact, my business makes more money today than it did back when I was getting several times the traffic I get now. Funny how that works.

Traffic and revenue just aren’t as connected as we’ve all been trained to think. How your business is built… your offers, your email list, your relationships with actual customers… matters way more than how many people wander in from Google.

So maybe it’s time to change the scoreboard.

Organic traffic has been treated as THE number for a long time. Check it every morning, celebrate when it’s up, panic when it’s down. As an old-school content guy, I know the preoccupation with web traffic. 😜 But it’s one KPI out of a whole army of them. Leads. Conversion rate. Revenue. Customers who stick around. Watch those. If they’re healthy, a traffic dip is a lot less scary.

If you ARE worried about it… Then the answer isn’t chasing the traffic you lost. It’s attracting better traffic to begin with.

That means content AI can’t just hand out in a search result. I talked about this back in issue #591… the question to ask about everything you publish is, “Can AI answer this without me?” If it can, that piece is living on borrowed time. (Honestly, I’ve been saying this for over a year now.)

What AI can’t fake is your actual experience. Your testing, your numbers, your client stories, your take. That’s the content that pulls in people who are actually looking to do something… and those are the visitors who turn into customers.

Also, remember that web traffic is just one thing. YouTube, podcasts, email opens… anything that gets you in front of people counts here. Web traffic is often the least important, frankly.

A couple of practical notes before you start rewriting everything. If an update just rolled through, give it a couple of weeks before making big changes. Rankings bounce around. And look at which pages lost, not just the site total. That’ll tell you where the problem actually is.

But mostly? Stop treating Google as something you own. It’s rented. The stuff you actually own… your list, your relationships, your own data on who your customers are… is what matters now. Google is fickle… and the moment you feel secure about the traffic Google is sending your way, it’ll remind you who is in charge.

In the next article (below), let’s talk more about the BEST way to get to know your audience and customers…

WordPress News & Updates

AI agents don’t pick WordPress. Andy Peatling has been running a benchmark: ask AI agents to build a website without naming a platform, and see what they reach for. Out of 193 completed builds for sites that would be a natural fit for WordPress… zero were WordPress. Nobody knows exactly why yet. But if more people start asking an AI to “build me a website,” that’s a real problem for WordPress. See the benchmark, and Remkus de Vries’ take on it.

Hacked Ninja Forms sites are getting hidden admin accounts. Attackers are actively exploiting flaws in Ninja Forms and WPC Product Bundles. When an admin views the poisoned content, it quietly installs a malicious plugin and creates an admin account you can’t see. If you run either one, update now (Ninja Forms 3.15.4, WPC Product Bundles 8.6.7) and go look at your user list for admins you don’t recognize. Patchstack’s breakdown.

Rank Math SEO PRO got hit with malware. This one was serious. Attackers slipped malicious code into some copies of Rank Math SEO PRO version 3.0.123, and anybody who downloaded or updated it between the evening of October 15 and the morning of October 16 (UTC) may have gotten the bad version. Once activated, it plants hidden backdoors, creates admin accounts you can’t see, and tries to steal passwords and API keys. (One more reason I left Rank Math a while back.) Version 3.0.124 is clean, but updating alone won’t undo the damage… if your site got the bad copy, treat it as hacked and restore from a backup taken before October 15. I caught wind of this fast and had every Concierge client running Rank Math Pro checked and updated before most of them even knew it happened. That’s kind of the whole point. 😉 Wordfence’s advisory.

SSL certificates are getting shorter. Starting February 10, 2027, free certificates from Let’s Encrypt will last 64 days instead of 90, and they’re heading to 45 days in 2028. If your host renews them automatically (most do), you won’t notice a thing. If anybody’s still renewing by hand off a calendar reminder… time to fix that. The announcement.

WordPress.com’s AI agent now builds custom themes. Tell it your goals and it designs a theme for you, with most sites ready in under four minutes. It can also install and update plugins right from the chat, remember your brand guidelines, and take requests over Slack. Put this next to the first item and you can see exactly where Automattic thinks this is all going. What’s new.

ChatGPT ads: 370 clicks, zero sales. Barn2 spent $477 over six weeks testing ads inside ChatGPT. Not one sale. Meanwhile, people who found them through regular links in ChatGPT’s answers stayed about 12 times longer and bought five times. Showing up in the answer beats paying for the ad next to it… at least for now. Barn2’s write-up.

More turmoil at Automattic. Matt Mullenweg had accessibility work by longtime core committer Andrea Fercia reverted, then told Fercia to “contribute your talents to another project.” Same week, Automattic’s interim CFO resigned less than a month into the job… the second CFO out the door since the failed attempt to oust Mullenweg. Not exactly a picture of stability for the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack and WooCommerce. The Repository has the Fercia story, and TechCrunch covered the CFO.

The Fluent team had a busy week. FluentCart turned one and celebrated with a whole release week: dynamic pricing (discounts without coupon codes), checkout embedded right on your sales page, and in version 2.0, multi-currency so customers see and pay prices in their own currency. More than 9,000 stores run it now. FluentCommunity 2.12 added Insights reports… who’s active, who’s going quiet, what’s popular. And FluentBoards 2.2 added ready-made board templates plus AI access through MCP.

WP Crontrol changes hands, and the Pro features go free. The popular plugin for managing WordPress’s scheduled tasks is now maintained by Awesome Motive. Version 2.0 made the old Pro features free, including logging and new Cron Alerts that email you when a scheduled task fails. Handy if your scheduled posts or emails sometimes silently don’t fire. Some longtime users aren’t thrilled about the new owner, so it’s one to keep an eye on. The plugin.

Check your site before PHP 8.2 goes away. Security support for PHP 8.2 ends December 31, 2026, so expect hosts to start moving sites to newer versions. CompatNav PHP Upgrade Checker is a free plugin that scans your plugins and theme (custom code included) and separates what will actually break from what just throws warnings, for PHP 8.0 through 8.5. For what it’s worth, all Concierge clients are already running PHP 8.3. The plugin.

Your Forms Are a Survey That Never Stops Running

Most people think of forms as plumbing. Somebody fills one out, you get an email, done.

I’ve come to see them a little differently. Every form on your site is a survey. A survey that runs 24/7, collecting answers from exactly the people you most want to understand.

The problem has always been doing something with those answers.

Put a form everywhere it makes sense

If you’re going to ask your audience questions, ask them at the moments when they’re actually paying attention. A few spots that work really well:

• Right after they opt in. The thank-you page after someone grabs your lead magnet is prime real estate. They just raised their hand. Ask them a couple of questions while they’re most engaged… what they’re working on, what they’re stuck on, what made them sign up.
• Surveys to your email list. Every so often, just ask. You’d be amazed what people will tell you when you actually ask.
• After they buy. Whether it’s a product or a service, onboarding is the perfect time to learn who they are and what they’re hoping to get out of it.
• When they book a call. Ask a few questions on the booking form. You get better calls out of it, too.
• When they unsubscribe. Ask why. Yeah, it stings a little. It’s also some of the most honest feedback you’ll ever get.

And here’s the important part… have your forms plugin save those entries. Don’t set it to purge them. (I used to suggest auto-deleting old entries… I’ve changed my mind.) That data is the whole point.

It doesn’t matter much which forms plugin you’re using. That said, my pick is Fluent Forms. It’s what I run on my own site. It’s fast, it’s priced fairly, and every entry gets stored right in your WordPress database… which means the data is yours, sitting on your own server.

But I didn’t write this just to remind you to use forms. 😜

Because, here’s what usually happens… Somebody sets up a survey. Responses start rolling in. And then… nobody really looks at them. Or they look at them once, export everything into a spreadsheet, scroll for 20 minutes, get overwhelmed, and close the tab. Or… responses sort of trickle in, so you forget about it and don’t realize the treasure trove of customer feedback you’re sitting on.

I get it. Reading through hundreds of free-text answers and trying to spot patterns is tedious work. So it doesn’t get done.

This is where AI earns its keep.

Point your favorite AI tool at those form entries and let it do the pattern recognition. This is where you’ll truly get the power of those form entries… and really turn them into something actionable.

Fluent Forms now has its own MCP server (I mentioned it a few weeks ago), so you can connect Claude (or another AI tool) straight to your form data. No exporting needed. Using a different plugin? An export file works fine too.

Then just ask it questions. What are the most common problems people mention? What do the people who buy have in common? What words do they use to describe what they want? Who signs up but never goes any further, and why?

It gets even better when you start cross-referencing…

Your form entries on their own tell you what people said. But you’ve got other data sitting around too… who bought, who booked a call, who opens your emails, who unsubscribed, which tags they have in your CRM. Cross-referencing means having your AI line those things up side by side, so you can see how what people said connects to what they actually did.

That’s where the really useful stuff shows up.

Here’s a simple example. Say your opt-in form asks new subscribers, “What’s your biggest challenge right now?” On its own, that gives you a list of challenges. Nice to know.

Now have your AI match those answers against who went on to buy something.

Maybe it turns out the people who said “getting more traffic” almost never buy… but the people who said “turning my readers into customers” buy at three times the rate. Suddenly you know who your real buyer is. You know which problem to talk about in your emails, which lead magnet to promote, and which audience to stop chasing.

You’d never see that just reading form entries. And you’d never see it just looking at your sales either. It only shows up when you put the two together.

I’ve been doing this lately with my own business. I had my AI pull up everybody who booked a Roadmap Call with me and cross-reference them against what they’d told me in my forms… what they said they were struggling with, what they signed up for, how they found me. It’s surfacing patterns I’d never have spotted on my own, and they feed straight into my marketing and how I set up my offers.

And the best part? You don’t need to know how to build a pivot table or write a database query. You just ask, in plain English. “Of the people who booked a call, what did they have in common when they first signed up?” The AI does the digging.

That’s the difference between “a pile of form entries” and actually knowing who your customer is.

Make it ongoing, not a one-time project

The real power shows up when you stop treating this as a one-off.

Your AI can keep checking those entries as new ones come in (kind of like the AI receptionist I wrote about a while back). It can keep building and refining a profile of who’s on your site, who’s on your list, and who’s buying… and what they need and want. Someone unsubscribes and tells you why? That gets folded in too. You can even put your AI onto a recurring task to send you an updated report every single week with any updates… across all forms. Or, have it produce an HTML dashboard that you can look at any time.

Instead of a survey you ran once two years ago, you’ve got a living picture of your audience. Always up to date, always in front of you.

And that’s data you own. No algorithm update can take it away from you.