Plus, bot traffic and Google updates  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Raptive News SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 By Courtney Kahn Content Marketing Hi Raptive, “I’ve gotta be honest, I’ve been expecting your call,” Google. They’re back with yet another update. If your week has been equal parts new Taylor Swift (yay!) and staring suspiciously at your analytics (boo 👎), we’re right there with you. There’s a lot of noise in the numbers right now: • Bot traffic continues to make traffic and RPM trends harder to interpret • Another Google spam update • And there are more ways than ever for people to discover your content—including some you may not be watching yet So while Taylor handles the soundtrack, we’ll help with the bots and traffic. Here’s what’s worth paying attention to this week. What’s new Seeing RPM changes? Bot traffic may be part of the picture Bot traffic is increasing significantly as more AI and agentic systems come online, and we’re seeing increased activity across sites of different sizes and categories. Not all bots are bad. Search crawlers and other automated services have legitimate purposes. But bad bots can generate traffic that shows up in your analytics without behaving anything like a real reader—and that can affect how you interpret your RPM. Here’s what to know: • Bots can make your RPM look lower. Session and pageview RPM use all reported traffic. If bot visits increase your traffic without generating ad revenue, your RPM can fall even if the monetization of your real audience hasn’t changed. • Monetized RPM can help you understand what’s really happening. It focuses on traffic where we saw monetizable ad activity. If your overall RPM declines while monetized RPM remains relatively steady, non-monetizing traffic may be contributing to the difference. Check it out in the Earnings Overview tab of your dashboard. • Some bots can trigger ads, too. Sophisticated bots can generate ad activity that advertisers and their verification partners may identify as Invalid Traffic (IVT). Some IVT is normal, but sustained increases—even over a day or two—are something we watch closely. A surge can temporarily put pressure on CPMs, while elevated IVT over a longer period can have a more significant impact on advertiser demand and revenue. We’re doing everything we can on our side to prevent this and protect your earnings. That’s why we don’t diagnose performance based on a single RPM metric. We look at the bigger picture: total earnings, overall RPM, monetized RPM, CPMs, impressions, traffic quality, and how much of your traffic is actually monetizing. It’s also important when looking year-over-year or with different ad providers, given how much the traffic environment has changed and how much reporting can differ between providers. What can you do about bad bots? Your host or CDN is typically the best place to stop them. If you work with Nerdpress, they offer advanced custom blocking tools as well. They can investigate IPs, networks, user agents, request patterns, and other information that may not be visible in analytics, then use targeted tools like managed challenges, firewall rules, or rate limits. Be careful with broad blocking, though—legitimate crawlers and even real readers using VPNs can sometimes look suspicious. Learn more about bot traffic → Google is rolling out another spam update Google began rolling out its September spam update on last Thursday and says it could take up to two weeks to complete. That means if you see some movement in Search over the next couple of weeks, try not to draw conclusions from a day or two of data. An update in progress can create volatility, and the announcement itself doesn’t tell us why any individual site gained or lost visibility. Keep an eye on your Search Console trends and give the update time to finish rolling out before making major changes. Check Google update status → Quick tip New Search Console report for visual content “Google recently added multimodal search reporting to Search Console, giving you more visibility into how people discover your content through things like Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome image search. To view, open Search Console, find the new multimodal search type filter, and see which pages and images are already earning impressions. You may discover that some of your content is getting found in ways you weren’t measuring before.” Eddie Mercado VP, SEO Solutions In case you missed it Google updated its requirements for Search profiles Google has updated the eligibility requirements for Search profiles, which bring your content, bio, and social presence together across Google Search and Discover. To be eligible, you now need at least 10,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or X. If you have a Search profile—or have been considering creating one—it’s worth checking Google’s updated guidance to make sure you still qualify. See Google’s updated Search profile requirements → What we’re reading Catch up on news from around the industry • LLMs keep citing YouTube in search results (Digiday) • DOJ’s OpenAI copyright brief previews AI licensing deals’ future (Bloomberg Law | gated) • ChatGPT now sends 95.1% of AI referral traffic to websites, BrightEdge says (The Next Web) Question of the week When traffic gets noisy, which number do you check first? 📈 Overall traffic trend Is your audience growing, shrinking, or holding steady? 💵 RPM / Page RPM A quick read on revenue 🔎 RPM on monetized traffic How the traffic that’s actually earning is performing 🧭 Traffic source mix A closer look at shifts in search, social, direct, or other sources Thanks for reading! Was this email helpful? You’re receiving this email because you help manage a site that works with Raptive. 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