On September 17, 2025, a bug in Google’s search results caused results pages to be overwhelmed with ads, leaving few or no organic listings. The glitch affected queries globally between 1am and 6am ET, though it could not be consistently replicated in all regions.
Complaints surfaced from users worldwide, prompting speculation about links to other recent changes such as the removal of the 100 results feature. However, Google’s Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin later confirmed that this was unrelated and clarified it was a temporary bug impacting only a small percentage of traffic.
The issue has since been resolved, but it highlights how platform outages can temporarily disrupt visibility for both advertisers and organic listings.
This news was shared by Barry Schwartz.
