If you opened Google Analytics this week and saw a flat line, stop before you phone your developer. Nothing broke on your website. Google’s own reporting broke, and it has been broken since Tuesday. It matters, because plenty of people are about to make expensive decisions on numbers that are not real.
Search and analytics
Google Analytics has shown zero traffic since 1 September
From 1 September, standard reports in Google Analytics 4 started showing zero or sharply reduced traffic. Active users vanished from the main charts. Complaints piled up in the Google Analytics forums, on WebmasterWorld and across social media, and Google acknowledged the problem in its own Help Centre thread, saying that since 1 September the standard reports are not showing active users or traffic data.
The detail that matters is that Realtime reports kept working. Visitors were still arriving and events were still being collected. The fault sits in the reporting pipeline that feeds the standard reports, not in the collection layer. Your data is almost certainly sitting there waiting to be displayed.
Why this matters for your business: Do not act on anything you see in Google Analytics right now. Do not cut a campaign that looks dead, and above all do not let anyone rewrite your tracking code to fix a problem that is not yours. Rewriting tracking during an outage is how businesses end up with duplicate events and broken conversion counts months later. Open Realtime, confirm traffic is still arriving, and screenshot it for your records.
Google says the disavow tool does have effects
John Mueller was asked again this week whether the disavow file actually does anything. He said it does have effects, but it has its place and time. That is plainer than the industry has had for a while, and it cuts against a common belief that the tool is theatre Google keeps around to stop people worrying about their links.
The rest of Google’s position has not moved. Disavowing is not part of normal site maintenance. It is for cases where spammy links have caused a manual action or look likely to. Mueller has separately confirmed you can disavow a whole top level domain using the domain prefix when the bad links cluster there.
Why this matters for your business: If someone sold you a monthly link cleanup, ask what manual action it protects you from. There probably is not one. Check the manual actions report in Search Console first. If it is clean, leave your disavow file alone. If it is not, the tool works, but give it three to six months before you judge the result.
Advertising
Google Ads takes the language setting off your campaigns this month
From late September, Google removes the campaign level language setting from Search campaigns and from AI Max for Search. Instead of you telling Google which languages to target, Google will match on the language of your ads and your landing page, combined with what it already knows about the languages a searcher reads. Performance Max loses the setting for the Google Search channel too, though it stays in place for other channels.
Google says existing single language campaigns keep working and no restructure is needed. Language exclusions are still not supported, which is the part worth noting. You cannot tell Google to stay away from a language. You can only make sure your creative and your landing page speak the one you want.
Why this matters for your business: This lands harder here than in a single language market. If you run English and Afrikaans campaigns side by side, the separation between them now rests entirely on your ad copy and your landing pages. Check that every ad group points at a page written in the same language as its ads. An Afrikaans ad set pointing at an English page will start pulling the wrong audience once the setting disappears.
Social and content
LinkedIn reopens its vertical video feed outside America
LinkedIn has started reopening its immersive video feed to users outside the United States, beginning with the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The feature is a full screen scrollable stack of vertical videos with its own Video tab in the mobile app. LinkedIn withdrew it outside the US while it rebuilt the recommendation system behind it, and it now says people spend twice as long watching video in the feed and in carousels as they did before.
Why this matters for your business: South Africa is not in the first wave, but the rollout order tells you where this is going. LinkedIn is the one professional network where a small business can still reach decision makers without paying, and it is building a surface that rewards vertical video specifically. If you already cut vertical video for TikTok or Reels, post it to LinkedIn too.
Automotive
A read-across, not news: what a reporting hole does to your co-op claim
There is no fresh automotive news today, so this is a read-across from the analytics outage rather than a story of its own. Dealers are more exposed to a reporting gap than almost any other business, for two reasons.
The first is co-op. Most manufacturer co-op programmes want traffic and lead evidence pulled from analytics, and the claims window usually closes shortly after month end. A hole in your September data lands squarely inside that window. The second is the telephone. Practitioner guidance puts forty to sixty percent of dealer leads on the phone, and without a call tracking platform feeding events into analytics those leads are already unattributed on a good day. Take the standard reports away and there is very little left.
Why this matters for your dealership: Screenshot your Realtime reports daily until the standard reports return, so you have evidence that traffic continued. Pull lead counts from your CRM and your call tracking platform instead, because those systems are unaffected. And tell your co-op contact now that there is a platform level gap in September. A note sent before the deadline reads as diligence. The same note sent afterwards reads as an excuse.
What to do this week
- Open Realtime in Google Analytics, confirm traffic is still arriving, screenshot it, and leave your tracking code alone until Google confirms the fix.
- Report September numbers from Search Console and your ad platforms directly, and flag the analytics gap in writing to anyone who receives a report.
- Check the manual actions report in Search Console before anyone touches your disavow file.
- Match every ad group’s landing page language to its ad language before Google removes the campaign language setting late this month.
- If you run Local Services Ads, check they are still linked to your Google Business Profile. Google confirmed on 2 September that a bug is unlinking them, and said it is not connected to the ongoing move of Local Services Ads into Google Ads.
- Post one vertical video to LinkedIn this week and watch what it does.
Working out what your September actually looked like will take more than one dashboard. If you want a hand, get in touch and we will help you build a report you can stand behind.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, Google Analytics showing zero traffic on 1 September
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Analytics broken again
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google says the disavow tool does have effects
- Search Engine Land, Google Ads is removing language targeting from Search campaigns
- PPC Land, Google Ads drops language targeting in September
- Social Media Today, LinkedIn video presentation and discovery updates
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google working on Local Service Ads bugs
- Demand Local, GA4 for auto dealerships