The usual causes
| Cause | Typical sign | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Technical problem | Pages vanish or traffic falls off a cliff | Page indexing report and URL Inspection |
| Algorithm update | A gradual drop that lines up with an update | Google Search Status Dashboard |
| Competitors | You slip a few places on key terms | The current results for those searches |
| Seasonal demand | Impressions fall but positions hold | Search Console, compared year over year |
| Site change | The drop starts right after a launch or edit | Your change log and redirects |
| Manual action | Sudden losses plus a message from Google | Manual actions report |
How to diagnose a drop
- Pin down the date the drop started in Search Console.
- Check whether impressions fell, or only positions or clicks.
- Compare the date with the Search Status Dashboard.
- List every site change from the week before.
- Find which pages and queries lost the most.
Google's guide to traffic drops also mentions reporting glitches. Check Search Console's data anomalies page before you change anything.
If a core update caused it
Google says a drop after a core update does not mean something is fundamentally wrong with your content. Compare your pages with the ones that gained. Improve usefulness, proof and clarity on the pages that lost, rather than making quick technical tweaks.
If your site caused it
Good example. A dental office notices a drop two days after a redesign. It finds that old URLs lost their redirects, restores them and recovers within weeks.
Bad example. The same office rewrites every page in a panic after a small seasonal dip and makes the drop worse.
Changes in demand are not losses. A pool company sees fewer impressions every winter because fewer people search.
See SEO penalties and why pages are not indexed. Our SEO audit finds the cause before anyone touches the site.