Did Google update, or did you break something?

Traffic falls. The instinct is to assume a Google update, because that requires no further investigation and nothing is your fault. It is the wrong first move about half the time, and it costs weeks.

Work through these in order. The order matters, because the cheap checks rule out the expensive ones.

1. Did you lose rankings, or lose clicks?

This is the first fork and almost nobody checks it. If your positions are unchanged and clicks fell, no amount of rewriting will help, because you have not lost a ranking contest. Something is intercepting the click, usually an AI Overview appearing above your result and answering the question.

If positions genuinely fell, carry on down the list. If they did not, stop and go and look at what now sits above you.

2. Did somebody change the website?

Check this before blaming the algorithm, because it is the most common real cause and the easiest to fix. A redesign, a plugin update, a migration, a well-meaning tidy-up of page titles, a change to robots.txt.

Dated notes on your charts are what make this answerable in seconds instead of a fortnight. If the drop starts the day after a deployment, that is not an algorithm update, and the fix is much cheaper.

3. Did an update actually land?

Now check the dates against the confirmed update timeline. The word confirmed is doing work: the SEO world declares an update roughly every fortnight based on volatility charts, and most of those are noise.

If a core update landed on the 12th and your drop starts on the 12th, that is a real signal. If your drop starts on the 3rd and the update was on the 12th, it is not your explanation, however much you would like it to be.

4. Did a competitor do something?

Rankings are relative. You can lose position while doing everything right, because somebody else published something better, earned links, or expanded into your topic. Look at who now occupies the positions you held.

5. Is it the season?

Compare against the same period last year, not last month. Plenty of drops are just what happens in that part of the calendar for your business, and the year-on-year comparison settles it immediately.

6. Is something technically broken?

The unglamorous checks that occasionally explain everything: a certificate that expired, a robots.txt rule that arrived with a deployment, pages returning errors, a noindex left on from a staging environment.

Why this is worth doing properly

Each of these causes has a different response, and picking the wrong one wastes a quarter. Rewriting pages that lost clicks to an AI Overview does nothing. Waiting patiently for a recovery from an update that never happened does less.

This is also exactly the sort of cross-referencing that used to justify a phone call to a consultant. If you have your rankings, the update timeline, your notes and your Search Console history in one place, you can ask your own AI assistant to work through the list and hand you the evidence.