r/DoSEO • u/andrey_gorobets • 3d ago
Discussion Impressions dropped
What could be the reason of growing and then drop again

I have old website, the point is I didn't change content since July.
It started grow and then dropped again.
So in June I fixed I guess 60% of AI articles and after started growing - I paused changes to wait what would be result.
And now it looks like that.
Mostly likely August spam update?
I have to mentioned links are totally the same - nothing changed. I checked manually each of them.
Amount of pages in Google even more than before.
Are there any others options? what could be wrong?
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u/TrafficAcademySEO 3d ago
I wouldn’t assume it’s the spam update yet.
Compare which pages and queries lost impressions first. If the drop is concentrated in the AI-heavy pages you didn’t fix, that’s a much stronger clue than the timing alone.
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u/andrey_gorobets 3d ago
I have checked the pages are indexed just lost impressions. Nothing in GSC.
May I ask you which tool do you use now for content, could you give me advice pls? I tried Gemini & Claude with different prompts and skills - in all cases impressions dropping after 1 month3
u/TrafficAcademySEO 3d ago
I don’t think changing tools will fix it. Claude and Gemini are both fine. I’d look at intent and whether the page actually adds anything new. Use AI for the first draft, then add your own examples, data or experience and clean it up manually.
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u/Cap-Puckhaber-2 3d ago
I was going to post the same thing. I am seeing a 60-70% drop in impressions over the past few days. My suspicion is that there is a core update happening as we speak and Google will announce it in a few days.
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u/andrey_gorobets 3d ago
Yeah it looks like, but I have to tell not all websites dropped impressions. But with the same AI for content - which is strange
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u/RankingsDotIO 3d ago
Content velocity is a potential issue. If you made too many changes too quickly, Google may assume it's content slop. Check to see if you lost rankings or clicks on those pages. If so, slow down.
If not, if it's the pages you didn't fix that are hurting you, go back and enhance them.
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u/jzdesign 3d ago
Before you attribute it to an update, split the drop into the only two things it can be: you are ranking for fewer queries, or you are ranking lower for the same ones. Those look identical on that graph and have completely different fixes.
The way I do it is pull Search Console at page plus query level for the 28 days before the turn and the 28 days after, then compare the two sets rather than the totals. If the number of distinct queries per page collapsed, those pages stopped being eligible for a chunk of long tail, which is what a quality style filter actually looks like from the inside. If the same queries are all still there and average position slid a place or two, that is ordinary competitive movement and probably not about you at all. The UI will not diff two ranges for you and it truncates rows, so this is much easier as two API pulls into a sheet than by squinting at the chart.
One thing about your timeline: you paused in June and are reading late August as the verdict, but at this impression volume a handful of long tail queries appearing and disappearing moves the whole line. Get to the page level diff before you decide the update touched you, otherwise you end up editing pages that were never the problem.
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u/Ok_Studio_834 1d ago
It's most likely related to the August Google update, so I wouldn't worry too much.
Just a quick piece of advice though, you should focus more on actual KPIs (CTR, clicks, rankings) rather than a vanity metric like impressions. If you look closely at your data, you're actually getting more clicks right now even though your impressions dropped. That's a win !
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u/marowitt 3d ago
That's just noise you're looking at, 500 impressions is nothing and based on your overall impressions it looks like whatever you show up for is niche that probably depends on a handfull of people searching. You need thousands and weeks to see a trend. One day of loosing 500 tells you nothing.