Did your site traffic drop? Here's how Google's recent changes work.

Your Analytics dashboard looks wrong. Traffic is down. Organic rankings you've held for months have shifted. Conversions are off. And Google hasn't announced anything. Or maybe they have, but the announcement was buried in a documentation update that nobody in your marketing team saw coming.

This is now a regular feature of running a website. Google's core updates happen multiple times a year, they affect different industries and content types differently, and the impact can be significant and fast.

Google's algorithm has one job: match search intent to the best available content. Every core update is an attempt to get better at that job. The challenge is that "best" is a moving target — it depends on what users actually want, what signals indicate quality, and how the content ecosystem has shifted since the last update.

The last several updates have had a consistent theme: helpful, original, experience-based content. Google has made it increasingly difficult to rank with content that is thin and generated at scale, without demonstrated expertise, or optimised for search engines rather than readers.

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has become more important, not less. If your content doesn't demonstrate that a real person with real knowledge wrote it, it's at a disadvantage. Keyword stuffing, unnatural link patterns, and content that exists to rank rather than to inform are consistently deprioritised.

The first step is diagnosis. Before you make any changes, understand what actually happened. Did traffic drop across your whole site, or specific pages? Did rankings move for certain keyword clusters? Did the drop coincide with a known Google update? Google's Search Status Dashboard and the industry tracking tools will tell you when updates rolled out — compare that to your traffic patterns.

If the drop is recent and corresponds to a core update, give it time before you react. Core updates roll out over two to three weeks and can look chaotic mid-rollout. Wait for the dust to settle before drawing conclusions.

If the impact is confirmed, audit your content quality. Google has published detailed guidance on what it considers "helpful content" — use it as an actual framework to evaluate your pages, not just as a checklist to skim.

Invest in original content. First-person experience, original research, proprietary data, real case studies — these are harder to replicate and consistently rewarded. If your content could have been written by anyone about anyone, it probably won't rank against content that couldn't.

The uncomfortable truth: if your site traffic dropped after a core update, the algorithm didn't make a mistake. It made a judgment call about the relative quality of your content against the available alternatives. That's the most useful frame for working out what to fix.

Google's goal and your goal are actually aligned: they want users to find content that genuinely helps them. The sites that win consistently are the ones that build for that outcome, not for the algorithm's current interpretation of it.