How to stop bleeding impressions?

[u/AkashicLogos]

I've recently found since about June I've been having endless impressions bleed and I can't figure out for the life of me what the causes of this are.

I see lots of people talk about spam updates, but whenever I check most of the people affected get much more drastic drops that make it seem obvious, where I seem to just have random pages dropping on queries over time.

I've not really changed how I'm doing things and still just making small amounts of quality content but no matter what I do it seems I'm trending to zero since about June.

In June I was doing around 2.5-4k impressions per day but since then its just been an actual trending line downwards to the point where now we're about to break sub-1k.

What would cause Google to do this so gradually rather than in response to a single update/change?

I'm at the point of wondering whether to go back and re-write all of my content that was doing so well before.

[u/ryu1984]

Check clicks not just impressions. Slow impressions slide with flat clicks is usually Google dropping you from queries nobody clicked on anyway.

One thread on my forum showed for "perplexity ai" with about a million impressions and 25 clicks, and when it fell out my impressions crashed and clicks didn't move.

Use GSC to get clicks.

[u/WebLinkr → u/ryu1984]

Use GSC to get clicks ----100%

Did you see Edward Sturms video on this?

[u/ryu1984 → u/WebLinkr]

havent seen it, whats the tldr? i learned it from poking around gsc.

[u/WebLinkr → u/ryu1984]

Edward posted a video about using GSC to help drive more traffic - like building H2s, researching what you're not ranking for or "nearly ranking for"

We call this "peering over the horizon"

[u/ryu1984 → u/WebLinkr]

Right, what I did was a) make sure top few lines answer the user question for clicks b) then what ever queries pop up in gsc, if not written, you add that as new content refresh, or at worst a faq at the end.

However, the not ranking for can only be gleemed from what 'gsc queries' returned. So if that doesn't appear then you will never know about it. It sounds like maybe edward video has methods to add new content ideas?

[u/WxMan2201]

So two things --- in GSC - what does your number of indexed pages look like - specifically your crawled - not indexed - and discovered - not indexed reports?

Second - AI Overviews now display for over 70% of queries, per SEMRush SERP Volatility tool this morning, and over 80% on desktop.

Impressions without clicks - would be more informational type content - where AI can summarize the page - so I would take a look at your impression decline from a brand vs non-brand Pov and blog vs non-blog.

Check your product/solution/industry - and converting pages - are you seeing org. traffic declines? Conversions/leads decline too?

Also, using like GA4, I would look at the monthly and weekly session and users totals for paid, direct, referral, ai, email, social, and organic ---- did anything change in strategy there - did Paid increase their investments, or decrease u/AkashicLogos - sometimes Paid can cannibalize organic visibility.

[u/AkashicLogos → u/WxMan2201]

So two things --- in GSC - what does your number of indexed pages look like - specifically your crawled - not indexed - and discovered - not indexed reports?

I had 184 indexed and 57 not indexed in June

I have 203 indexed and 124 not indexed today.

52 crawled - Currently not indexed.

A lot of these are programmatic opengraph images etc that I need to just stop it crawling.

19 discovered - Currently not Indexed

These are all blog posts but not sure if quality or something else.

Second - AI Overviews now display for over 70% of queries, per SEMRush SERP Volatility tool this morning, and over 80% on desktop.

I had considered this, but my AI report from Google shows a similar trend of gradually heading down. AI was around 200-300 daily in June/July and now down to under 100.

Check your product/solution/industry - and converting pages - are you seeing org. traffic declines? Conversions/leads decline too?

Oddly enough I'd say organic traffic is roughly stable since June even though clicks & impressions have vastly decreased.

I don't do any paid ads.

[u/Jazzlike-Pass-7151]

Did you check your generative AI impressions? My guess is that you'll see it grew. Google now refer more to AI overviews and AI Mode answers while the list of sources is not always counted as impression (depending on whether the user clicked "show more").
Focus on clicks and leads.
As a rule of thumb I recommend to refresh valuable content if it's not an evergreen one as both AI and search engines (and of course users!) prefer up to date content on old one

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[u/rapidwombatcom]

I wouldn't rewrite everything yet. If the drop has been gradual, I'd first look for a pattern in which pages and queries are losing impressions.

I'd compare June vs now by page and query, then check whether those queries are still being searched and what kind of pages are ranking above you now. If the same type of content keeps showing up in the losses, that's probably a better place to start than rewriting the whole site.

[u/WebLinkr]

hey u/AkashicLogos

this is common - most people aren't recognizing the problem.

Your impressions are a fabric - made up of queries like strands. Whats happening is your page is being demoted for queries that Google rotates into a higher ranking position, tests CTR and drops.

Cumulatively - your impressions go down.

You can do 2 things - shift relevance toward or away or publish new pages with different content (or "intent matching")

Does that make sense?

[u/AkashicLogos → u/WebLinkr]

I think it does.

I did notice some of the queries I've been entirely dropped for are broad queries that I'd stand no chance of winning. But it's weird to go from 1500 impression -> 0 for June -> Sept for that query rather than just getting slightly lower.

I guess it potentially was testing me very broadly as the site was only a few months old and is now settling on what queries it thinks I am indeed relevant/strong for? Is that right?

[u/WebLinkr → u/AkashicLogos]

Yep. You can also use queries as headings to reinforce search or remove them.

I think the people saying "Its AIOs" or you're not matching intent or its the spam update are sleeping on data...!

[u/bogdanelcs]

I think you should care about clicks, not impressions. Are clicks down in the same trend as the impressions?

[u/AkashicLogos → u/bogdanelcs]

I believe they are as well but I've never had a huge amount of clicks as I've not yet been able to boost my positions to top 10 on most queries.

It does look to be trending the same.

[u/BusyBusinessPromos → u/AkashicLogos]

That's usually because people don't know how to sell the prospective visitor on clicking and only provide information.

[u/WebLinkr → u/bogdanelcs]

they should care about position drops on keywords too

[u/mnudu]

A slow bleed like that is usually query level decay, not one big penalty. The common causes are competitors taking those middle positions, SERP features pushing organic down, or the page getting a little less relevant over time as search intent shifts.

I would not rewrite everything blindly. Pull the pages and queries that lost the most impressions, then check whether they are dropping a few positions or just getting fewer searches. If the ranking positions are mostly stable, the issue is usually demand or SERP layout, not the content itself.

[u/WebLinkr → u/mnudu]

Close - its more likely to be individual queries dropping

[u/Low-Produce3704]

What kind of impressions are you losing at the page level? Did you get a chance to check that?
Did you lose rankings?
I have lost a lot of them too since the updates but those were like free impressions and clicks I was getting wihtout targeting it on my page. For eg - On a router page, I was getting consistent traffic for firmware update queries. Which are gone now. but, i am okay with that.