Been messing around with a few affiliate sites this week and noticed something odd.

One of my review pages jumped from page 2 to low page 1, but the CTR is all over the place. Impressions are up, clicks are not really matching. Another site in a different niche got the opposite treatment — same rankings, but traffic dipped hard.

I’m not trying to overthink it, but it feels like Google is testing different SERP layouts again or just shifting intent a bit. I’ve seen this before where the ranking change looks small, but the real traffic impact is way bigger than expected.

What I’m doing right now:
– checking GSC query by query instead of just page-level data
– comparing branded vs non-branded clicks
– testing title rewrites on a couple pages
– watching affiliate link clicks, not just organic traffic

Also been using AI to speed up title/meta testing, but I’m still rewriting them manually because the raw AI stuff usually sounds too generic.

Curious if anyone else is seeing the same thing:
– rankings stable but CTR drops?
– affiliate pages losing clicks even when positions hold?
– any title/meta tweaks that actually helped after the update?

Would be good to compare notes because right now it feels like one of those “small change, big traffic swing” situations.