Reply To: Traffic dead after this week’s update

Yeah, I’d be looking at the content mix before I’d start blaming some phantom plugin issue. That bounce-then-drop pattern is the part that usually makes me think “retest / reeval / quality pass” rather than a straight technical break. I’ve seen pages sit there, then twitch back for a day or two, then get shoved back down once whatever filter finishes chewing on them. Annoying as hell, but it’s not usually random. If both sites got hit at the same time, that’s the bigger clue to me. Same footprint, same kind of content, same treatment from Google. I’ve had that happen on a couple smaller sites where the common factor was way more obvious after the fact than it looked in the moment. I wouldn’t totally ignore crawl/indexing stuff, but if Search Console isn’t showing anything weird and nothing changed on the tech side, I’d be side-eyeing the AI + light edits setup pretty hard. That combo can look “okay” for a while and then just stop holding. Google’s been inconsistent, sure, but it’s not always random nonsense when…