Been watching a couple of my affiliate sites over the last 10 days and traffic has been all over the place.

One site in the home improvement niche dropped about 18% in clicks, but impressions barely moved. Another smaller review site actually picked up a bit, mostly on long-tail stuff. What’s weird is the CTR changes don’t really match the rankings. Same positions, but different click behavior.

I’ve been testing a few things:
– rewriting meta titles to be more direct
– adding price/benefit angles for affiliate pages
– using AI to generate title variations, then picking the least “salesy” one
– changing a few pages from broad review-style intros to quicker answer-first intros

So far, the biggest win has been on pages where I made the title more specific. Example: instead of “Best X for Y,” I went with something like “Best X for Y in 2026: 5 Options That Actually Hold Up.” Nothing crazy, but CTR improved a bit.

Also noticed Google seems to be favoring pages that answer the query fast. The fluffy intros are getting crushed more than usual.

Curious if anyone else is seeing the same thing. Are you guys adjusting titles/meta right now, or just riding it out?