Been noticing some odd stuff on a couple of my sites this week.

One affiliate site in the home niche is holding rankings pretty well, but CTR dropped hard on a few money pages. Same positions, same snippets, just less clicks. Another smaller site actually picked up a bit of traffic even though I didn’t touch the content at all.

I’m trying to figure out if this is just normal post-update noise or if Google is messing with SERP layout again. I’ve seen this before where rankings look stable in GSC, but the actual clicks tell a different story.

A couple quick things I’m testing right now:

– rewriting titles to be less “SEO-ish” and more direct
– adding more comparison-style intro copy for affiliate pages
– checking if AI-written sections are getting pushed down versus edited sections
– watching whether featured snippets are stealing clicks on some keywords

Also curious if anyone else is still getting decent results from AI-assisted content when it’s cleaned up properly. I’m not talking raw AI spam, just using it to speed up drafts and then tightening it up manually.

For me, the biggest wins lately have been boring stuff:
– better internal linking
– tighter intent match
– simple title tag tweaks
– stronger affiliate CTAs above the fold

Not trying to overcomplicate it. Just wondering if others are seeing the same CTR weirdness, and if you’ve found anything that actually moved the needle after the update.