Why did my Google traffic drop?

Start with the pages themselves. A page written three years ago carries three-year-old prices, dates, examples and advice. Google and the AI tools that sit on top of it prefer pages that have been kept current: in one study of 7,683 pages cited by AI tools, 72% had been updated within the year. Pages that nobody touches drift down, slowly, then all at once. If your best pages have not changed since they were written, this is the likeliest cause, and it is the one you can fix.

Then check whether Google moved. Google announces big changes to how it ranks pages several times a year, and says openly that a page can drop without anything on it having changed. A drop that lands on many of your pages in the same week, and on your competitors too, is usually one of these. There is nothing to fix on your site, and anyone who sells you a fix for it is selling weather.

Third, the click may have gone even if the ranking did not. By 2026 about two searches in three on Google in the US ended without a click on any website. Your page can hold its position and still send fewer people, because the answer now appears on the results page itself. The pages that survive this are the ones with something specific enough that the searcher still wants the whole thing.

How to tell them apart: open Google's own report on your site (it is free, under Search Console), sort your pages by how many clicks they have lost, and look at the dates. Losses concentrated on old pages point to the first cause. Losses everywhere in one week point to the second. Impressions steady while clicks fall points to the third. Provenplot's free check does the first part for you in about a minute, without an account.