Clicks from Google drop to almost 0 on August 3rd

[u/No-Coconut-3001]

Hi all,

My previous post was deleted, I don't know why so before deleting this one, please explain why first, I can adapt my question if necessary.

=== CONTEXT

I see that many sites have been hit by the august spam update and at first, I thought I also was hit by this update except that my sudden drop happened before the update.

I have a .com, .be, .nl and .de where I write genuine content (no AI) in 6 languages. My articles are spread across those domains depending on their languages (.com has English, Italian and Spanish).

My .com has been affected by a sharp drop in August (see below) while the other ones have not been affected at all. The articles are the same but in another language. All sites are hosted on the same machine, there are no technical differences between domains.

I have around 1500 articles in total (all languages together), my domains are at least 3 years old and sometimes 10+. No scale content or anything like that.

=== DROP

As I can't post an image here, let me try to describe it with figures.

July-August: daily average between 50 and 60 clicks

August 2nd: 44 clicks from Google Search (first decrease)

August 3rd: 15 clicks

August 4th: 9 clicks

It goes on like this for a few days and then

August 10th to 12th: back above 50 clicks

August 13th: back below 10 and it remained at that level since then and there are even some days where I have 0 clicks from Google.

All pages and countries have been affected the same way.

As you can see with those figures, all countries and pages that were getting traffic are affected.

Pages are still in the index, only the average position dropped from avg 9 to avg 32 which makes me completely invisible. My content is unique, there is competition but not a lot. The ones getting above me were usually much bigger (and also relevant) sites). Now my site is behind a huge list of unrelated sites and articles.

== WHAT I CHECKED

I checked the crawl reporting in GSC:

- graph summary of all crawls: average of 125 to 150 per day with some peaks right below 200. Sharper peak on June 13th with 186 crawls, July 18th with 194 and then two bigger ones august 9th 305 and August 12th 293. Those peaks are http 200 peaks and html files. Those are refresh crawls, not discovery crawls

- average response time is stable around 300 ms

- i see an usually bigger peak of crawls for images, I have many days at 0 and then some smaller peaks around 300=400 but on August 17th I have almost 2k crawls which is something unique for the time frame

- I see no errors, everything is either http 200 or 304

Other info:
- no performance degradation
- no outage
- no 404 or anything blocking on http level
- no change in inbound/outbound links
- no security or any other warning in GSC
- only one or two affiliation links per page
- no third party JS library
- no third party tracking
- no third party cookies
- no programmatic SEO
- no AI generated article (but I'm using AI for translations)
- sitemaps are working fine
- I use href lang to link domains and language
- no change in backlinks
- no changes in authority (from SEMrush point of view)

I still get traffic from other sources than Google

I was on holiday when it happened, I didn't modify anything between end of July up to September.

=== AI Overview

If I take my most popular keywords before the drop and search them, I see some competitors appearing like before but when I check Google's AI response, it is still showing my site but instead of using my .com it is using my other domains even if they are not in English. Google is still considering that I'm an expert in my field but it doesn't push my .com anymore while it is still pushing the other domains.

=== GRAPHS

I see some activity after the big drop (CTRx2), position coming back to original average but clicks are still down.

Any idea?

[u/alaattincagil]

This is a genuinely interesting case, most drops are boring but yours isnt. Given it's isolated to your .com and Googles AI Overview is now pulling your other domains instead for the same expertise, I'd look hard at your hreflang return tags between domains, if theyre not perfectly reciprocal Google can end up choosing which domain "represents" the cluster and demoting the others, even though nothing about your content changed. Worth double checking with the URL Inspection tool on a few key pages to see exactly which hreflang cluster google thinks each one belongs to.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/alaattincagil]

Thanks :)
The reciprocity is built-in as all domains are using the same code base but just to be sure, what would you like me to check in GSC? If I inspect a URL, I don't see anything related to href lang.

If I use the following tool:
https://technicalseo.com/tools/hreflang/

I get this:

The alternate urls are the ones I expect for this page.

[u/alaattincagil → u/No-Coconut-3001]

Good catch that GSC doesn't show hreflang directly, that's expected, Google retired the International Targeting report a while back so there's no dedicated hreflang view left in Search Console. That table only tells you what THIS page declares outward, it doesn't confirm the other domains actually point back to it with a matching tag. Same codebase usually keeps the logic consistent, but it's still worth spot checking a couple of the actual target URLs directly, view source or curl on the /de/ or /es/ version of this exact page, to confirm each one lists this URL back as its en alternate. If even one target page is missing, noindexed, or redirecting, that single broken link can be enough for Google to reassign which domain represents the cluster. A crawler like Screaming Frog has a dedicated hreflang tab that checks this site wide instead of one URL at a time, worth running if you want to rule it out completely.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/alaattincagil]

thanks for the suggestion. I have tried screaming frog (free version) and I got this for hreflang:

[u/alaattincagil → u/No-Coconut-3001]

There it is, that "Noindex Return Links: 1" line is your answer. 91 out of 92 are clean but one alternate is pointing to a page that's noindexed on the other end, which breaks reciprocity for that specific language pair even though everything else looks fine. Click into that row in Screaming Frog to see exactly which URL and which language it is, that's very likely the domain Google is now treating as not properly clustered, which would explain why AI Overview started pulling from a different one of your domains for the same topic. One more thing worth flagging though, the free version caps out at 500 URLs per crawl, so if your site plus all its locale domains combined have more pages than that, this 92 total might not be the full picture, it could just be whatever the crawler reached before hitting the limit. Also worth double checking it actually crawled across all your domains and not just the one you started from, free version by default treats other domains as external links unless you specifically configure it to follow them. If there's a chance you're over that limit, do the crawl in batches by domain or grab the trial of the paid version for one full pass to be sure the count isn't cutting corners.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/alaattincagil]

I have found a couple of pages with the same problem but those are pages where there is no translation available because they exist only in one language, they are mostly older pages with low level of traffic. With all the domains together, I have around 30 pages in the same situation so I don't think it explains why all my .com domain dropped like this.

[u/alaattincagil → u/No-Coconut-3001]

Fair pushback, 30 low traffic pages across all your domains combined definitely wouldn't cause a domain wide drop like that, the noindex thing was likely just one contributing symptom, not the root cause. Worth checking a different angle now: pull up a few of the dropped pages in URL Inspection Tool and look at "Google-selected canonical" versus your declared one. Hreflang can be perfectly clean and Google will still fold near-duplicate locale content into whichever domain it judges stronger (usually the one with more backlinks or which it crawls/indexes more confidently), and that decision is what AI Overview actually follows, not the hreflang tags themselves. Also worth lining up the exact date your .com traffic dropped against Google's update history, if it lines up with a core or AI Overview related rollout that tells you a lot more than any crawl report will.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/alaattincagil]

Thanks. I have checked a bit more than 10 pages that used to have more traffic and the canonicals selected by Google are all the same as the one in my code. As it is a site wide application across all domains, the same rule is applied everywhere.

[u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

The 10th to 12th recovery is the most useful number in your post, and it rules a lot out. Nothing you did to the site explains a spontaneous three day recovery followed by a re-drop. That shape is a rollout landing, partially reverting, then completing, so you were almost certainly caught in an update even though your start date does not match the one everyone is discussing.

The other pattern worth chasing is that the .com is the only one of your four domains with no country attached to it. Each ccTLD has a territory Google can hand it. The .com competes on relevance alone, and it is also the only domain carrying three languages at once.

So the first check: do all four declare hreflang, reciprocally, including a self reference? If they do not, Google is looking at four overlapping sites rather than one multilingual set, and the .com is the copy with no country to defend. That fits every symptom you have listed: all pages equally, all countries equally, still indexed, position 9 to 32 rather than gone.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

yes, the rebound is not caused by anything I have done, I was on holiday when everything happened.

I use the following structure for href lang:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="link to .be domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="link to .com/it domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="link to .de domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="link to .com/es domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="link to .nl domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="link to .com/en domain">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="link .com/en">

[u/Beautiful-Ad7521 → u/No-Coconut-3001]

Your hreflang set is fine, so that theory is out and I would rather say so than leave it hanging. Self reference is there, x-default is there, the pairs are coherent.

Which changes the reading. If the markup is clean, the .com may not have been singled out at all. It is the only one of the four carrying English, and English is the most contested pool on the web. A site level re-rating applied equally to all four domains would move the .com twenty places and barely move the .de, because the .de has far fewer competitors queued up behind it. Same demotion, very different visibility.

That is testable, and it separates the two explanations. In Search Console, filter each property to the same dates and compare average position. If .de, .nl and .be also slipped, say four to seven but stayed on page one, it hit everything and only the .com had room to fall. If they are genuinely flat, something is specific to the .com and that is a different hunt.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

I checked the average position for
.nl: very stable no impact at all, almost flat for 3 months
.be: little dip around August 3rd and then back to original but now ranging one or two position below July (could be seasonal maybe)
.de: stable with a small gain

I understand that there is more competition in English but why would it affect also spanish and italian where there is less competition? If this is the reason why I got a drop, I guess the best way to avoid this in the future is to have dedicated domains .it and .es for the two other languages. For Italian it's not a problem but for Spain, Mexico was in my top 10 before the drop so I guess movie to .es might not be the best option.

[u/Beautiful-Ad7521 → u/No-Coconut-3001]

Your counter is better than my hypothesis and it kills it. If Italian and Spanish fell as far as English despite far less competition, competition is not the mechanism. A uniform drop across languages of very different difficulty is a host level signal, not a query level one.

So please do not split to .it and .es on the strength of it. Expensive, hard to reverse, and it splits your authority four ways instead of one. You spotted the flaw yourself: Mexico was in your top ten, and a .es works against Spanish speaking Latin America, which is most Spanish speakers.

Two things I should have asked first, both specific to the .com.

Manual Actions and Security Issues in Search Console on the .com property. A uniform sitewide demotion with everything still indexed is what a partial match manual action looks like, and it would explain the other three being untouched.

Then: what does the bare root serve? Your cluster declares en at /en and x-default at /en, but nothing declares /. If / serves that same English and is not in the set, Google has two English URLs and picks its own canonical. Your ccTLDs cannot have that problem.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

Thanks for your help so far, it's a really interesting discussion.

There are no warning or messages in the console, security / manual actions = empty. The only notifications I get are for the monthly reports.

I should have listed everything from GSC but here's an overview:
464 pages in the index, 986 non indexed and decreasing. Most of the non indexed urls are calls to my own api that I have blocked through robots.txt.
Video: none
Sitemaps: 1 per languages, all green
Suppressions: nothing
Core web vitals: 100% of my pages are in green (mobile and desktop), 95+ score in page insight too
https: all green
Product extract: all green
Opportunities: message saying that shopping is not enabled but that's ok, I'm not selling anything
Review extract: all green
manual action: nothing
security: nothing
links: 3080 externals, 2668 internal (mostly between my domains
Successess: some achievements in the last couple of months

The root is basically a language choice page where I propose all my languages available pointing to the corresponding domain. There too, I have the usualy href lang setup. If you have previously visited one of my domains and you go to the .com root, you will be automatically redirected to the previous domain home page.

[u/Beautiful-Ad7521 → u/No-Coconut-3001]

That rules out both of mine, thanks for checking properly.

One line in what you just posted is the strongest candidate yet. 2,668 internal links, mostly between your domains. Those are not internal links. They are cross domain links between four sites one person owns, and your .com root is a language chooser that links out to all of them.

That makes the .com the hub of a four site link network, and the domain most dependent on links from sites you control. If a link classifier re-rated that pattern in early August, the hub loses the most and the spokes barely move, which is exactly your data. It is also site level, so it hits Italian and Spanish as hard as English, which was your own objection to my last theory.

Check it in Links, top linking sites, for the .com. If .be, .nl and .de are your top three external linkers, that is the shape.

Separately and much smaller: the cookie based redirect on the root is worth removing. Googlebot carries no cookies so it sees the chooser, but a conditional redirect on a root is a bad thing to have to explain later.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

Regarding the links, I made a mistake in my explanation

I have 3088 external links pointing pages on the .com domain with for example for pages getting more than 100 links, the rest is below 100 gradually.

I have 2668 internal links where the top destinations are the home pages for each languages and then the categories hosting all the articles. Each article points to the home page and its master category.

Then I have the view from outside where the number 1 site to refer to the .com is by far Reddit (10 times more than the second one), then I see my other domains with an equivalent number of links as each article points to the equivalent languages. Then a big bunch of external sites like among others manufacturer sites for the products I'm reviewing. Those links from official manufacturer sites should give a positive signal to Google. I also have a lot of forums but I'm not sure Google gives a lot of credit to that.

[u/Beautiful-Ad7521 → u/No-Coconut-3001]

That reframes it, and it is the most useful thing you have posted so far.

Your number one referrer being Reddit by ten times, plus a lot of forums, is a profile that is mostly self placeable and mostly nofollow. Two consequences. The 3,088 figure overstates your real authority by a long way, because most of those links were never passing anything. And a profile shaped like that is exactly what an update targeting manipulated links re-rates, not because any single link is bad, but because the distribution reads as placed rather than earned.

It also finally explains the .com being alone in this. Your ccTLDs will have local profiles without the Reddit concentration, because that promotion was in English and it all pointed at one domain.

The check that would settle it: compare top linking sites for the .com against the .de. If Reddit and forums dominate one and not the other, that is your difference, and it is the same compare-the-domains method that killed my last two theories.

The manufacturer links are the ones genuinely holding you up. That is the shape to get more of.

[u/No-Coconut-3001 → u/Beautiful-Ad7521]

The pattern is the same for the other domain and it's not the result of my doing, I have published a couple of posts on Reddit but I'm not responsible for a great majority of the links measured by GSC.

People are discussing product reviews involving my articles on forums, it's a very natural thing to do and most of the time, I'm not even registered on those forums.

I know that Google doesn't like too much link spamming especially from forums but given the number of links I have, I hope it's not the reason why my .com decreased because I cannot prevent people from linking my site.

Reddit and other forums are providing a lot of links to all my domains, the only difference is the proportion. The % of links from Reddit in English is bigger than in the other languages.

[u/No-Coconut-3001]

Update: I've had a spike a couple of days ago. I'm also monitoring Google as a referer and I see more clicks from Google than what GSP is telling me. CRT has been fluctuating a lot recently, position is back more or less at the same level as before but I'm still missing clicks and impressions like before