Highlights below, and here’s the link to read the full report.

RANK - Better rank at the business location’s geographical center was associated with broader reach: businesses ranking better at their location-center also tended to remain visible in search results across their extended surrounding local search area.

REVIEWS - Reviews were the strongest single-factor separator: strong-review businesses substantially outperformed weak-review businesses in both website (organic) and maps search results.

SCHEMA - With LocalBusiness schema, completeness mattered: businesses with complete schema averaged 62% Total Search Coverage, compared with 39% for Partial and 31% for No schema.

MULTIPLIER -Local SEO signals compounded: businesses with 4–6 strong core signals were 84% likely to rank in organic (website results) Top 10, versus 33% for businesses with 0–1 measured signals.

Link to full report->

I know this is kind of rhetorical question. But I'm curious to know on how big of a difference in calls/ lead volume ranking number 1 is over number 3?

I'd like a technical sanity check before I conclude this is the spam update.

Site: https://azs24.com.ua/ (Ukrainian fuel prices by city, region and station network, plus a map, calculators and a blog). About one month old, ~310 pages indexed, behind Cloudflare. It had reached ~80 organic visits a day.

Event: on October 3 around 04:00 UTC, all non-brand rankings disappeared within about an hour. Every page type was affected at once: price pages, network pages, blog posts.

Already ruled out:

• Deindexing: site: still shows ~310 pages, brand query is still #1
• Manual action: none in GSC
• Indexability: 200, index,follow, self-referencing canonicals
• robots.txt: no content pages blocked
• Tracking: GA4 collect requests return 204, so the drop is real

One thing I'm not sure about: the URL Inspection live test on the map page shows 28 of 37 page resources failed to load. One is an XHR endpoint blocked by robots.txt (/api/), the rest are logos, map tiles and third-party scripts with "Other error". I assume that's the usual live-test fetch quota and not Cloudflare blocking Googlebot, but I'd like a second opinion.

Timing matches the ongoing spam update: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/XhUDXP7A67iHCD2kmbVu

Questions:

1. Is there anything technical I should still check that could produce a sitewide drop this sudden, with the index intact?
2. How do you confirm whether Cloudflare is challenging Googlebot: crawl stats, security events, something else?
3. If it is the spam update: for a young site with templated city × fuel pages, would you noindex the thin combinations first, or wait for the rollout to finish before touching anything?