Why did my Google rankings drop?

Work through it in this order: confirm the page is still indexed, confirm the drop is real rather than a measurement artefact, check whether it happened to one page or the whole site, and check the date against Google’s list of core updates. If all four come back clean, the honest answer is that you cannot tell — and that is the usual outcome, not a failure to look properly.

First check	How to confirm	Can you fix it
The page left the index	Search Console, or an index check on the URL	Usually yes
The drop is not real	Re-measure for one fixed query, country and device	Nothing to fix
The whole site moved	Compare several unrelated keywords	Rarely, and not quickly
A core update landed	Match the date against Google’s update log	No, not directly
Something above you appeared	Look at the live result page	No
The page itself changed	Check your own deploy history	Yes

Start with indexing, not ranking

A page that has been dropped from the index ranks nowhere, and every rank tool will report that as “not found” — which looks exactly like falling off the bottom. It is the cheapest thing on this list to check and it has a definite answer, so check it first.

If the page is gone from the index, the ranking question is premature: fix the indexing problem and the position question answers itself. Why is my page not indexed covers the common causes, and Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ covers the one that is most often an accident — a staging flag shipped to production will remove a page within days.

Then confirm the drop is real

Positions move by a place or two constantly, and a number measured two different ways is not a comparison. Before treating a drop as an event:

• Re-measure the same query, country and device you measured before. If the first number came from your own browser and the second from a tracker, you have compared two different things.
• Check the size. A move from #4 to #7 is inside normal variance for most queries. A move from #4 to #40 is an event.
• Check how long it has held. A single day is noise; a week is a signal.

How to check your Google ranking covers what each measurement method actually reports, including why Search Console’s average position can fall while your position for a specific query has not moved at all.

One page, or all of them?

This is the question that decides what kind of problem you have.

Pick five or six keywords that have nothing to do with each other and check them all. If only the one page moved, look at the page: what changed on it, what changed in the links pointing at it, whether it now competes with something else you published. If everything moved together, the page is not the problem and editing it will not help.

Site-wide drops usually mean one of three things: a core update, a technical change that affected every page at once, or a manual action. The first two are far more common than the third. Search Console will tell you plainly if there is a manual action — under Security & Manual Actions — and the absence of one is worth confirming before spending a week on a theory.

Core updates move whole result sets

Google ships broad core updates several times a year and announces each one. They re-weight how results are assessed across entire categories, so a site can lose positions without having changed.

Check your drop date against the announced start and end of the nearest update. If it lines up, two things are true and both are unwelcome:

• There is no specific fix. Google’s own guidance on core updates says there is nothing wrong with pages that drop, and offers no list of things to change.
• Recovery, when it happens, usually comes with a later update rather than in the weeks after.

This is the part most articles on this query will not tell you, because “wait and keep publishing” is not satisfying advice. It is still the accurate one.

Your position can hold while your traffic falls

A rank is a position among organic results. It says nothing about what sits above them.

If an AI overview, a local pack, a video carousel or a fresh block of ads appeared over your result, you can hold #3 and lose half the clicks, and no ranking report will show a cause. Look at the live result page for the query before concluding that the ranking moved — often it did not.

Search Console is the cross-check here: compare clicks and impressions against position for the affected query. Impressions steady, position steady, clicks down is the signature of something new above you.

What changed on your side

Leave this until after the checks above, because it is the one people start with and it is rarely the answer. Still, it is the only category you control:

• A redirect, a canonical tag or a robots.txt rule shipped with a deploy. See Page with redirect in Search Console for how these surface.
• A page rewrite that dropped the sections which matched the query.
• Two of your own pages now targeting the same keyword.
• Links removed, or a linking page that fell out of the index itself.

Your deploy history is the fastest way through this. Match the date of the drop against what you shipped that week; if nothing shipped, the cause is not here.

When the answer is “you cannot tell”

Ranking factors are not published, results are personalised, updates are continuous, and competitors change without telling you. A drop with no indexable cause, no site-wide pattern and no update behind it is common, and the available responses are unglamorous: keep the page accurate, keep measuring the same way, and give it weeks rather than days.

What is worth avoiding is the reflex to change the page repeatedly in response to a number you have not yet confirmed is real. That removes your ability to tell which change did anything.