Checklist to review your website after Google changes

When Google shifts its ranking systems, the usual reaction is to look for a checklist that will bring back lost traffic. There is no magic formula, but there is a verification protocol that separates the noise from the real problems. This is the list I use when a client reports a drop that coincides with an update.

Before touching anything: confirm there is a problem

• Compare equivalent periods in Search Console (same number of days, same seasonality). A 15% drop in August versus July may be holidays, not an algorithm.
• Segment by page type: home, categories, informational articles, and product pages rarely drop at the same time. If only the blog drops, the focus is content; if everything drops, check technical and indexing.
• Rule out your own changes: migrations, new redirects, template deployments, or blocks in robots.txt explain more drops than are acknowledged.

A common mistake: attributing to the algorithm a loss caused by a bad canonical set across a batch of 200 URLs. I have seen this in projects where the development team changed the tag manager and broke the rendering of internal links without notifying SEO.

Technical crawling and indexing checklist

• Coverage: review the indexed pages report and look for spikes in “crawled, currently not indexed.” It is the most reliable signal that Google is discarding URLs for quality or duplication.
• Crawl budget: cross-reference server logs with Googlebot visits. If crawling is concentrated on parameters or filter pages, the architecture is spending resources where it adds no value.
• Core Web Vitals: check the page experience report by URL group, not the overall figure. A high INP only on mobile on product pages usually comes from third-party scripts.
• Structured data: validate that the types generating rich results are still valid. Google has been retiring and adjusting the eligibility of certain rich results, so correct markup may stop showing the expected visual format.

Content and quality checklist

• Pages orphaned from intent: identify articles that answer a query but do not cover what the user expects to resolve. Typical signal: high impressions, low CTR, and short dwell time.
• Duplicate or cannibalized content: two URLs competing for the same keyword often alternate in positions. Consolidate or differentiate the intent.
• Review of authorship and sources: in sensitive topics (health, finance, legal), the absence of an identifiable author and verifiable references weighs heavily. It is not a switch, but it is a quality factor evaluated by reviewers.
• Content generated at scale without review: if you published hundreds of pages with AI without human editing, expect the low-value ones to drop. Those that contribute original data or real experience tend to hold up.

Links and external signals checklist

• Review new and lost inbound links with backlink analysis tools; a spike in toxic links is not usually the cause of a drop, but it helps to rule it out.
• Check brand mentions without links: if they have decreased, the problem may be demand, not the algorithm.
• Assess whether you depend on a single topical cluster. Diversifying traffic sources reduces the impact of any update.

What this checklist does not solve

There is no official confirmation of which specific factor caused a drop on a given website. Google does not detail the weight of each signal, and industry studies correlate, they do not prove causality. Nor is there any guarantee of recovery: there are projects that bounce back within weeks and others that never regain their previous position because the SERP composition has changed (more forum results, videos, or generative AI).

Moreover, applying all the checks at once makes it impossible to know which measure worked. I recommend prioritizing according to the affected segment and documenting each change with a date, so the effect can be attributed afterward.

Recommended order of execution

1. Confirm the drop with segmented data.
2. Rule out recent changes of your own.
3. Review indexing and crawling.
4. Audit the URLs with the greatest loss of clicks, one by one.
5. Fix quality and cannibalization before planning new content.
6. Measure at 4 and 8 weeks, without simultaneous changes.

If after this walkthrough there is no technical or content explanation, the most honest hypothesis is that the results environment has changed and it is time to diversify: owned channels, email, and direct acquisition. The algorithm is not the only asset you can work on.