Massive ranking & impressions drop since August 16-18. Anyone else experiencing this?
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to understand whether we're dealing with a Google algorithm update or if there's something specific affecting our website.
For the past 6 months, our website has been growing consistently. We reached:
- 300-350+ organic clicks per day
- 18,000-19,000 daily impressions
- More than 150,000 indexed pages
Then, starting around August 16, everything changed almost overnight.
5.500 Impressions and 108 Clicks
Between August 16-18, we experienced:
- A sudden drop in impressions.
- Organic clicks falling dramatically.
- Many pages that had ranked on the first page for months disappearing from the search results for their primary keywords.
- Rankings dropping across multiple unrelated sections of the website, not just one category.
The strange part is that the site appears to be technically healthy:
- Pages are still indexed (
site:search returns them normally). - No Manual Actions.
- No Security Issues.
- Core Web Vitals: Passed.
- Crawl Stats look healthy.
- No server migration.
- No robots.txt or noindex changes.
- No major structural or technical changes before the drop.
I also noticed that Google officially started rolling out the August 2026 Spam Update on August 18, so I'm wondering if this timing is just a coincidence or if others are seeing similar behavior. Google says the rollout may take several days to complete.
Has anyone else experienced a similar drop around August 16-18?
I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has seen the same pattern or has ideas on what else I should investigate.