u/shhhhshank

It’s not about supporting a political party. It’s about accountability. It’s about acknowledging mistakes and taking action to correct them. The power of the youth cannot be ignored or taken for granted. You can never silence or eliminate them.

I onboarded a service-based brand for SEO around the end of December 2025.

The unfortunate part? Their organic performance started dropping almost immediately from January onwards. Naturally, it looked like the decline happened right after we took over, even though we had not made any major website, content, or technical changes at that point.

From what I could see, the timing closely matched Google’s December core update. Several important service pages started losing clicks, while Google appeared to favour more informational or blog-style results for some of the broader queries.

Then, just when we were trying to properly understand and stabilise the decline, the website was migrated in the first week of May.

So now the timeline looks something like this:

December core update → traffic starts declining in January → more volatility over the next few months → website migration in May → further instability.

Pretty much perfect timing. 😭

The confusing part is that impressions have increased in several cases, and average positions even look better, but clicks and CTR have dropped significantly. Service pages were affected much more than blog pages, although blogs also lost traffic overall.

I am not saying the core update or migration is definitely responsible for everything. There could be multiple factors involved, including search-intent changes, SERP features, URL consolidation, canonicals, redirects, internal linking, or Google simply reassessing the site against stronger competitors.

But from a client-management perspective, this is honestly hard luck. The decline started exactly when the brand came onboard, despite no major SEO changes being made by us, and then a migration was added into the mix before the site had a chance to recover.

Has anyone else taken over a project right before a major update or migration and then had to explain that the timing was mostly coincidental?