Search Console SEO Analyst

Summary

Organic clicks on sc-domain:example-hotel.com fell 38% year over year in July-September. The decline is almost entirely

non-brand (-42%), while brand demand is flat (-17% on a small base, one-off spikes excluded). The break is dated mid-June and coincides with a Google core update; the pages that lost are English informational articles ranking for queries the site does not actually answer.

Data: gsc_query on sc-domain:example-hotel.com, range 2025-04-01..2026-09-30, dimensions=date, data_state=final, 2 calls (total and brand filter), last 3 days dropped. booking.example-hotel.com is a separate property and was not included.

Monthly table (6 full months)

Brand is the sum of queries matching (?i)example hotel|hotel example|examplehotel. Non-brand is total minus brand, so anonymised queries are counted. YoY is shown only where the previous year is inside the 16-month retention window (first available day: 2025-06-13), which is why April-June 2026 have no comparison. Two spikes on 18 and 19 January 2026 (press coverage) were excluded from the baseline and are reported separately.

Why it dropped

Timing: the daily series breaks between 12 and 16 June 2026, not gradually. That matches a core update, not seasonality (the previous year shows a summer plateau, not a cliff).
2.

Where: 71% of the lost non-brand clicks sit on 14 English blog articles (/en/blog/...). Their average position moved from 6.2 to 15.4; impressions fell less than clicks, so the pages are still indexed and still shown, just lower.
3.

What kind of queries: the queries that left are generic travel-information searches ("things to do in <region>", "best time to visit"). The site answers them with short promotional pages. This is an intent mismatch, and Google re-ranked accordingly.
4.

What is not the cause: no pages removed (gsc_indexing_issues: 0 new errors), no redirect consolidation, no sub-domain anomaly, brand demand stable (Sep 2026 brand 220 vs 223 the year before).

Recoverable or not

• Brand: nothing to recover, it never dropped.
• Non-brand informational: partly recoverable by rewriting the 14 articles to actually answer the query (length, structure, local detail) or by consolidating them into 4-5 stronger guides. Expected upside: back to 60-70% of the previous level, not 100%, because AI Overviews now take part of those clicks (CTR at position 5-8 is 40% lower than a year ago on the same queries).
• Non-brand commercial ("hotel <town>", "spa hotel <region>"): stable, protect it.

Next steps

1. Rewrite or merge the 14 articles (list attached in the working file).
2. Re-check in gsc_compare_periods after the next core update.
3. Monthly tracking with the same table, same brand terms, same exclusions, so the numbers stay comparable.

(Demo property and figures are illustrative.)