Something dropped. Nothing was changed. The immediate assumption is a penalty, and the immediate action is to start changing things, which is how a small problem becomes a large one.
Work through it in this order instead. It is roughly ordered by how common each cause is, which means most people find their answer in the first two sections and never need the rest.
Step 0: confirm the drop is real
Half the drops I get asked about are not drops.
You are not seeing what everyone sees. Search results are personalised by location, history and device. Checking your own ranking while logged in, from your office, on the connection you always use, tells you almost nothing. Use a private window, and better, check Search Console rather than the results page.
Average position is an average. If you start appearing for a hundred new queries at position 40, your average position gets worse while your actual visibility improves. This is why average position is the least useful number in the report. Look at clicks, and look at them per page.
Some of it is seasonal. Trekking queries, festival queries, exam queries and admissions queries all move on a calendar. Compare to the same period last year, not to last month.
If clicks to a specific page have genuinely fallen and stayed down for more than a week or two, continue.
Step 1: did the results page change, rather than your position?
This is the cause people check last and it is now among the most common.
Search the query and look at what is above you. An AI Overview, a new set of images, a map pack, a video carousel, a block of People Also Ask — any of these pushes the first organic result further down the page. Your position number can be identical while your clicks halve, because position three used to be near the top and now sits below a screen of other things.
Search Console shows this clearly: impressions flat or rising, clicks falling, average position unchanged. That combination almost always means the page changed shape rather than your ranking changing. There is no fix in the ordinary sense — the useful response is to look at whether you can be the thing being featured, which is a different piece of work. I have written about how that plays out in Nepal in Google search versus AI search.
Step 2: check whether you broke something without noticing
"We changed nothing" is almost always sincere and frequently untrue. Things that count as changes and rarely get remembered:
- A plugin updated itself.
- A developer pushed a fix to something unrelated.
- A staging site went live, or the live site got a staging setting.
- A security plugin added rules to
robots.txt. - Hosting was migrated, or a CDN was switched on.
- SSL renewed, or failed to.
Three checks, in order:
Is it still indexable? Look at yourdomain/robots.txt for a Disallow: /. Then use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on the affected page and read what it says. A page that has become noindex will fall out entirely, and the most common cause is a launch that carried a development setting into production.
Does the page still return 200? And does a page that should not exist still return 404? Sites that answer 200 for everything create endless duplicate URLs, which dilutes everything — I hit this on my own domain.
Does the content still render without JavaScript? If a change made the main content dependent on a script, crawlers may now be seeing an empty page. Disable JavaScript in your browser and reload. If the page is blank, that is your answer and it is urgent.
Step 3: check whether the page got slower
Speed rarely causes a dramatic drop on its own, but a site that became much slower — a new hero video, an added chat widget, a hosting change — can lose ground gradually and it compounds with everything else. Worth ruling out, especially in Nepal where the spread in response times is enormous and the median visitor is on mobile data.
Step 4: look at who replaced you
This is the step almost nobody does, and it is often the whole answer.
Search the query and actually read the pages that now rank above you. Not the domains — the pages. Ask what they have that you do not: are they more recent, more specific, more complete, do they answer a sub-question you ignored?
Often you have not been demoted. Somebody published something better and the results reordered themselves correctly. That is not a penalty and it is not fixable by technical work. It is fixable by making your page the better answer again, which is more effort and more reliable.
It is also possible the intent of the query shifted — the results are now all comparison pages where they used to be service pages, meaning Google's read of what people want has changed. In that case your page is not worse, it is answering a question people stopped asking. That is a content decision, and the framing I use for it is in starting with intent rather than keywords.
Step 5: was there an update?
Google ships broad core updates several times a year and announces them. Check the date of your drop against the announced dates before assuming anything specific to you.
Two honest things about core updates. First, if your drop lines up with one and is spread across the whole site rather than concentrated on a few pages, that is likely the cause. Second, there is no fix to apply. Sites that recover do so by being genuinely better over the following months, not by making adjustments in the following week.
The worst thing to do during an update is start changing things at speed. You lose the ability to attribute anything, and if the drop was going to partially reverse — which happens — you will credit whatever you happened to do.
The one thing to do before any of this
Write down what the numbers were before. Date, page, clicks, position, and what you believe changed.
Almost every one of these investigations is slower than it needs to be because nobody recorded a baseline, so the argument becomes about whether the drop is even real. Ten minutes of writing things down converts a fortnight of speculation into an afternoon of checking — which is also the argument I made for measuring local SEO properly.
If you have a drop you cannot place, send me the page and the dates. The Search Console export usually settles it in one sitting.