New: see why your Discover traffic changed

The question I get asked most is a simple one: "My Discover traffic dropped. Why?" From today, every site in DiscoverGap has a page that answers it, step by step, from your own figures.

Why Discover changed

Discover moves a lot from week to week, so the first job is to tell a real change from the normal noise. We compare your last 2 complete weeks with the 8 weeks before. Your usual week is the middle of those 8, and your normal range runs from the lowest to the highest. If the last 2 weeks sit inside that range, the page says so and leaves it there.

When they don't, it works through the same checks I'd do by hand:

• Are the figures complete? Only Google's final data is used, and days with no Discover figures at all are flagged as a possible reporting gap.
• Shown less, or clicked less? Fewer impressions and a lower click rate point to very different fixes.
• New articles or older ones? For news sites this is usually the answer. Most Discover traffic comes from stories in their first week, so a drop often means fewer new articles took off, not that old ones broke.
• Which older articles, and which countries? With the share of the change each one accounts for.
• What Google was doing. Any ranking update or reported problem on Google's Search Status Dashboard that overlaps the dates.

It ends with a short list of things to check, most useful first. They are suggestions from the evidence, and the page says so. Matching dates fit a cause, they don't prove it.

Articles to revisit

The second page looks for articles that earned Discover traffic for weeks and have since faded. A news story that did well for three days and then stopped isn't on it: that's the normal life of a news story. What's left are the pieces that already worked for your readers and might work again with an update.

Press the check button and we open the top five like a browser would, looking for an old update date, an old year in the headline, a missing large-image setting or a small main image. If nothing is wrong, it tells you that too, and suggests leaving the article alone.

Both pages are in the sidebar under each site, and the Overview points you to them when they matter.