Why Discover changed

Discover goes up and down every week, so a lower number on its own doesn't tell you much. Why Discover changed first checks whether a change is real, then works out where it happened, using only your own Search Console figures.

Open it from the sidebar under your site, or from the Overview when your traffic moves outside its normal range.

Is it a real change?

1. Your last 2 weeksThe two newest complete weeks (Monday to Sunday, Pacific Time, like Search Console).
2. Your usual weekThe middle value of the 8 weeks before. A middle value isn't pulled up by one lucky week the way an average is.
3. Your normal rangeFrom the lowest to the highest of those 8 weeks. It's the shaded band on the chart.
4. The verdictIf the last 2 weeks average more than 20% below your usual week and below the whole range, it's a drop. More than 20% above and above the range, it's a rise. Anything else is the normal up and down of Discover.

Sites with a usual week under 50 Discover clicks aren't judged: at that size, ordinary swings are too big to call a change. The page needs 10 complete weeks of figures.

Where it happened

• Are the figures complete? We only use Google's final figures, so unfinished days can't cause a false drop. Days with no Discover impressions at all, when your site normally has many, are flagged as a possible reporting gap.
• Shown less, or clicked less? Fewer impressions means Discover showed your pages less often. A lower click rate with steady impressions points at headlines and images.
• New articles, or older ones? The difference is split three ways: articles new to Discover (first listed that week or the week before), older articles, and smaller pages Google doesn't list one by one. The three add up to the whole difference. For news sites the answer is often "fewer new articles took off".
• Which older articles? Each one's last 2 weeks against its average 2 weeks before, with its share of the total.
• Which countries? The same comparison by country, once we have 10 weeks of country figures (collected with each daily update).
• What was Google doing? Ranking updates and reported problems from Google's Search Status Dashboard that overlap the dates.

What to check next

The page ends with a short list of checks, most useful first, each with the reason it's suggested. They are suggestions from the evidence, not proof of the cause. A Google update that overlaps your drop fits the timing; it doesn't prove the update did it.