Traffic Drop Checker: Google Update or Technical SEO Break?

Your Google impressions fell off a cliff overnight. Was it the core/spam update, a broken site, or a hack? This Actor answers in about a minute and gives you one verdict, the evidence, and the fixes in priority order.

It combines three things no single tool does together:

1. Drop dating from your Google Search Console "Dates" export: finds the break day and the shape (overnight cliff, step, slow slide, clicks-only CTR loss, or spike-then-normal).
2. Official Google updates and incidents: reads Google's own Search Status Dashboard feed live and tells you if the drop falls inside a core update, spam update, or a crawling/indexing/serving incident.
3. Live technical and security checks: robots.txt errors and Disallow: /, noindex (meta and X-Robots-Tag), canonicals pointing to staging or another domain, off-site redirects, 4xx/5xx, DNS, sitemap health, spam URLs in the sitemap, Japanese keyword hack, hidden off-site links, and a Googlebot user-agent comparison that catches cloaking only Google sees.

Verdicts

Verdict	What it means
TECHNICAL_BREAK	The site blocks or fails Google right now. Fix first (exact fix included).
HACKED_OR_SPAM_INJECTION	Spam pages, injected links or Googlebot-only content. Clean the site.
GOOGLE_RANKING_UPDATE	Site is clean and the drop sits inside a confirmed core or spam update.
GOOGLE_SIDE_INCIDENT	Drop overlaps an official Google crawling/indexing/serving incident.
SERP_CTR_CHANGE	Impressions held, clicks fell: AI Overviews, SERP features, title rewrites.
SPIKE_NORMALIZED	"Drop" is traffic returning to normal after a short spike.
PAST_OUTAGE_OR_MANUAL_ACTION	Overnight cliff, no update, site clean today: check Crawl stats and Manual actions.
GRADUAL_DECAY / UNEXPLAINED_STEP	Not a break: content decay, competition, or your own site changes.

Input

• Sites: one or more sites you own or manage (agencies: paste all clients for a weekly sweep).
• Search Console Dates export (optional, recommended): Performance > 3-16 months > Export > open Dates.csv and paste its contents.
• Key URLs (optional): pages that lost the most.
• Sitemap sample size (default 10), Googlebot comparison on/off, delay.

Output

• Dataset: one row per site with verdict, confidence, summary, nextSteps, dropDate, dropPct, dropShape, matchedUpdates, criticalFindings, topFixes, plus every finding and page checked.
• REPORT record in the key-value store: a client-ready Markdown report.

Pricing

$0.03 per site checked (pay per event). Mistyped or unreachable sites and empty input are not charged. A typical check makes 10-15 polite requests.

Polite and safe

Identifies itself as CygnixTrafficDropCheck, obeys robots.txt for its own crawling, waits between requests (default 1 s), samples at most 50 URLs. The Googlebot user-agent comparison is a single homepage request; turn it off for sites you do not manage. No logins, no paid APIs, no Google account access needed.

FAQ

Does it need access to my Search Console? No. Paste the Dates export if you want the drop dated; without it the live checks still run.

Was it the spam update? Should I disavow? If the verdict is GOOGLE_RANKING_UPDATE for a spam update, the report explains that spam updates target practices on your own site (scaled content, link schemes, site reputation abuse), not spam links pointing at you.

The site looks fine now but traffic died overnight. You get PAST_OUTAGE_OR_MANUAL_ACTION with the exact Search Console screens to check (Crawl stats > Host status, Manual actions, Security issues). Live checks cannot see a problem that was fixed before the run.

Why do Semrush/Ahrefs show a different drop? They estimate traffic. Use Search Console numbers.

Also available as an AI agent skill on Agensi (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex). Questions or custom audits: info@cygnixlabs.com

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-10-30): first release.