So you spent a lot of time working on your website: creating backlinks, fixing technical issues, adding schema and improving and optimizing your content. You made your pages more search-friendly and spent a fair amount of time thinking about and acting on LLM and AI search visibility too. Then you open Google Search Console and see that the clicks have suddenly dropped! It is simply brutal.
But before we assume that all your work has been wasted, let's first find out which part of the search performance has actually changed. Let's try to solve this issue through the lense of an SEO analyst, starting with the below elements:
- Clicks and impressions both dropped: I check rankings, indexing and search demand. On a Dubai project I worked on, several important pages lost visibility after a website update. TThe problem was that they were not being indexed. We fixed the affected URLs and reviewed their internal links, and their visibility gradually returned.
Clicks dropped, but impressions stayed similar: I look at CTR. If Google is still showing the page but fewer people are clicking, I review the meta title, meta description and search intent. I also compare the result with competitors.
Average position dropped: I compare the affected keywords and landing pages with their previous positions. If several pages lost rankings, I investigate Google updates, competitor changes, content quality and recent website edits.
Only certain pages dropped: I inspect the URLs for noindex tags, incorrect canonicals, redirects, broken internal links, crawlability problems and server errors.
The entire website dropped: I look at recent deployments, redesigns, migrations, robots.txt changes, Search Console's Page Indexing and Crawl Stats reports, and Google's Search Status Dashboard.
I also check whether search demand itself has changed. If a Dubai service page has lost clicks, I compare its main queries with the same period last year and use Google Trends. If search interest has fallen across the market, the problem may not be the website. But it is important not to react to the drop in numbers alone. A drop in clicks is only part of a bigger problem. The real job is finding whether the problem is demand, visibility, rankings, CTR, indexing, technical changes or competitors and then fixing that specific issue.
For businesses in Dubai, I would definitely take this issue seriously because a small search visibility loss can quickly become fewer inquiries. I would find the exact cause first, rather than change ten things at once and have no idea what actually worked!