Your Search Console impressions dropped: it is a Google correction
If your impressions dropped in Search Console while your clicks held steady, the cause is probably a Google correction. A logging error inflated impressions from May 13, 2025 to April 27, 2026. The fix brings the curve back down without any change in how your site actually performed.
Google acknowledged the error on April 3, 2026, on its data anomalies page. The official wording is clear: a logging error prevented Search Console from reporting impressions correctly starting May 13, 2025. The period covers a little under eleven months and fifty weeks of data.
What is affected and what is not
The distinction is finer than what you usually read, and it decides what you can still compare.
- Clicks are not affected: they remain comparable across the whole period, before and after the correction.
- Impressions are affected: they were overstated during the fifty weeks in question.
- Click-through rate and average position are affected too: both are calculated from impressions, so both inherit the error. This is the point most write-ups leave out, and the one that invalidates the most reports.
In practice, a click-through rate that seems to improve overnight after the correction is not improving: the denominator has simply returned to its true value. An average position that moves at the same moment should be read the same way.
Two points nobody writes about
The first: Google never put a number on the size of the overstatement. No percentage was published, either overall or by type of site. Any figure put forward on how much is therefore a third party's extrapolation, not data.
The second: the announcement did not appear in a blog post. It was added to the data anomalies page in the help centre, a page few teams monitor. That is why many organizations saw the drop before they knew its cause.
Historical data has not been rebuilt. The window from May 13, 2025 to April 27, 2026 stays as it is in your reports, and it will stay that way.
What to write before this month's report goes out
One sentence is enough, and it is worth more than an explanation delivered after the fact. It names the cause, the period and what remains comparable.
What to communicate and what to keep as your benchmark
- The sentence to write: on April 27, 2026, Google corrected an error that had been inflating impressions since May 13, 2025; the drop seen in our impressions comes from that correction and not from a loss of visibility.
- The benchmark to keep: clicks and inquiries received, which were never affected and remain comparable from one year to the next.
- What to stop comparing: click-through rate and average position between the affected period and the corrected period.
- What to note in your reports: a marker at April 27, 2026, so that whoever reads the curve two years from now knows why it falls away.
A vendor who explains this drop by an algorithm update or by work that needs redoing has not read the anomalies page. One who shows you the clicks curve next to the impressions curve has understood what happened.
Rebuilding a dashboard that holds up through this kind of break is part of what we cover in a consultation.
The indicators that deserve monthly tracking, and those that do not, are detailed in our analysis of SEO indicators. The full reading of an account is covered in our analysis of what an SEO audit contains.
- Google, data anomalies in Search Console, entry dated April 3, 2026, accessed September 2026.
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