Recover lost citations
A diagnostic sequence for when engines stop citing you: establish what actually changed, then match the fix to the cause.
Citations disappear for a handful of reasons and they need different responses. Diagnose before you act, because the most common mistake is rewriting a page that was never the problem.
What you'll learn
- How to confirm a loss is real before you react
- The five causes, and how to tell them apart
- What to do about each
Step 1: Confirm it is a loss
Three things look like a loss and are not:
- An exclusion. A surface reporting excluded has no measurement this window. It is not a drop to zero. See when a number is missing.
- A thin window. A rate computed over very few checks moves violently. Check the footer for the window.
- An absent AI Overview. Google not drawing a panel is not a failure to cite you, and those checks are excluded from your rate already.
If none of those apply, it is a loss.
Step 2: Find out what changed
Ask, in this order:
- "Which prompts am I losing, and who is taking them?" Establishes whether the loss is broad or specific, and whether somebody took the space.
- "Show me the exact sentences AI wrote about us." Read the most recent sentences. Sometimes you are still named and the sentiment has turned, which is a different problem.
- "Which pages are the engines citing me on?" A source that stopped appearing usually explains a citation that stopped appearing.
Step 3: Match the cause
| What you found | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your own page stopped appearing in Sources | You changed, moved or removed it | Restore the URL, or redirect it properly. Check the ledger for a change marked Drifted |
| A rival's share rose as yours fell | They published something better | Read two answers naming them. Then answer the question better than the page they are winning with |
| Lost on one surface only | That surface changed how it retrieves | Check Access and extractability in Readiness. Give it a cycle before rewriting anything |
| Still named, sentiment turned | A source with a negative view is being used | Find the source and fix or refute it. Do not rewrite your own page |
| Lost everywhere at once | Usually access. Sometimes a site migration | Check robots.txt, check crawler allowances, check the new site renders without JavaScript |
Step 4: Look for a Drifted change
Open the ledger and look for Drifted. That state means a change was live and the page has since stopped satisfying it, which is exactly what happens after a redeploy or a CMS edit.
A drifted change is the fastest possible diagnosis of a sudden loss, and it is the first place to look.
Step 5: Fix one thing, through the ledger
Approve, ship, let it be observed, let it be confirmed. One change at a time, so the measurement means something. Fixing five things at once gives you a recovery you cannot attribute.
Step 6: Confirm recovery honestly
Recovery is not the first citation reappearing. It is:
- the affected prompts cited again on more than one surface
- across at least eight checks, so the sample can carry the conclusion
- with the change reading Observed live at minimum, and Confirmed moved where a control exists
Try this in Outercite
Open the ledger and filter to Drifted. If anything is there, that is your answer before you start investigating anything else.
Related
Changes
Drifted, and the rest of the ladder.
Why is my citation rate low?
For a rate that was never good rather than one that fell.
Sources
Finding the page that stopped feeding the answers.
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