Large Drop in GBP Search Impressions Last Week. Anyone Seeing Something Similar?

[willy_evans]

Last week (Jun 29-Jul 5) our company saw a large and very uniform decrease in search impressions for our GBPs when compared to the previous period. There was a similarly sized drop YoY but not as uniform. We're a national retail business with a lot of seasonal variance, so WoW fluctuations aren't unusual. It's just odd to see them this big and this consistent.

I checked with the stores team and the only change we made that week was a bulk upload of our holiday hours for the 4th. We also didn't make any changes to our store/location pages.

The most likely explanation is drops caused by the 4th of July, but we didn't see any similar drops in website traffic or revenue.

Has anyone else seen any similar drops in GBP search impressions? Has anyone noticed a changes in the local pack or anything?

 

[Henry LocalClarity]

In past data issues, Google provided zeroes for the impacted metrics for a few dys. So far, this situation is looking different. We're receiving non-zero data for every location for every day, but only at about 20% of the Mobile Search and Desktop Search values we saw before June 24th.

 

[keyserholiday]

In past data issues, Google provided zeroes for the impacted metrics for a few dys. So far, this situation is looking different. We're receiving non-zero data for every location for every day, but only at about 20% of the Mobile Search and Desktop Search values we saw before June 24th.

It’s hard to say as Google hasn’t provided the PEs with an answer.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Are you guys seeing this as fixed now?

 

[willy_evans]

Are you guys seeing this as fixed now?

It hasn't been fixed for us, but our data is a week or so behind

 

[klharris08]

Our data is beginning to come back, but not back-filled.

 

[Robinso123]

Has anyone heard any update on this? Very annoying.

 

[Caszieme]

I'm seeing something similar across several profiles. It looks like impressions dropped sharply but interactions like calls and direction requests stayed steady, so I’m guessing it might be a reporting glitch.

 

[Caszieme]

We had almost the exact same thing happen—huge drop in GBP impressions that week, but everything else like revenue and clicks stayed pretty normal. It’s strange when it’s that consistent across the board. We're big on local SEO, so we track stuff closely, and nothing else changed on our end either except some holiday hours.

 

[Maddie Peart]

We've seen a significant drop in impressions on all of our GBPs starting 9/7/25, and we haven't made any changes to the profiles. Is anyone else experiencing this?

 

[klharris08]

We're not seeing anything weird, no drops.

 

[willy_evans]

Are you guys seeing this as fixed now?

This issue was fixed for a while, but we just saw the same thing happen last week. Huge drop in search impressions for GBPs without ranking or traffic drops. Looking at our Big Query data, it looks like the exact same bug that happened before.

This started again on October 4th

 

[willy_evans]

It also looks like Google never backfilled the data from the last time this happened

 

[klharris08]

Yup - I agree. Google never backfilled the data (at least I don't see it). This is also happening to us as well beginning on Oct 6th 2025.

 

[willy_evans]

Yup - I agree. Google never backfilled the data (at least I don't see it). This is also happening to us as well beginning on Oct 6th 2025.

Glad it's not just us! "Goodbye data" is killing me

 

[willy_evans]

Has anyone else been having issues with this? The GBP API is also returning "null" for most of our interaction metrics.

Is this something I should put in a support ticket for?

 

[fisicx]

Glad it's not just us! "Goodbye data" is killing me

But if you are still getting the same number of leads from your profile does it really matter if the data is missing?

It is after all a free service Google provides, they do tell you in the terms that they promise nothing.

 

[keyserholiday]

But if you are still getting the same number of leads from your profile does it really matter if the data is missing?

It is after all a free service Google provides, they do tell you in the terms that they promise nothing.

There could be several reasons that people are concerned.
1. They are trying to make sure they or their clients aren’t losing rankings or performing poorly.
2. It’s part of the reporting that they provide their clients.
3. It’s part of their KPIs
4. Higher ups are monitoring all data points and are concerned.

After all data and performance is our job.

 

[fisicx]

After all data and performance is our job.

I agree. But you are relying on a free service that doesn't offer any guarantee of uptime or even accuracy.

These things do fall over from time to time (see recent AWS collapse) so maybe your SLA with the client needs to include a suitable clause for third party data. That way if things do go awry the client can't call foul.

 

[keyserholiday]

I agree. But you are relying on a free service that doesn't offer any guarantee of uptime or even accuracy.

These things do fall over from time to time (see recent AWS collapse) so maybe your SLA with the client needs to include a suitable clause for third party data. That way if things do go awry the client can't call foul.

Nope, I just educated them whenever there was a change in the way Google calculated data or when there was a data outage. I would send links to posts on here, SEO Round Table, or the Sterling Sky blog. It's all about education and not CYA.

 

[willy_evans]

I agree. But you are relying on a free service that doesn't offer any guarantee of uptime or even accuracy.

These things do fall over from time to time (see recent AWS collapse) so maybe your SLA with the client needs to include a suitable clause for third party data. That way if things do go awry the client can't call foul.

That's the entire point of this thread. Identifying when a drop in metrics is caused by issues with third party tools. I'm just trying to get confirmation that other people are seeing the same issue so I have a good answer when I'm asked about it