Diagnose a traffic drop after a Google core update

Organic sessions to [yourdomain.com] fell from about 42,000/month to 26,000/month in
the two weeks after the March 2026 core update rolled out. The site is a mid-size
recipe blog with roughly 900 published posts, most monetized through display ads.

DOMAIN: [yourdomain.com]
NICHE: [food and recipe blog]
TRAFFIC BEFORE: [42,000 sessions/month]
TRAFFIC AFTER: [26,000 sessions/month]
DATE RANGE OF DROP: [March 5 to March 19, 2026]
GSC PERFORMANCE DATA (paste query/page/clicks/impressions export): [paste here]

Work through this the way a senior SEO consultant would triage an emergency ticket,
not a generic checklist:
1. First rule out non-algorithmic causes: check whether the drop lines up with a site
   migration, a robots.txt change, a plugin update, or a CDN outage in the same
   window. State explicitly whether you found a coincidental technical cause or not,
   since chasing "algorithm recovery" tactics on a technical bug wastes months.
2. If it looks purely algorithmic, segment the GSC export by page type (recipe pages
   vs. roundup/listicle pages vs. category pages) to see whether the loss
   concentrated in one content type, that tells you what Google is now discounting.
3. Identify which 10-15 queries lost the most clicks and check who now outranks
   [yourdomain.com] for them. Note anything those competitors have in common (author
   bios, first-hand photos, structured recipe schema) that this site lacks.
4. Distinguish "helpful content" style demotions (broad, sitewide softening) from a
   targeted spam or quality action (sharp cliff on specific pages). Recommend
   different remediation for each.
5. Give a prioritized 30-day recovery plan, and flag if any recommended action
   requires waiting for the next core update to show results, so the client doesn't
   expect overnight recovery.