My traffic is stable. Here are some stats from my competition.
1. Monster site, no older than 10 years though, aggressive SEO but also very popular among users:
View attachment 158436
2. Monster site, older than 10 years, very popular among users, covers just one sport. NO agressive SEO, I would say no SEO at all:
View attachment 158437
3. Aggressive newcomer (big budget, I would say six figures at least):
View attachment 158438
4. Not-so-old site, aggressive SEO (including GSA generated links), not quite popular in branded searches. No big budget, this one grew almost without spending, but implementing anything you can think of:
View attachment 158439
5. Not-so-old site, no aggressive SEO, got hit in May, recovered in December, not quite popular among users. Big budget from promotion but not aggressive in terms of SEO.
View attachment 158440
6. Biggest winner of December update, got hit in May, for some unknown reasons the AI decided in 6 months the site is in fact a good one, recovered in December. No aggressive SEO, quite popular among the users and webmasters.
View attachment 158441
Backlink profile for #6:
View attachment 158446
.edu links are plenty, but they all come from just 4 domains and are organic.
Sorry for posting so many screenshots
Knowing what each site is doing, I would focus on
#6 and I can say what is distinctive:
1. Page speed sucks.
2. Content (as in correct English) is very far from what it should be, but data is accurate and plenty.
3. HUGE link popularity across the Internet, all gained organically, there's nothing forced.
Conclusion?
Natural gained links seem to matter the most. There's nothing new here, right? There's also no
clear explanation for the May hit and December recovery. One would be the site gained a lot of new links, which can be seen in Ahrefs, but they were all due to increased popularity.
In the end:
All these sites above deserve to be on the top 10. Even more, there are still
at least 20 sites that deserve the same places. I think Google knows that. The difference is made by little things or just by... link popularity.
I would not exclude the possibility of "rotation", so each site gets top positions for top keywords for a very short period of time. Even in the top 10, #1 can be shared among many, and during each time Google gathers data on increased/decreased link popularity, user behavior (even though they say it's not "on the menu") and other things, in order to prepare the next core update.
Hope this helps somehow in understanding the new (AI powered) Google.