Impressions & Clicks Dropped to Zero After April 11?

Hey BHW,

I’m working on a gambling affiliate site and something strange (and pretty depressing) happened on April 11. My site’s Google Search Console stats fell off a cliff – from steady growth to literally zero impressions and clicks overnight. It’s been stuck near-zero ever since (see screenshot).
Here’s the context:

• Niche: Gambling affiliate
• Content: A lot of AI content, but edited manually
• Structure: Many pages have similar content structure and URL patterns (worked well on my other similar projects)
• Indexing issues: About 20% of the pages were "Crawled - Not Indexed", but I’ve been fixing that daily and indexing is improving
• No manual actions or penalties – nothing in GSC
• site:domain.com still shows pages indexed in Google
• Domain: ~10 years old, bought recently at public auction
• Link profile: Clean, not spammed. About 8 solid backlinks built over 2 months. Site is DR 20
• Pages ranked decently before April 11
• No hosting or technical changes

I strongly suspect the core update is the cause, but I’m wondering:

What else could cause a total drop like this?
Has anyone recovered from something similar recently?
Do I need to revamp the content structure entirely? Or wait it out?

Appreciate any feedback – this drop is killing motivation.

Most likely a soft filter hit from the update. Seen similar reports in gambling and finance niches. Patterned content + AI edits = high risk now. I'd test with a few manually rewritten pages, unique structure, see if they pick up.

NeedMyLink said:

Most likely a soft filter hit from the update. Seen similar reports in gambling and finance niches. Patterned content + AI edits = high risk now. I'd test with a few manually rewritten pages, unique structure, see if they pick up.

Click to expand...

Yeah, maybe I should try that. Not sure what else to do.