Again anecdotal, but I lost the majority of my SEO traffic late last year around the time of a core update. I've spent the best part of a year attempting to repair it, on the assumption I'd committed some heinous SEO crime. The more time that passes, I'm starting to think that the issue isn't mine so much as Google's. It's baffling. I wrote about it here:
I don’t see what you did wrong, it must have been the algorithm change. My parents had a business that was killed by a Facebook algorithm change. My brother took a significant hit from an Amazon algorithm change. Building a business around any of the big tech companies seems very risky.
I think Google search has just declined a lot. I guess they’re losing the constant cat and mouse game with SEO. It seems worse than it has ever been, I’m relying more on ChatGPT and copilot now.
I can only imagine that LLMs will be the end of any content based search ranking. I don’t know how they’ll adapt to that.
https://johnnyreilly.com/how-i-ruined-my-seo