During SEO assistance on Google’s support forums, we see this issue almost every day: People are worried because their website is indexed, yet it receives little to no traffic. In most cases, there is no indexing problem. Google has found the pages, crawled them, and indexed them correctly. The real issue is usually elsewhere. The content is often acceptable, but not distinctive. It closely resembles what already exists in the search results. When multiple pages answer the same query in the same way, Google has no strong reason to send traffic to another similar one. Indexation confirms existence. Visibility requires differentiation. Before looking at links or technical tweaks, comparing content with top-ranking pages is often the most revealing step. What is you process to generate content that stands out ?
In reality, the problem of losing search traffic (when it previously existed and then dropped significantly/disappeared) is far more complex, because the number of possible causes is much greater than the ones you listed. Assuming that all pages are indexed (if not - read this), all causes of traffic loss can be divided into two groups. The first is changes to Google’s algorithms. In particular, this refers to the introduction of Google AI Overviews in search, which allow users to get answers directly in the SERP without visiting websites. As a result, many content pages optimized for quick informational queries have lost search traffic (for example - "what is business management" or simply "business management"). In the past, such pages could generate a significant volume of traffic, but this model no longer works, and today there is no real point in creating content solely for these types of queries. The second is a reassessment of content quality at the page level. This is mainly about the more active use of Google’s AI Classifier and the reevaluation of how useful each content page on a site actually is. Previously, it was often enough to write a unique and detailed text for it not only to be indexed, but also to bring stable traffic. That is no longer sufficient. Content must be not only unique, but also original, meaning it needs to add something new that does not already exist on similar pages across the web. Author expertise, personal observations, and original conclusions are especially valued. Template-based, shallow content (which now floods the internet) is considered unhelpful by Google. Such content gradually loses search traffic. Moreover, if the majority of a site’s pages are classified as low-originality and low-utility, the entire site can be algorithmically downgraded by Google as not sufficiently trustworthy. In this situation, a site may continue to receive traffic, but at a fraction of its former levels. More importantly, even genuinely high-quality articles and guides on such a site will receive limited traffic, because domain-level demotion affects all pages. Over time, traffic continues to fade and can drop to negligible percentages of its previous levels, which is a typical scenario after the impact of the HCU. That is why it is critically important to clearly understand and distinguish between two situations. Are we losing traffic because the site is insufficiently optimized, search queries were chosen incorrectly, or the impact of AI answers in search was not taken into account. Or are we losing traffic because the site is already under domain-level algorithmic demotion, in which case any isolated SEO actions will not produce meaningful results until the fundamental issues of content quality and usefulness are resolved.