One site's impressions hit zero while live URL tests still pass

A site owner posting to a thread on r/TechSEO reported that Search Console impressions for a bilingual German and French site fell from 286 to zero in mid-October, while live URL inspections on the affected pages kept returning a pass. The site has about 300 URLs, and the post says that as of October 20 the Page Indexing report was still stamped October 12 as its last update.

Several of the symptoms listed there are faults in Search Console rather than in the site. URL Inspection showed “Temporary processing error” and “No referring sitemaps detected” for URLs the owner says are in submitted sitemaps, and the custom date picker showed validation messages citing January 1, 1970. That date is the zero point of Unix time, which usually surfaces when a value arrives empty rather than wrong. Search Console reports have drawn similar unconfirmed complaints before, including desktop merchant listing impressions running 3 to 7 times high in one SEO’s data.

The symptoms do not all come from the same report, and that decides how much each one is worth. “Crawled - currently not indexed” is a Page Indexing label, and Page Indexing is the report the owner says has not refreshed since October 12. The fall in valid breadcrumb items, from roughly 27 to 4, comes from a separate enhancement report whose refresh date the post does not give. Impressions come from the Performance report, which kept producing dated rows through October 15. A frozen Page Indexing report makes its exclusion labels, and probably the breadcrumb count, unreliable as a picture of today. It does not explain impressions reaching zero.

The owner’s own cross-check points the same way without settling it. GA4 showed nothing close to the same decline, though, as the post notes, GA4 sessions and Search Console clicks count different things. A tighter version of that comparison would help: Google organic sessions in GA4 set against Search Console clicks over identical dates. Real deindexing of category hubs and product reviews takes organic sessions down with it, so if those sessions held, Search Console’s figures are the thing at fault.

Nothing in the thread justifies changing the site yet. The owner has already checked robots directives, canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps, server responses, rendering and structured data without finding a sitewide fault. Search Console reported no manual action, and both language homepages stayed indexed while internal pages in both languages dropped out. Neither of the two replies corroborates the pattern. Both offer advice rather than a matching report. Stalled indexing attracts tidy explanations that are hard to disprove, as with the theory blaming stalled migrations on site quality.

What to do

Everything useful here happens outside Search Console, because a report that has stopped refreshing cannot be used to check itself.

• Read the server logs for Googlebot hits on the URLs now labelled crawled and not indexed. Logs are the one record Search Console cannot distort. A sharp fall in Googlebot visits after October 12 would support a real change, while fetches at the usual rate prove less, because Google keeps crawling pages it declines to index.
• Run a site: query on three or four of the exact URLs, then search an exact sentence from one of the pages. A page that returns is indexed whatever the report says.
• Open Bing Webmaster Tools for a second index’s opinion. It says nothing about Google’s decisions, but a page missing from both indexes points back at the site.
• Set Google organic sessions in GA4 beside Search Console clicks for the same dates, rather than comparing session totals with impression totals.
• Leave canonicals, robots rules, hreflang and sitemaps as they are until two sources outside Search Console agree on what changed. Edits made during a reporting outage remove the baseline that would show it.

If a site: query still returns those URLs and organic sessions held, the report is wrong and waiting costs nothing.