While researching reviews last week, I noticed Wirecutter wasn’t ranking as well in Google. And for some queries, they weren’t ranking AT ALL. So I dug in more to better understand their visibility trending in 2025. Note, we’ve had two broad core updates this year, including the March 2025 core update, and then most recently the June 2025 core update, so I wanted to see how Wirecutter fared during those powerful updates.
What I saw shocked me. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is Wirecutter’s visibility trending since the spring of 2025. Notice the two huge drops in visibility (first on May 18 and then another drop on July 20 right after the June core update completed). When comparing current visibility to May 2025, Wirecutter has dropped by a whopping 69% based on Sistrix data, 72% based on ahrefs data, and 65% based on Semrush data . Sure, it has dropped in the past at certain points, but it has dropped heavily in the several months.
This was incredibly surprising since I’ve always thought Wirecutter provided extremely thorough and in-depth reviews and I know they have ranked very well over time (mostly). I have even mentioned Wirecutter several times in my posts about Google’s reviews updates as an example to emulate.
Did Wirecutter really drop? Checking visibility and rankings.
Wirecutter dropping heavily is a big deal if you focus on reviews since it provides a lot of killer reviews content. But… they do cover a wide range of categories and products. I’ll cover more about that soon.
But before I went crazy about the overall drop, I wanted to spot-check the SERPs for the queries that dropped or were lost. First, ahrefs revealed that a whopping 3.6M queries in the U.S. either dropped or were lost in Google when comparing today to six months ago. That’s insane.
Sometimes Wirecutter vanished from the top 100, while sometimes it dropped from ranking number one to lower on page one. But one thing was for sure… it dropped, and across many queries.
Side note, AI Overviews and AI Mode impacted as well:
As I covered in a previous post, site owners should be very careful about focusing too heavily on AI Search and ignoring Google. If quality drops, then a site is susceptible to being hit by a broad core update down the line (or other types of algorithm updates). And with the majority of traffic still coming from Google, that’s a dangerous game to play. Remember, AI Search is driving less than 1% of traffic to most sites (with most sites under .5%).
Well, as you would guess, Wirecutter wasn’t showing up as often in AI Overviews or AI Mode for the queries I was testing (which makes complete sense). Note, these were queries where Wirecutter dropped over the past several months. Remember, both AIOs and AI Mode are rooted in Google’s core quality and ranking systems. So if a site drops in visibility due to a major algorithm update (or some other change by Google), then AIOs and AI Mode should follow.
For example, here are two queries where Wirecutter used to rank well in the 10-blue links before the drops. Wirecutter is not showing up in AI Mode as of today:
And Gemini leverages Google’s search systems as well, so being cited as a source could drop there as well. I need to dig into more queries for Wirecutter to see how they are performing in Gemini now, but I wanted to mention that. And I also need to dig deeper with AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. to see how well Wirecutter is ranking there.
Reviews updates, ‘starkly different’, and a surge in vertical reviews:
So what exactly is going on here? First, reviews updates are now running behind the scenes and are not announced by Google. That started in November of 2023 when Google explained that was the final reviews update that would be officially announced.
But that didn’t mean they were ending… On the contrary, Google explained that the reviews system would be updated ‘on a regular and ongoing basis.’ In addition, Danny Sullivan explained in 2024 that the reviews system was being updated frequently. So the drops for Wirecutter could have been during one of those reviews systems updates.
Second, I wrote a post last year titled, “A Nightmare on Affiliate Street” where I covered how a number of sites with affiliate sections were tanking in Google. I speculated that maybe Google was handling site reputation abuse algorithmically then… Well, Google sent me a statement explaining that wasn’t the case. That’s the first time they mentioned the ‘Starkly different’ algorithm (or system) that they were working on and improving.
That’s where Google could algorithmically understand when a section of content is ‘starkly different’ from the majority of the main content on the site. And when that happens, the section would not leverage site-wide signals like other sections could. When that happens, that section could drop heavily in rankings. It’s not a penalty, it’s just that the section would not leverage the power of the site like it normally would.
For Wirecutter, Google could be treating the Wirecutter directory differently than the core New York Times site. Hard to say for sure, but possible.
This is what that looked like across two different sites when Google improved its ‘Starkly different’ system in 2024:
Wirecutter wasn’t alone. Other sites focused on reviews have dropped as well.
The Wirecutter drop led me to run the visibility numbers for over 700 sites I have documented that were impacted by reviews updates in the past. I wanted to see how those sites fared over time and especially sites similar to Wirecutter. For example, when reviews content was housed in a section of a larger and broader site.
First, many of those reviews sites have tanked since reviews updates (and Product Reviews Updates) were first launched in 2021. I covered some of that in my post about the impact of reviews updates over time. Sure, some are up, but many are down – and really down. See some examples below. There are many like this.
Vertical Expertise Rewarded? Niche publishers with reviews surge.
I also started think that Google could have implemented a change to the reviews system that rewarded vertical expertise? i.e. Sites heavily focused on the vertical they are publishing reviews about (versus mammoth sites covering a range of topics). Again, I saw many of these smaller publishers show up in my research while analyzing the Wirecutter drop. I’ll reach out to Google to see if they can shed some light on what’s going on here.
For example, here are niche publishers with reviews that have surged in 2025:
When Wirecutter drops, affiliate marketers pay attention:
Seeing Wirecutter drop heavily in 2025 was surprising to me. Again, they have published some of the most in-depth reviews content over the years. That said, they do publish content across many different categories… And the surge in niche publishers with reviews during my research was interesting to see. So were reviews updates the cause of the drop, was it Google’s ‘Starkly different’ algorithm, or was vertical expertise rewarded? Hard to say, but I’ll reach out to Google to see if they can share any information about the impact I’m seeing across publishers focused on reviews content. Stay tuned.
GG