Impact is an automatic estimate of how much a story is likely to
affect one website, weighing who published it, whether Google has
confirmed a ranking change, how many outlets ran it, and whether
the wording implies work on your site. It reads headlines, not
your analytics — treat it as triage, not a verdict.
In 2024, we introduced our site reputation policy to stop a practice where third-party content is published on a trusted website just to exploit that site's good reputation to rank higher in Search.…