Some users are seeing a drop in visibility and indexing for PDFs in Google Search. Savanna Gray spotted this and shared her observations on LinkedIn.
She wrote: “This week I’m seeing several sites with dramatic drops for clicks to PDFs on Google. I first noticed this when looking at PDF performance in GSC, which had a significant drop off for one particular site in August. I assumed it was an implementation problem at first, but nothing changed here and there were no red flags (huge thanks to Johnny Herge for helping me validate this). Plus these pages were still indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Then I zoomed out and saw it happening across a few sites with different CMSs, CDNs, even industries.
What’s most confusing to me is it isn’t ALL PDFs on these sites, but it also isn’t only low-quality or thin-content PDFs that make sense to go into Crawled, Currently Not Indexed jail.
It’s not just my clients either. I ran a search for ‘back to school printable pdf’ and got… not a single PDF result. Plenty of HTML pages that list PDFs, but no actual PDFs in the results.
I’ve also Google searched the URLs for lots of competitor PDFs I see in LLM citation data, and very often they’re removed from the index, too.
The real confusion for me is that these pages aren’t just losing rankings, they’re being removed from the index. That’s a very dramatic step and affects a lot of future options for how Google can change search results.”
Lily Ray also shared her observation on X, wrote:
“My amazing @amsiveagency teammate @SavannaLGray found several examples of PDFs losing clicks and dropping out of the index in GSC. Are others seeing the same?”
Glenn Gabe replied to Lily Ray post:
“Just checked a site that has a ton of PDFs. Trending is pretty stable and I spot checked some rankings that are still there. I’ll check some more sites soon but not seeing a change there.”
I also cross-checked this on my own site and noticed a drop in my PDF pages as well.
The post Google search results are dropping PDF pages appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
