Anomalies

The Anomalies section compares every page on your site against the period before and lists everything that moved, biggest movers first. It answers the question a traffic chart cannot: not just that traffic changed, but where and what changed on the site around the same time.

The window it compares

The recent window is whatever the range selector says, defaulting to the last 7 days. The baseline is the equally long period immediately before it. Pick Last 30 days and you get this month against last month; pick a custom fortnight and you get it against the fortnight before. The Baseline control names the other windows you can measure against: the previous period, which for a single day is the same weekday a week back, the previous day when the window is one day, or a period you set yourself.

What each entry shows

• The page, its direction, and the visitor counts for both windows with the percentage change.
• A New badge for pages that had no traffic in the baseline window, and a Lost badge for pages that had traffic then and none now, so launches and disappearances are separated from swings.
• Possible cause: the detected changes to that page inside the window - title or meta edits, content changes, redirects, noindex flips and more - each with when it was detected. Only a change whose direction fits the move is named as the cause, so a rising page is never blamed on being removed; the page's other changes are still listed underneath.

Site-wide changes in the window (platform, sitemap, robots, DNS and similar) are flagged at the top, since they can affect every page at once. A summary above the list nets the risers against the fallers, so you can tell "traffic is flat because nothing moved" from "traffic is flat because two big moves cancelled out".

Performance regressions

The section opens with any Core Web Vitals regression it found in the same window. A site-wide slowdown is exactly the kind of "what moved" this view exists to surface, and it rarely shows up as one page.

Bots

The report is human-only by default, matching the rest of the dashboard's headline numbers. Sites that track bot traffic get a toggle to read the same movers for crawlers instead, which is how you tell an AI crawler discovering a section from readers arriving in it.

From a mover to a diagnosis

Clicking a row opens that page's own view, carrying the same two windows: the sources, countries and devices behind the change, the Search Console decomposition of whether position, impressions or click-through moved, this page's speed and errors, and its full change history with the word-level before and after. See Pages.

The Overview's Pages card carries the top of this list. Its Movers tab ranks the pages that moved most in the current window against the period before, with the change that could explain each, and the card's footer names the single biggest mover on every other tab. Both link straight to the page's diagnosis.

Anomaly flags on the chart

The list above ranks every mover in a window, which is right for a list and wrong for a flag: a flag that fired for every page every day would be noise. So the flags on the traffic chart come from a stricter, daily judgement. Once a day, every page with enough history is measured against its own prior four weeks: the typical day and how much it normally varies. A page that swings by nature gets a wide band and rarely flags; a page that barely moves flags on a modest shift. The site's overall move for the day is taken out first, so a site-wide dip does not read as three hundred page drops, and the site total is judged the same way against its own history.

• One Anomaly flag per day at most, on the day a page or the site sat outside its band. A quiet day gets no flag.
• The record behind the flag lists every page that moved, biggest move first, with what the day was expected to be and the cause Numative found at the time: a title change two days earlier, a lost backlink, a slipped search position.
• Pages younger than two weeks are not judged; a new page rising and fading is a launch, and the page flags already cover it. Pages with fewer than twenty visitors on a typical day are not judged either.
• There is nothing to tune. The spike and drop thresholds in Alerts scale how far out of band a page has to sit, and an owner can dismiss a flag from its record.

The same daily judgement drives the page-move digest: one email a day listing the flagged pages and their causes, on by default under Alerts.