An analysis of more than 400 websites by Zyppy founder Cyrus Shepard identifies five characteristics associated with whether a site gained or lost estimated organic traffic over the past 12 months.

Shepard classified sites by revisiting many of the same ones covered in Lily Ray’s December core update analysis, categorizing them by business model, content type, and other features, then measuring correlation with traffic changes. Traffic estimates come from third-party tools, not verified Search Console data.

Five features showed the strongest association with traffic gains, measured by Spearman correlation:

1. Offers a Product or Service: 70% of winning sites offered their own product or service, compared to 34% of losing sites. Service-based offerings like subscriptions and digital goods performed well alongside physical products.
2. Allows Task Completion: 83% of winners let users complete the task they searched for, versus 50% of losers. Sites don’t need to sell anything to score here.
3. Proprietary Assets: 92% of winners owned something difficult to replicate, such as unique datasets, user-generated content, or specialized software. Among losers, that figure was 57%.
4. Tight Topical Focus: Winners tended to cover a single narrow topic deeply. Shepard noted that a general “topical focus” classification showed no difference between winners and losers, but tightening the definition to single-topic depth revealed the pattern.
5. Strong Brand: 32% of winners had high branded search volume relative to their overall traffic, compared to 16% of losers. Shepard measured brand strength by examining each site’s top 20 keywords for navigational branded terms using Ahrefs data.

The effects were additive. Sites with zero features had a 13.5% win rate. Sites with all five reached 69.7%.

What Didn’t Correlate

The study also tested features Shepard expected to matter but found no correlation with traffic changes. These included first-hand experience, personal perspectives, user-generated content, community platforms, and uniqueness of information.

Shepard cautioned against misreading those findings.

He suggested these features may already be baked into Google’s algorithm from earlier updates, meaning they could still matter even if they don’t show differential results between winners and losers in this dataset.

Why This Matters

Shepard’s findings suggest that sites offering a product, completing a task, or owning harder-to-replicate assets were more likely to show estimated organic traffic gains in this dataset. The study puts specific numbers behind that pattern, though it doesn’t establish causation.

The additive pattern is the most useful finding for those evaluating their position. A site with one winning feature had a win rate (15%) roughly the same as a site with no winning features (13%). The gap only widened at three or more features.

Roger Montti’s analysis for Search Engine Journal in December identified related patterns from the other direction, noting that Google’s topical classifications have become more precise and that core updates sometimes correct over-ranking rather than penalizing sites.

Looking Ahead

The correlation values in this study are moderate (0.206–0.391), and the methodology relies on third-party traffic estimates rather than verified analytics. Correlation doesn’t establish causation.

Sites that offer products may perform better for reasons beyond Google’s ranking preferences, including higher return-visitor rates and more natural backlink profiles.

The full dataset is public, which means others can test these classifications against their own data.

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