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Understanding timelines

How to read visibility shifts operationally using deploy overlays, annotations, and cohort-based deltas.

Timelines are the core operational surface: you use them to answer what changed, when, and what moved as a result.

What a timeline should contain

  • Visibility series (clicks, impressions, CTR, position)
  • Operational overlays (deploys)
  • Change history (annotations)
  • Source context (Google vs Bing, GA4 overlays where relevant)

Avoid the average-metric trap

When you see a shift on the timeline, do not stop at the average:

  • isolate the cohort (queries/pages) responsible for most of the delta
  • separate impression changes from CTR changes
  • validate whether the shift aligns with a deploy or a recorded annotation