Playbook: the first 72 hours after a confirmed core update

Playbook: the first 72 hours after a confirmed core update
A confirmed rollout is live and you're down. What to do before you touch anything, per practitioner consensus:

— Hour 0–24: Freeze changes. Aleyda Solis advises against panic edits mid-rollout — rankings are unstable and you'll lose your baseline.
— Day 1: Export GSC page+query data for the 28 days pre-rollout as your snapshot. You can't measure recovery without it.
— Day 2: Bucket losers by page type (category, article, product) — Lily Ray's analyses repeatedly show updates hit page-types unevenly.
— Day 3: Map winners in your niche via a visibility tool to see what Google now rewards.

Don't start editing until the rollout is marked complete on the status dashboard — Google's own guidance says wait for full deployment.

One to bookmark: Google's core updates guidance — the 'questions to ask yourself' list is still the canonical recovery framework.