IndexWatch 2025: Visibility Losers in Google UK Search

From:

Luce Rawlings

Published: 28.01.2026

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All country reports, including the winners reports, are available via links at the bottom of this report.

Ecommerce

HelloPrint

HelloPrint is an online shop for custom printed materials, ranging from books and brochures to stationery, stickers, banners, and clothing.

Year-on-year, helloprint.co.uk experienced a 99.99% decline in organic visibility, but what was the cause?

Further analysis confirms that in late 2025, the .co.uk domain was migrated and redirected to “helloprint.com/en-gb/”. This move was part of a wider internationalisation strategy where dedicated subfolders were created for the UK, USA, and various European countries, including specific Flemish and French versions for Belgium.

Although the migration successfully transferred equity from “.co.uk” to .”com/en-gb/”, the new domain’s Google visibility is 16% lower than the .co.uk domain’s in December 2024.

Nasty Gal

American-founded fast fashion brand Nasty Gal’s UK site has seen a 95.16% visibility downturn vs December 2024.

When Nasty Gal was acquired by Debenhams Group (formerly known as Boohoo Group) in 2017, they acquired the entire business and its assets, not just the UK strand, with all historical commerce taking place through localised subfolders on nastygal.com, including for the UK.

Post-acquisition, Nasty Gal leveraged Boohoo’s infrastructure to maintain global operations, using nastygal.com as its main storefront for several years. However, in 2024, nastygal.co.uk started to emerge within the search results, dedicated specifically to the UK market.

As the .co.uk site gained SERP prominence, the .com’s authority in the UK declined, solidifying the migration to separate UK and US properties. The .co.uk domain sustained organic growth from 20th May 2024, but by 8th September 2025, visibility had dropped significantly.

It is difficult to determine the exact cause, but nastygal.co.uk’s visibility loss was closely aligned with the August 2025 spam update. This correlation, alongside the simplicity of their category pages, implies that SEO has become less of a priority for Nasty Gal compared to third-party channels. In October 2025, the brand launched on Amazon to expand further into the US market, suggesting that Debenhams Group prioritised this and other projects over website optimisation.

[SCREENSHOT: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nasty+gal&crid=267VK3SSB05HL&sprefix=nasty+gal%2Caps%2C205&ref=nb_sb_noss_1]

Finance

NerdWallet

Business and personal finance website nerdwallet.com has seen an 85.10% drop year-on-year, with declines noted following all 2025 core and spam updates.

Analysis of the site’s URL data reveals a significant structural shift: the “article” subfolder, which previously grouped all informational content, has been removed and replaced with a “[category]/learn/” structure.

Although this new structure consistently places “learn” after the category folder – “[category]/learn/” – search engine bots are generally capable of recognising such patterns and grouping authority accordingly. That said, maintaining URL cleanliness remains critical to ensure readability and minimise the scope for confusion.

However, despite the like-for-like migration of content and the correct implementation of 301 redirects, the data shows that rankings for 3,597 pages decreased following the change, compared to only 1,146 that improved.

Furthermore, the XML sitemap index only contains a sitemap for pages, and it appears to exclude “learn” content. Aside from internal linking and site structure, sitemaps are a primary tool for discovery and indexing. The Yoast-generated sitemap – a WordPress plugin – is showing just 255 URLs. SISTRIX data shows 12828 URLs ranking.

It is possible that the combination of a complex new URL hierarchy and an incomplete sitemap is hindering performance, despite the high quality of the on-site content.

Investopedia

Compared to December 2024, investopedia.com experienced a 97.66 point decrease in visibility. As the name suggests, Investopedia is a finance education website providing resources such as definitions, market news, analysis, calculators, and a stock simulator to help users understand financial topics.

A browse of the domain’s directories confirms that over the last 12 months, two sections – “terms” (-42.21%) and “articles” (-72.33%) – saw a gradual SERP drop-off.

Within the “articles” subfolders, the categories with the most notable losses include “investing” (green line), “personal-finance” (blue line), and “trading” (red line), with “investing” seeing the largest decline (-67.16%).

A deeper analysis of the “investing” section reveals a stark contrast over the last 12 months: articles in this category experienced ranking declines or losses for 25,391 keywords, compared to only 7,890 keywords that improved or were newly ranked.

This disparity suggests that the content may be outdated or is no longer satisfying search intent as effectively as competitor content.

In the case of the financial “terms” glossary, the biggest visibility losses were to definition pages for terminology beginning with the letters “s”, “p” and “c”.

Historical data for the “terms” subfolder confirms that AI Overviews increased as traditional visibility fell. Given that definitions lend themselves to direct answers, this uptick suggests that informational queries are shifting toward generative features, causing traditional page rankings to be deprioritised.

Note: AI Overviews are not directly included in the Visibility Index calculation.

Medical

Penn Medicine

Penn Medicine, the official website for research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s health system and medical school, saw a 92.25% decline in SERP visibility year-on-year.

A deeper dive into pennmedicine.org’s keyword data highlights significant ranking losses (6,727) and position decreases for a further 3,689 terms.

An analysis of the visibility trend for pennmedicine.org across both UK and US SERPs over the last 12 months reveals a similar downward trajectory, though the UK decline is more pronounced.

This suggests that whilst local relevance may have contributed to the drop on Google UK, it was not the sole cause.

Interestingly, an analysis of Penn Medicine’s AI Overview data confirms that in September 2025, aligning with the broader domain decline, the website began losing visibility in AI Overviews. By early 2026, its presence had dropped by nearly 50%. This points to potential underlying issues such as decreased content quality, a lack of topical authority against larger competitors, or technical issues affecting crawling and therefore, content accessibility.

Note: AI Overviews are not directly included in the Visibility Index calculation.

BioMed Central

Biomedcentral.com (BMC) is a UK-based online medical publication. It has seen a 98.40% Google visibility decrease year-on-year.

Founded in 2000, BioMed Central has been owned by academic publisher Springer Nature for the last 17 years. However, over the past year, Springer Nature decided to consolidate the brand, implementing 301 redirects from all biomedcentral.com pages to a BMC hub on the link.springer.com subdomain.

By implementing blanket redirects to the BMC brand page (https://link.springer.com/brands/bmc) rather than taking a more strategic approach, little to no SEO authority has been transferred to BMC’s new online home.

2025 losing domains lists

Below, we have included two tables containing the top 250 domains (absolute and percent). Click through to access SISTRIX data. A 14 day free account is available

Percentage losses:

Search and sort the list to find domains

Absolute losses:

Search

Conclusion

Although growth is the goal, the sharpest lessons often come from declines. We’ve identified the potential causes behind these domain drops, but what learnings can be taken from last year’s setbacks to get things back on track in 2026?

• Regardless of how smoothly a domain migration is executed, it remains a high-risk activity with no guarantee against visibility loss. HelloPrint’s strategic shift from “.co.uk” to “.com/en-gb/” aligns with their long-term goals, but the immediate results highlight a hard truth: regaining the historical authority of a dedicated local domain takes time.

• Equally, as seen with BioMed Central, when migrating and consolidating content, using blanket redirects to the homepage should be avoided. Not only does this send link equity to irrelevant pages – failing to benefit deeper pages in the architecture – it is also bad for user experience.

• SEO is not set and forget. Deprioritising organic search to focus on other channels leaves a site vulnerable to algorithmic demotion and surrenders business to competitors. For Nasty Gal, this oversight may become costly, particularly as organic search evolves and transitions toward an AI-driven experience.

• As NerdWallet demonstrates, even minor URL structure changes can hinder performance, even with redirects in place. When modifying site architecture, it is vital to update your XML sitemap to reflect the new hierarchy immediately. If bots encounter a complex new structure alongside an outdated sitemap and weak internal linking, they may struggle to effectively access and assess content.

• It is vital to keep content fresh, detailed, and aligned with user search intent, whilst also keeping an eye on content types that are becoming more susceptible to being used within AI Overviews. In the case of Investopedia, this has resulted in a fall in their visibility within Google’s traditional search results.

• Simultaneous drops in traditional and AI-driven search visibility, such as those seen for Penn Medicine, are a strong indicator of a fundamental website issue – whether that is down to content quality or technical standing. This is why it is vital to prioritise continual auditing, allowing you to identify issues, create an action plan, and resolve them to improve future ranking potential.

All IndexWatch 2025 reports

Winners

🇬🇧 – https://www.sistrix.com/blog/indexwatch-2025-uk-winners/

🇮🇹 – https://www.sistrix.it/blog/indexwatch-winner-2025/

🇪🇸 – https://www.sistrix.es/blog/indexwatch-ganadores-seo-2025/

🇩🇪 – https://www.sistrix.de/news/indexwatch-2025-die-seo-gewinner-des-jahres/

🇫🇷 – https://www.sistrix.fr/blog/indexwatch-winners-france-2025/

Losers

🇮🇹 – https://www.sistrix.com/blog/indexwatch-2025-uk-losers/

🇪🇸 – [Coming soon]

🇩🇪 – [Coming soon]

🇫🇷 – [Coming soon]