Category pages that lost ranking position year over year often share one trait: fewer products displayed on the page than before. Brodie Clark, writing via Search Engine Roundtable on July 16, pointed to product count as one of the stronger signals available to Google for ranking these pages. The logic follows from how Google treats a category page in the first place. A page reduced to a handful of internal links offers little for the crawler to evaluate, while a fuller product grid reads as a substantive index of a topic.
That distinction sharpened after the March 2026 core update. Sites that held or grew category-page visibility since March treated those pages as core content assets, not navigational scaffolding, and backed the change with denser product grids, distinct intro paragraphs, and schema markup.
Product count alone will not rebuild a ranking that content thinness and missing schema also caused. Teams recovering category-page traffic should audit product depth alongside intro copy and structured data together, not chase a single-lever fix.
Search Engine Roundtable relayed Brodie Clark’s analysis on July 16, 2026.
