workflow-update-postmortem

Update postmortem workflow

This workflow organizes performance movement around a known Google update, including template and segment evidence plus optional local change-log context. It helps identify where to investigate. Temporal overlap and exposure do not prove that the update caused any change, and retained winners and losers are not a complete property inventory when sources are capped or filtered.

Run it

Use the exact MCP discovery flow:

1. Call seo_list_reports with category: "workflows" and select workflow-update-postmortem.
2. Call seo_describe_report with id: "workflow-update-postmortem"; inspect the current schema.
3. Call seo_run_report with that id and only described parameters.

CLI parity:

seo reports describe workflow-update-postmortem --json
seo reports run workflow-update-postmortem --params '{"site":"sc-domain:example.com","days":90,"recentDays":7,"limit":10,"includeBrand":false,"knownConfounders":["Site migration on 2026-05-12"],"includeChangeLog":true}' --json

Record specific known confounders rather than vague suspicions. The change log is supporting context, not automatic attribution.

Interpret and act

Start with workflow step statuses, finalized date windows, source completeness, failed measurements, retained limits, and caveats. Then inspect update, insights, templateMovement, and segments. Keep positive and negative movement visible. The report's cause remains not established even when dates overlap. Compare like-for-like metrics and note brand filtering, invalid rows, duplicate aggregation, and partial provider results.

Safe next steps are falsifiable: inspect representative URLs from affected segments, reproduce technical changes, compare deployed templates, validate the local change log, and measure a bounded intervention. Preserve known confounders in the handoff. Do not roll back, rewrite, merge, or delete content solely because it appears among losers. Never claim update causation, recovery probability, future traffic, or ranking impact from this workflow.

Use MCP structuredContent as the machine contract and Markdown only for the human-readable postmortem.