Annotations: mark site changes and Google updates on your charts

Annotations are dated notes that appear as markers on AutoPSEO's time-series charts. When traffic moves, the first question is what changed on that day, and an annotation answers it before anyone has to dig through release notes or chat history. You can add notes for one property or for every property in your account, and switch on a built-in list of confirmed Google updates.

Add an annotation

Open Annotations from the property's Settings group (or from the account menu to manage all of them), press New annotation and fill in:

• Date, and an optional End date for events that ran over several days, such as a migration or a staged rollout.
• Title, up to 120 characters, and an optional Description of what changed and why it might move the numbers.
• Category: General, Content, Technical, Algorithm update, Migration or Other. Each category has its own colour.
• Applies to: This property, or All my properties (account-wide) for events that touch your whole portfolio, like a CDN change or a company rebrand.

Annotations can be edited and deleted at any time. In a team, they belong to the workspace: editors can manage them and everyone with access sees them.

Import and export

Import CSV accepts pasted text or a file with the columns date, end_date, title, category and description. A header row is optional (without one, the order is date, title, category, description, end date), dates use YYYY-MM-DD, and up to 500 rows are imported at a time; lines with errors are skipped and listed. Export CSV downloads every annotation with its scope and property, which is also a quick way to copy them into a client report.

Google updates on your charts

The Platform annotations (Google updates) list is a curated, read-only record of confirmed Google Search ranking updates, core updates and spam updates among them, with their rollout start and, when announced, end dates. Google publishes these on its Search Status Dashboard. Use Show on charts to switch the whole list on or off; the setting is saved per user.

Where annotations appear

Markers appear on the GSC Dashboard performance chart and on the Google Analytics and blended charts. Hover a marker to read the title. The Annotations menu above the dashboard chart switches three layers on and off independently: This property's annotations, My account annotations and Google updates & platform events. Separating them matters: a drop next to a core update is easy to blame on your own release, or the other way round.

Annotations in Search Console and in AutoPSEO

Search Console added its own custom chart annotations in November 2025. They are shared with everyone who has access to the property, limited to 120 characters, and are deleted after 500 days (custom annotations in Search Console). AutoPSEO's annotations are separate from Google's and are not synced either way. Theirs travel with the property inside Search Console; AutoPSEO's add date ranges, categories, account-wide notes, editing, CSV import and export, and the Google update feed.

How AutoPSEO helps

Your AI assistant can read and add annotations through the annotations and create_annotation tools of the MCP server (adding needs an API key with write access), so a note can be logged at the moment a change ships. Good candidates: template releases, migrations (Migration Compare), batches of new content, and changes in internal linking.