Google penalty
A Google penalty is when Google ranks a site lower or drops it from results for breaking its spam policies, by a manual action or by its systems.
A Google penalty is when Google pushes your pages down in its results, or removes them, because it decided they break its spam policies. Google itself calls the deliberate kind a manual action. People also use "penalty" for a drop caused by Google's automated systems, though Google doesn't use the word for that.
A penalty can take most of a site's search traffic away overnight, so it's worth knowing how to tell whether you have one.
Manual actions
A manual action is issued when a human reviewer at Google decides pages on your site break the spam policies. Common reasons include unnatural links to or from your site, thin pages with little value, hidden text and keyword stuffing, and spam left by users in comments or forums.
You'll find out in Search Console. The Manual actions report lists the issue, which pages it affects, and how to fix it. Once you've fixed every page, you click Request review and explain what you did. Google says reviews can take days or weeks, and longer for link problems.
Automated drops
More often, a fall in traffic comes from Google's systems, during a core update or a spam update. There's no message and nothing to request. The way back is to fix what's wrong and wait for Google to reassess the site.
For example, if Harrow & Pine's traffic halves on the same week a core update finishes, and the Manual actions report is empty, it's an automated change. A manual action would be listed there.
What a penalty does to AI answers
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode only link to pages that are indexed and eligible to show in Google Search. So pages a penalty removes from Google's results also drop out of the pool those answers draw on. Other AI platforms that run their own searches on Bing or elsewhere aren't bound by Google's decision, which is one reason your numbers can fall on one platform and hold on another.
In AnswerOrbit
Our numbers are split by platform. Compare Google AI Overviews and AI Mode with the others in the Overview, and use Before and after a date in Recommendations to see what changed after the day traffic dropped.