My game was sitting on the first page of every relevant tag (and occasionally the front page) for about a week, after being completely dead in terms of internal traffic. Starting around June 11. 2026. Yesterday (June 16), itch had the outage that a lot of people reported. Once it came back up, my game dropped to pages 3-5 on every tag it used to rank on straight away.

From my side as a dev, it was good finally get a feedback. I was responding to all, fixing release, bugs, balance, adding requested features etc. 

Has anyone else noticed a ranking shift right after the outage? Is this expected, or just coincidental timing with the algorithm's normal activity decay and I am just overreacting? ^^

Thank you all for the help! 

No, it’s perfectly normal for games to have a slump after the first few days, before they start building up constant traffic. In my experience, every single game goes through it. That’s why it’s advised to do your own promotion and not rely on itch.io for discovery.

Yes, I am doing all external promotion as I possibly can atm too, and will continue doing that. While itch.io discovery helped dramatically better than most of it. Thank you so much for a note on this.