Case study · One of my own sites

WireRef: growing on Bing after Google dropped it

Google almost stopped showing WireRef, my free NEC wiring reference for electricians, in a single day in March 2026. Bing grew it instead, from 655 clicks in April to 2.8K in September.

2.8KBing clicks in September, up from 655 in April
243Google impressions on March 6, down from 2.3K the day before
11Google clicks in six months, April to September

Visit WireRef Read the story

The whole site, month by month

The last 28 days for WireRef: fell on Bing. Google 4 to 1, Bing -11%.

September vs August+2%2.8K search clicks, from 2.8K
Last 28 days vs the 28 before-11%2.4K search clicks, from 2.7K
Jul to Sep vs Apr to Jun+138%7.4K search clicks, from 3.1K

655Apr
1.1KMay
1.3KJun
1.7KJul
2.8KAug
2.8KSep

Google Bing Complete months only. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, data through Oct 9, 2026.

Why did Google drop WireRef?

The fall happened in one day: from Mar 5 to Mar 6, 2026, daily Google impressions went from 2.3K to 243. Search Console records the change; it does not say what caused it, and nothing in these numbers isolates a single reason.

So the real question was a practical one: how does a reference site keep reaching people when Google stops sending them?

What WireRef does for an electrician

The National Electrical Code is public.

The values are public, spread across code tables and state adoption records. WireRef puts them where a person on a job looks first: the wire size for a circuit, the ampacity of a gauge, the rules in their state, the breaker for an appliance. Three calculators do the arithmetic.

On the live site: 50 state code pages, 62 appliance wiring guides, 35 project guides and 519 URLs in the sitemap.

Counted on the live site, 2026-10-11: menu labels and sitemap.

Bing did the growing, then leveled off

Bing sent 655 clicks in April and 2.8K in September, while Google sent 11 in the same six months. The report above shows every month.

Is Bing still growing? Not lately. August and September were close (2.8K and 2.8K clicks), and the weekly count has dropped since late August.

2026-08-21 to 2026-08-27: 737
2026-10-02 to 2026-10-08: 570

Bing clicks over seven days. The first week is the highest in the August to October stretch; the second is the latest complete week.

How I measured it. Google Search Console daily impressions and clicks; Bing Webmaster Tools clicks summed by full month. Pulled 2026-10-10 and 2026-10-11. My Bing archive starts on March 27, 2026 for every site, so there is no Bing baseline from before the drop. The Bing growth that followed is real in the data. Whether it would have happened anyway is something these numbers can't answer.

What I wrote five days before the drop

My first WireRef case study went up on March 1, 2026. Its page counts can't be confirmed today, so they are not repeated here. The lines below are quoted from it as written.

Every site I build teaches the next one.

The pattern of mistakes shifted from “did not plan this” to “planned it but underestimated the maintenance cost.” That feels like progress, but I am not done making mistakes here.

The mistakes are getting less fundamental. That is the only pattern I am confident about. I am sure the next project will teach me something I do not know yet.

From my WireRef case study, published March 1, 2026.

The evidence

Clarity click heatmap of WireRef's ampacity chart on desktop: red clusters on the row of breaker-amp buttons, few clicks in the table below. — Heatmap, WireRef

Electricians reach for the breaker shortcut first

1K page views, **308** clicks on desktops, last 30 days

On the ampacity chart, the hottest spots on desktop are the buttons that find a wire size from the breaker amps, which sit above the full table. My read: people arrive knowing their breaker, not their wire, so the shortcut belongs first.

Microsoft Clarity click heatmap, /ampacity/, captured 2026-10-12

Google Search Console performance chart for wireref.com: a spike of up to 12 clicks a day in late February 2026, then close to zero from early March through October — **Google sent up to 12 clicks a day in late February, then almost nothing from early March on.** Google Search Console, Performance, Feb 22 to Oct 8, 2026. Screenshot captured October 11, 2026, cropped to the totals and the chart; the query and page lists stay private.

Bing Webmaster Tools search performance chart for wireref.com over six months: 11.1K clicks and 454.3K impressions, rising from about 20 clicks a day in April to over 100 in September — **11.1K clicks from Bing in the last six months, up every month from April to August, then level in September.** Bing Webmaster Tools, Search Performance, the last six months. Screenshot captured October 11, 2026, cropped to the totals and the chart; the query and page lists stay private.

Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance chart for wireref.com: 320.1K total citations in Microsoft Copilot and partners over three months, 192 cited pages on average — **320.1K citations in Copilot answers, across 192 cited pages on an average day.** Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance (Microsoft Copilot and partners), the last three months. Screenshot captured October 11, 2026, cropped to the totals and the chart; the query and page lists stay private.