Traffic Forecast

Project future clicks or impressions for one property, place the projection next to last year's numbers and the seasonal shape, and say what has to change to beat the baseline. Every projected figure is an estimate and is labelled as one. The user's request may contain a property, the metric (clicks or impressions), a horizon ("next quarter", "12 months"), a growth target, a conversion rate and average order value for a revenue view, or the window to compare year over year.

Steps

1. Resolve the property and the inputs. If the user's request or the conversation names a property, use it. Site URLs use GSC formats: sc-domain:example.com or https://www.example.com/. Otherwise call list_sites and pick the obvious match. If several plausible properties exist, ask the user which one before continuing. Then translate the horizon into granularity and forecastPeriods:

   • "next quarter" is weekly with 13 periods, "six months" weekly with 26 (the default), "next year" monthly with 12.
   • Weekly needs about 105 days of history (13 complete weeks) and monthly about 240 days (6 complete months), because the first and last period of the window are dropped as partial.

2. Check whether the history is representative. Call detect_change_points with metric set to the metric being forecast and days: 180; raise it to 480 to cover the forecast's full default history (the window must stay between 14 and 480 days). Read:

   • changePoints: each break carries date, direction, changePercent, and beforeMean / afterMean, which are window means over windowDays days either side of the break, not whole-period means (segmentMeanBefore / segmentMeanAfter cover the full segments).
   • A break dated inside the last 90 days means the series moved to a new level recently and the trendline will blend the old level with the new one. Say so, and offer to shorten historyDays to the days since the break, never below 90 and never below what the granularity needs.
   • When beforeMean is 0, changePercent is 0 by convention and the shift is traffic from zero, not "no change".
   • With count 0, trendSummary still carries the overall movement (firstMean14d, lastMean14d, ratio, slopePerDay, direction, halfwayDate); read emptyBecause and nextStep before calling the traffic stable.