@Laura5421
You might not think that the updates/changes would affect your bookings but I also host private rooms in my own home and my views have nose dived dramatically since the updates. I can see that I've gone from a very healthy number of views to hardly any at all.
RE updating your listing or photos regularly to keep it high in the search results, I think that may be a bit of a myth. Although it is a few years old now, Airbnb did publish a topic here some time ago specifically about how the search results worked and in it they confirmed that tweaking your listing regularly has no impact whatsoever. I stopped tweaking when I read that and it made no difference to my views or bookings, so I believe I had been simply wasting my time doing that, but if you feel it works and don't mind, I suppose there's no harm. I also heard that it helps if people save your listing to their wish lists. Not sure if that is true or not.
Bear in mind also that, as a new host, you can expect to see an initial dip in views and bookings because Airbnb gives new listings a boost for the first month and, after that, you will drop in the search results. That doesn't mean you can't push it back up, but you no longer have that automatic initial boost.
What I have noticed (prior to these latest updates) is that enquiries often come in waves. I will suddenly get a lot of interest in the same listing for similar dates. When this happens, I suspect that I've had a boost in the search results. I think that the more bookings/interest the listing gets, the higher it appears in searches (which was also confirmed in the Airbnb article).
Also, I will suddenly get a lot of interest from a particular country. I host long term stays and, while this occasionally includes people from the USA, they never made up a large portion of my long term guests who were usually from the UK/Europe and Asia. In the last few months (again before the update) however, almost all of my bookings and enquiries have been from American guests. I do not know if this reflects a change in the way people from the US are travelling/living due to COVID (this would apply to many nationalities, not just the US) or because my listings were getting some sort of boost in their search results or both, but again it maybe reinforces that the more interest a listing gets, the higher it shows in the searches.
