Reporting · Diagnostics
Rankings stable or improving. Organic traffic down, sometimes sharply. It does not make sense on its face, and the instinct is to suspect the tracking, the content, or the site. It is usually none of those.
By Izzy Gregorio · Updated August 2026 · 7 min read
In short
Impressions rising while clicks fall is the signature pattern of AI answers absorbing the visit. Organic click-through on informational queries with an AI Overview has fallen 61%, and clicks are down 41% even on queries without one. Your ranking still earned the impression. The answer arrived before anyone scrolled. It is a structural change in the results page, not a failure in your content.
Start here
Before any explanation, identify which of these you are actually looking at, because they mean different things and only one of them is the pattern this post is about.
| Impressions | Clicks | Rankings | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up or flat | Down | Stable or better | The pattern this post explains. The answer is being served before the click. Not a content problem. |
| Down | Down | Down | A conventional visibility problem. Diagnose it the conventional way before blaming AI. |
| Down | Down | Stable | Demand shifted, or queries moved elsewhere. Check search volume for your terms before anything else. |
| Up | Up | Stable or better | Working as intended. Worth still testing AI visibility separately, since it is a different score. |
If you are in row one, keep reading. The explanation is not a mystery anymore. It is simply not reaching most marketing dashboards yet.
The math
Seer Interactive analyzed 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations, covering 25.1 million organic impressions between June 2024 and September 2025. Two findings, and the second one is the surprising one.
organic click-through on informational queries with an AI Overview, falling from 1.76% to 0.61%
organic click-through on queries without an AI Overview at all
Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR, September 2025
The first number is the one everyone quotes. Google's AI Overview answers the question at the top of the page, before anyone scrolls to the organic results. The user gets what they came for. The page that won the ranking still loses the visit.
The second number is the one that should change how you think about it. Clicks are also down 41% on queries where no AI Overview appears at all. Which rules out the comfortable objection that this only affects queries you do not care about. People are clicking less everywhere, likely because they are getting answers from assistants and other surfaces before they ever reach a results page.
One precision note, because this figure gets misquoted constantly. The 61% is organic click-through across informational queries where an AI Overview appears. It is not a position-one figure.
Ahrefs measured the position-one number separately at roughly a 58% drop when an AI Overview is present, updated December 2025. Both are severe. They are different measurements, and citing one as the other is the sort of thing a skeptical reader catches.
And this is not a rare occurrence. Ahrefs found that nearly all informational keywords now trigger an AI Overview. Meanwhile Semrush measured a 93% zero-click rate in Google's AI Mode, which replaces the results page entirely rather than sitting above it.
Run it yourself
Clicks equal impressions multiplied by click-through rate. That is the whole equation, and it is why the pattern feels contradictory until you write it down.
Take a page whose impressions rose 25 percent over a year, which is a genuinely good outcome and evidence the ranking work succeeded. Now apply a 61 percent fall in click-through.
The arithmetic
Impressions: up 25% → a multiplier of 1.25
Click-through: down 61% → a multiplier of 0.39
1.25 × 0.39 = 0.49
Traffic roughly halves, while every visibility metric on the report improves.
More visibility. Fewer visitors. Better rankings. Worse traffic. Nothing broke, and no amount of auditing the content will find the cause, because the cause is not on your website.
Do this with your own figures before your next reporting meeting. Two numbers from Search Console, one multiplication, and you can explain a year of declining traffic in a single sentence that does not sound like an excuse.
The larger gap
This is the part that gets missed. Everything above is at least measurable. You can see impressions holding and clicks falling, and once you know what causes it, you can explain it.
On the assistants themselves, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, there is no click to measure at all, ever. When somebody asks a question and gets an answer with a brand name in it, that interaction does not appear in Search Console. It does not appear in your analytics. It is entirely invisible to your existing reporting.
Two visibility gaps stacked on top of each other, and only one of them shows up in any report you have ever seen.
Which is why the falling traffic number, frustrating as it is, is the visible half of the problem rather than the whole of it.
Keep going
What is actually changing in search and AI visibility, every figure sourced, dated, and stated at its real size. Written for people who have to explain a report to somebody else.
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The divergence
Overlap between top Google rankings and AI-cited brands
~76% → 17 to 38%
Mid-2025 to early 2026, in roughly a year
Ahrefs, July 2025, for the earlier figure. Multiple studies for the 2026 range, which varies by methodology.
Less than a year ago, a strong ranking was a reasonable proxy for AI visibility too. That is no longer true, and BrightEdge put a sharper point on it in February 2026: only around 17 percent of AI Overview citations come from pages ranking in Google's organic top ten. More than four in five citations go somewhere else entirely.
One honest caveat, since this post is about reading numbers correctly. The divergence is not uniform. Google's own AI Overviews still overlap substantially with Google's rankings, which makes sense given they run on shared systems. The sharp separation is on the platforms Google does not operate, and those are the ones growing fastest.
And here is where the clicks actually went. Seer found that brands cited inside an AI Overview earn roughly 35 percent higher organic click-through than uncited brands on the same results page, for the same query.
So clicks are not simply evaporating. They are consolidating around whoever gets named. That is what makes this a problem worth solving rather than a condition to accept.
What to do
The foundation still matters. Google search is not going away, ranking well still has value, and the technical and content work behind those rankings supports AI visibility as well. Panic-rebuilding a strategy that is working is the expensive version of this mistake.
If clicks are structurally suppressed, reporting clicks as the headline number tells a misleading story about work that is actually succeeding. Lead with impressions and share of voice, report click-through as context, and note whether the query carried an AI Overview.
Rankings and AI visibility are now two separate measurements, and you almost certainly have only one. The second requires a different test: querying ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini with the questions your buyers would ask, and documenting what comes back. You cannot close a gap you cannot see.
Common questions
Because AI Overviews answer the query at the top of the results page, before anyone scrolls to organic results. Seer Interactive measured a 61% fall in organic click-through on informational queries where an Overview appears. Your ranking still earns the impression. The visit gets absorbed by the answer above it.
Clicks equal impressions multiplied by click-through rate, so a rise in one can be overwhelmed by a fall in the other. Impressions up 25 percent gives a multiplier of 1.25. Click-through down 61 percent gives a multiplier of 0.39. Together that is 0.49, meaning traffic roughly halves while every visibility metric improves.
No. The same Seer study found organic click-through fell 41 percent even on queries where no AI Overview appeared, suggesting people are clicking less generally as they get answers from assistants and other surfaces. So avoiding Overview-heavy topics does not avoid the problem.
Yes. When clicks are structurally suppressed, leading with clicks tells a misleading story about work that may be succeeding. Report impressions and share of voice as headline numbers, click-through as context, and note whether queries carried an AI Overview. Then add AI visibility as a separate measurement.
Measurably, yes. Seer found brands cited inside an AI Overview earn roughly 35 percent higher organic click-through than uncited brands on the same results page for the same query. Clicks are not disappearing so much as consolidating around whoever gets named, which is what makes citation worth pursuing.
Start here
The AI visibility audit tests your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini using the queries your buyers would actually use, compares the results against your closest competitors, and identifies the structural reasons behind whatever gap it finds. No sales call required. You request it, we run it, you get a plain-English report.
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