Your Google Impressions Are Up and Your Clicks Are Down. Here’s What’s Actually Going On.

A wellbeing provider I work with in Australia flagged something odd in her Google Search Console. Her rankings were strong and getting stronger. Her impressions — how often her site showed up in search — were high. But the clicks weren’t coming. Across her whole site, roughly 300,000 impressions over 90 days had produced about 2,100 clicks. That’s a click-through rate under 1%.

One search made it impossible to ignore. For a core commercial term in her field — the kind of phrase someone types right before they hire — one of her pages ranked in the top four. It pulled more than 12,000 impressions over the year. It earned a 0.37% click-through rate. At a top-four ranking, the rough benchmark is 10 to 15%. She was getting roughly thirty times fewer clicks than that position should deliver.

Her ranking wasn’t the problem — it was excellent. More people were seeing her than ever. Fewer were visiting. And nothing about her site had changed to explain it.

More people were seeing her than ever. Fewer were visiting. And nothing about her site had changed to explain it.

If you’ve opened your own Search Console lately and felt that same lurch — the impressions line going up, the clicks line going down, the two of them pulling apart like a zipper coming undone — I want to tell you three things. You’re not imagining it. It’s probably not your fault. And there’s a specific reason it’s happening, one that started in 2025 and isn’t going away.

First, You’re Not Imagining It

This exact pattern — impressions flat or rising, clicks falling, average ranking holding steady — is showing up in Search Console accounts across nearly every industry right now. I see it on client sites. SEO agencies are reporting it on theirs. It’s common enough that “why are my impressions up but my clicks down” has become one of the most-asked questions in search marketing this year.

So before you tear your site apart looking for what broke: in most cases, nothing on your end did. Your content didn’t suddenly get worse. Google didn’t penalize you. Your rankings, in a lot of these cases, are exactly where they were. The thing that changed sits between your listing and the person searching — and it’s new.

What “Impressions Up, Clicks Down” Actually Means

So “impressions up, clicks down” means this: Google is showing you to more people, and a smaller share of them are coming to your site. The visibility is there. The visit isn’t. Marketers have a name for it — the zero-click search, where someone gets their answer right on Google’s results page and never lands on yours. That gap is the whole story — and to understand it, you have to look at what the Google results page actually looks like now versus two years ago.

Why It’s Happening: Google Started Answering the Question Before You Could

In 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary that now sits at the very top of a lot of search results, above every regular link. You’ve seen them. You search something, and before any website appears, Google gives you a few paragraphs of answer assembled from across the web, with a handful of source links tucked to the side.

For the person searching, it’s convenient. They often get what they came for without clicking anything. For the business that used to earn that click, it’s a problem — because the answer they would have provided on their own page is now being delivered on Google’s page instead.

Here’s how fast this moved. SEMrush analyzed more than 10 million keywords across 2025 and found that AI Overviews showed up for 6.49% of searches in January 2025, spiked to nearly 25% by July, and settled around 15.69% by November. So roughly one in six searches now opens with an AI answer instead of a list of links — and which searches get one keeps shifting.

It started with informational, “how does X work” type questions. But it didn’t stay there. SEMrush found AI Overviews on commercial searches (the “best X for Y” comparisons people make right before buying) jumped from about 8% to nearly 19% over the period, and on transactional searches — the ones closest to a sale — from 2% to almost 14%. The AI answer is creeping down the funnel, toward the searches that actually pay your bills.

Now, the reason your Search Console looks the way it does — and here it’s worth listening to Google directly, because Google documents this.

Why impressions climb. To build an AI Overview, Google runs what it calls a “query fan-out” — it fires off multiple related searches behind the scenes and pulls in a wider, more diverse set of links than a classic results page would. More links surfaced, across more searches, means more chances for your site to be shown — and every time one of your links appears in an AI feature, Google counts it as an impression in the same Search Console report. So your impression number can rise because AI Overviews are appearing.

Why clicks don’t follow. When Google answers the question at the top of the page, a share of people have what they came for and never scroll to your link. And even when you do appear, the AI summary takes up room — a lot of it on a phone — pushing every regular link further down. You can hold the exact same ranking you held last year and simply be seen later, and lower, by a thumb that already has its answer.

Back to my Australian client, because she’s the whole pattern in one site. An AI Overview was appearing on about three-quarters of the searches she tracked, and she was cited inside that AI answer on roughly four out of five of them. She is winning the citation race on her own topic — Google is literally using her as a source. The citations just don’t come with clicks. And the phone makes it worse: on her own brand-name search, her site converted at about 39% click-through on desktop and about 13% on mobile — same search, same site. The only thing that changed was how far down the phone screen her result sat, once the AI answer, the map, and the business panel had taken the top.

She’s winning the citation race on her own topic — Google is literally using her as a source. The citations just don’t come with clicks.

The Honest Part: “AI Is Killing Your Traffic” Is Too Simple

I’m not going to hand you a panic headline, because the people on both sides of this argument have a real case — and you deserve both.

On one side, the independent studies are blunt. SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Seer Interactive have all measured the click-through rate on searches that show an AI Overview dropping sharply — by a third to nearly two-thirds, depending on the study and the query. On a per-search basis, when the AI answers, fewer people click. That’s real.

On the other side, Google itself disputes the doom version. In an August 2025 post, the head of Google Search, Liz Reid, wrote that total organic clicks from Google to websites have stayed “relatively stable year-over-year,” that the quality of those clicks has gone up, and that the dramatic-decline reports often rest on “flawed methodologies.” Google’s explanation: people are searching more and seeing more links, so even if any single search is less likely to produce a click, there are simply more searches happening.

Both can be true at once. The click-through rate on a given AI-Overview search can fall while total clicks across the web stay roughly level — because there are more searches, and more slices, than before. What it means for you depends entirely on which searches you depend on. That’s exactly why a generic “traffic is up” or “traffic is down” headline is useless, and your own Search Console is the only honest answer.

One thing both sides agree on: the clicks that still come through are better ones. Google’s own documentation says people who click from a results page with an AI Overview tend to spend more time on the site. When someone reads the summary and clicks anyway, they’re usually after something it couldn’t give them — a real comparison, a price, a person to talk to, proof you’re the one to trust. Fewer clicks, maybe. But more of them from people close to actually hiring or buying.

What This Means for a Business Like Yours

If you run a local service business — a clinic, a studio, a trade, a shop — there’s a piece of good news buried in the SEMrush data. The categories where AI Overviews have gained the least ground are the ones tied to real-world, local, “I’m ready to act” intent. Searches where a person wants a map, a phone number, reviews, a booking — not a paragraph of explanation. Google has its own tools for those (the local map pack, for one), and an AI summary doesn’t serve them well.

The businesses getting hit hardest are the ones whose traffic depended on answering general informational questions — the blog post that ranked for “what causes X” or “how to do Y.” If that’s a big share of how people found you, the ground under that strategy is genuinely shifting, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice.

Either way, the takeaway is the same: the click is no longer guaranteed by the ranking. Showing up isn’t the finish line anymore. Being the thing a searcher trusts enough to choose — that’s the line now.

What I’d Actually Do About It

No single trick fixes this, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. Here’s where I’d put the effort, roughly in order.

Become the source Google cites, not just a result it lists. Getting referenced inside the AI Overview is its own form of visibility. There’s no secret trick to it — Google is explicit that there’s no special markup or setting that gets you in. What earns the citation is the same thing that earns good rankings: clear, genuinely helpful content that answers a real question directly, in plain text Google can read. Solid structured data still helps Google understand your pages — Google’s one rule there is that it should match what’s actually visible on the page — and I’ve written about what schema markup is and why your plugin’s automatic version often falls short. But treat it as a foundation, not a shortcut into the AI box. There isn’t one.

Lean into the searches AI hasn’t taken. If you serve a local area, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your local search presence are more valuable now, not less — that’s the corner of search the AI summary is worst at. Effort spent there compounds while effort spent chasing broad informational rankings increasingly leaks into the AI box.

Write for the click that’s left. The people still clicking past the AI answer want what a summary can’t give: specifics, prices, a real person, proof. Pages that deliver those — a clear services page, an honest comparison, a real result with a real number — win the visitor the AI handed back to you.

Don’t let Google be your only front door. Email lists, repeat clients, referrals, your reviews, a social presence — every channel you own outright is a channel an algorithm change can’t quietly tax. I’m an SEO guy telling you not to bet the whole business on SEO. That’s the honest version.

Track the right number. Raw clicks are going to keep looking grim in isolation, and if that’s the only number you watch, you’ll make panicked decisions. Watch the metrics that actually map to your business: branded searches (are more people specifically looking for you?), conversions (are the visitors you do get turning into customers?), and where you can see it, whether you’re being cited in AI answers at all.

None of this is a new trick. It’s the same fundamentals I lay out in the 8-part SEO strategy every small business needs — AI Overviews just raised the stakes on getting them right.

The Reframe That Matters

For twenty years, SEO had a simple promise: rank well, get the click, get the customer. AI Overviews broke the middle link of that chain. Ranking no longer guarantees the click — and it no longer even guarantees you show up in the AI answer at all. Moz highlighted research showing only a 12% overlap between the top organic results and the URLs Google cites in its AI Mode. Showing up in one is no longer the same as showing up in the other.

The question was never really “how do I rank?” It was always “how do I get chosen?” AI Overviews just stopped letting anyone pretend those are the same thing.

That sounds like bad news, and for a “set it and forget it” approach to search, it is. But it’s clarifying, too. If your impressions are up and your clicks are down, you’re not failing. You’re seeing the new shape of search, early, in your own data. The businesses that adjust to it now — that build to be cited, to be chosen, and to be reachable through more than one door — are the ones that come out the other side fine.

Common Questions

Why are my impressions up but my clicks down?
Almost always because AI Overviews are now appearing on searches you rank for. Google can count an impression both when you appear in the AI summary and when you appear in the regular links, so your impression number rises — while the AI answer satisfies more searchers before they ever click. Your ranking can be unchanged and this still happens. It’s the local face of a bigger trend: the rise of the zero-click search.

Are AI Overviews hurting my SEO?
They’re changing what SEO results look like, not erasing the value of SEO. Independent studies show click-through rates falling on searches that get an AI Overview; Google counters that total clicks to the web are roughly stable and of higher quality. The effect is uneven — heaviest on broad informational searches, lighter on the local and commercial ones many small businesses depend on. Rankings still matter; they’re just no longer a guarantee of traffic on their own.

Should I stop investing in SEO?
No — but I’d change where the investment goes. Less chasing broad informational rankings, more on being the cited source, owning your local presence, and converting the visitors you do get. SEO is shifting from “earn the ranking” to “earn the trust.” Both still run through good search work.

How do I know if AI Overviews are specifically taking my clicks?
Open Google Search Console (the report directly — not the email alert, which is too vague to diagnose from) and look for the signature: impressions flat or rising, clicks falling, average position roughly stable. That combination, especially on your informational pages, is the fingerprint. I do this kind of read for clients as part of an audit.

More on how I approach search: my SEO services.