Ranking better, clicked less: what our Search Console data shows about AI search

Most of the websites we manage rank better than they did a year ago.

Most of them also get fewer clicks.

That's not a typo, and it's not a bad month. We pulled Search Console data across the sites we work on (law, finance, ecommerce, B2B software, non-profits and a few service businesses, mostly Australian) and compared the first four weeks of October 2026 with the same weeks in 2025. Nearly every site moved up in average position. Most of them still lost clicks. For the typical site, impressions were up slightly and clicks were down about a tenth.

Finance, ecommerce and professional services were hit hardest, each losing around a fifth of their clicks.

So what's going on? We cut the data a few different ways to find out.

People are searching the way they prompt

The first thing that jumped out was query length.

Searches of seven words or more grew about 25% in impressions. They grew at three in every four sites we looked at. Question searches ("how do I…", "what is…", "can I…") grew by almost exactly the same amount.

That makes sense. A year of using ChatGPT has changed how people type into Google. Fewer people search "smsf loan". More search "can my self managed super fund borrow to buy an investment property".

On its own, that sounds like good news. More searches, more specific searches, more chances to show up.

The longer the question, the less anyone clicks

Here's the catch. Click-through on those long searches halved. Same for question searches.

These are exactly the searches Google now answers itself, in an AI Overview or in AI Mode, before anyone gets to a website. You still show up. You just don't get the visit.

Short searches (one or two words, mostly brand names and product categories) held up much better. Click-through fell, but by less, and once you take out the two largest sites in our set, clicks on short searches actually went up slightly.

Here's how each type of search moved, October 2026 against October 2025:

If I had to sum up the whole study in one line, it would be this: the searches that are growing fastest are the ones that send the fewest visitors.

Price questions get answered before the click

We also looked at searches containing cost, price, fees or "how much".

Impressions held. Click-through fell by almost half.

People still want the number. Google is increasingly giving it to them on the results page, pulled from whichever site was willing to publish one. If your website says "contact us for a quote", you're probably not that site.

What the new AI report in Search Console tells you (and doesn't)

Google added a Generative AI report to Search Console this year. It counts impressions where your site appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Across our sites, it's about one impression in twelve for a typical site. The range is wide, from a few percent up to nearly a quarter for one ecommerce site.

(We covered how to find it in our rundown of the new Google Search Console features.) It's useful, but it's thin. You get impressions only. No clicks, no queries, and only the last three months. So you can see that you're in AI answers, but not which questions put you there or whether anyone clicked through.

The result we didn't expect

Going in, I assumed the sites with the most AI exposure would be the ones losing the most clicks. That's the obvious story.

It wasn't true. There was no relationship at all. Sites with lots of AI impressions lost about the same share of clicks as sites with very few.

My read is that the click loss isn't happening only where you're cited. It's spread across the whole results page. AI answers, bigger ads, more Google features: all of it pushes the organic links down and takes clicks from everyone, whether or not your site is the one in the AI answer.

It matches what I'm hearing from clients, which is a bit of a mix. A lot of them tell me conversions have been fairly consistent, but they're seeing a lot less traffic. When you look at the data above, that makes sense. The visits that disappeared were mostly people who got their answer on Google and were never going to enquire anyway. Iris wrote about exactly this pattern in your organic traffic is down, your business isn't dying.

What we're doing about it

None of this means SEO stopped working. It means the scoreboard changed. Here's what we've changed with our own clients:

• We stopped reporting clicks on their own. Impressions, branded search, calls and form enquiries sit next to them. A site can lose clicks and win business.
• We still write for the long question. It's where visibility is growing. Being the page an AI answer is built from is still being seen, even without the click. (Here's how that works for law firms and mortgage brokers.)
• We put real numbers on pages. Prices, timelines, specifics. Vague pages don't get quoted. It's one of the first things we'd fix for an accounting practice, for example.
• We protect the short, high-intent searches. Brand names and "service + city" searches are still where the visits and enquiries come from.

Check your own site in five minutes

You don't need us to see whether this is happening to you.

1. In Search Console, open Performance and set the date to the last 28 days, compared with the same period last year.
2. Click Add filter, choose Query, then Custom (regex), and paste this in: ^(\S+\s+){6,}\S+$. That keeps only searches of seven words or more.
3. Compare impressions and CTR between the two periods. Then swap the regex for ^(how|what|why|can|does|is|should)\b to see question searches.

If impressions are up and CTR is down, you're seeing the same thing we are.

The fine print

This is a snapshot, not a study of the whole web. It covers the sites we manage, one month, two years. A few things worth knowing:

• Totals come from Search Console's rounded summary figures, which is fine for percentage changes.
• Search Console hides rare queries, so long searches are undercounted in both years.
• The pooled numbers lean on our largest sites. We re-ran everything without them and the direction held.
• Google stopped showing 100 results per page in September 2025, which makes average position look better than it is. Our 2025 baseline is mostly after that change, but not entirely.

This is the kind of analysis that sits behind our SEO services. If you want to know how your own site looks through this lens, get in touch. We'll run the same cuts on your Search Console and tell you what we see.

FAQs

Why are my rankings up but my clicks down?

Google is answering more searches directly on the results page, especially long and question-style searches. You can rank higher and still get fewer clicks because fewer people need to visit a website to get their answer.

What is the Generative AI report in Google Search Console?

It shows how many impressions your site gets inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It currently shows impressions only, for the last three months, with no click or query data.

Is SEO still worth it if AI answers take the clicks?

Yes, but measure it differently. Short, high-intent searches still drive visits, and appearing in AI answers still builds visibility. Track enquiries and branded search, not just clicks.