We’re calling it “The Great Decoupling.”
Ryan Law wrote a short post about it for Ahrefs Blog (link in comments) — a handy explainer you can forward to your boss or client when they ask what the hell is going on.
Here’s the gist:
1/ Clicks are DOWN because of Google's AI Overviews.
People get their answers directly from AI — so they don’t bother clicking through to your site anymore.
2/ Impressions are UP because of Google's AI Overviews.
The new AI block includes link citations, which boosts your “Impressions” metric.
And here's something Ryan didn’t mention:
According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, “AI Overviews are increasing Search usage.”
This means that the impressions might be climbing up because people ask more questions to Google, where they expect to get a "zero click" answer.
And this is now our new normal, which we have to adapt to.
P.S. Just in case you like the term "The Great Decoupling," we stole it from Darwin S. 🙂
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