Impressions up, clicks down: AI Overviews or something else?

When Search Console shows impressions rising while clicks fall, the cause is usually one of five things: AI Overviews answering the question on the results page, a reporting change (Google's 2025–2026 data issues and the end of the num=100 parameter), new rankings for broad queries you barely win, a SERP feature pushing your link down, or seasonality. You can tell them apart in about twenty minutes with the Performance report's compare mode and three filters: query, page and search appearance.

How does Search Console count AI Overview and AI Mode impressions?

Google folds its AI features into the normal report. Its documentation for site owners says pages appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode are "included in the overall search traffic" and reported in the Performance report under the Web search type (AI features and your website). The Performance report help page spells out the counting rules:

• Position: an AI Overview occupies a single position in the results, and all links in it are assigned that same position.
• Impressions: the standard rules apply. A link in an expandable section generally has to be expanded or scrolled into view to count.
• Clicks: a click on an external link inside an AI Overview or AI Mode answer counts as a click.
• AI Mode follow-ups: a follow-up question counts as a new query, so its data is attributed to that new query.

The practical consequence: when your page is one of the sources linked in an AI Overview, you can collect an impression at a high position without anyone scrolling to your organic listing, and without a click. That pattern raises impressions and lowers CTR on exactly the queries where you used to win clicks.

Since June 2026 Google has also offered a separate generative AI performance report, announced on the Search Central blog and, according to Search Engine Roundtable, rolled out to all sites by August 31, 2026. It shows impressions in AI features by page, country, device and date. It does not show clicks or queries, so it tells you which pages are shown in AI answers but not what that is worth.

Do AI Overviews really reduce clicks?

The best public data says yes, for informational searches, by a lot:

Both Ahrefs studies are correlations on mostly informational keywords, not controlled experiments, and Pew measured a panel of users, not your site. They tell you the effect is real and large on how-to and what-is searches; they do not tell you how much of your own drop it explains. Your own query list does that.

Was it a reporting change instead?

Before you rewrite anything, rule out the two data events that moved every site's numbers in 2025 and 2026.

The end of num=100 (September 2025)

In mid-September 2025, Google stopped honoring the &num=100 URL parameter, which rank trackers and scrapers used to load 100 results in one request. Google told Search Engine Land that the parameter "is not something that we formally support" (Search Engine Land). Widely shared analyses afterwards reported that most sites saw total impressions fall and average position improve, while clicks stayed largely flat. The common explanation, not confirmed by Google, is that automated 100-result requests had been generating impressions at positions 20 to 100 that no person ever saw.

If your chart shows impressions climbing through mid-2025 and then stepping down in September 2025 with no matching change in clicks, that is this, not a penalty. Treat the period after mid-September 2025 as a new baseline.

The May 2025 to April 2026 impression logging error

Google's Data anomalies in Search Console page records that "a logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 until April 27, 2026." After the fix, Google says you may notice a decrease in impressions. Only impressions and the metrics derived from them, CTR and average position, were affected; clicks were not.

That matters for any year-over-year comparison that crosses those dates. If you compare a 2026 month with the same 2025 month, part of the impression change can be the logging, not your rankings. Clicks are the trustworthy metric across this window.

The same page notes that FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026, so FAQ impressions in the Search appearance filter dropped from that date. Always scan the Data anomalies page for your date range first; it takes a minute.

What else makes impressions rise while clicks fall?

One subtle case is worth spelling out. Average position and CTR are averages over every impression. If your page starts showing at position 45 for a hundred new questions, your site-wide CTR drops and your average position gets worse, even though nothing you already ranked for changed. Google's own guide on debugging traffic drops recommends focusing on impressions and clicks and using average position only as a secondary signal for this reason.

How do you diagnose it in Search Console, step by step?

1. Check Data anomalies. Open Google's Data anomalies page and note any event inside your date range, including the May 2025–April 2026 impression logging error.
2. Set a fair comparison. In Performance, Search results, choose Date, then Compare: the last 28 days against the same 28 days last year, and separately against the previous period. Keep the search type on Web.
3. Turn on all four metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR, position) and look at the chart. A clean step on a single date points to reporting; a gradual slide points to rankings or the results page.
4. Open the Queries tab and sort by Clicks difference. Take the 20 queries that lost the most clicks. For each, compare position: if position held but clicks fell, the results page changed.
5. Search those queries yourself in a private window, signed out, on the device that lost the most clicks. Note whether an AI Overview, AI Mode link, video carousel, shopping block or People also ask box sits above you, and whether your page is one of the cited sources.
6. Sort Queries by Impressions difference. If most of the new impressions are on queries where you rank below 20, you are seeing growth in visibility, not a loss.
7. Repeat on the Pages tab. A drop concentrated on a few how-to and explainer pages fits AI Overviews. A drop spread across templates, products or a whole folder fits a technical or ranking problem; see diagnosing a traffic drop after a Google update.
8. Split by Devices and Search appearance. A desktop-only impression spike with no clicks fits automated traffic. A fall in one appearance type, such as FAQ rich results after May 7, 2026, explains itself.
9. Check the generative AI report (the expandable tab in Performance, if your site has enough data) to see which of your pages are shown in AI features. Pages that appear there and also lost clicks are your AI Overview cases.

SEO Rank Fixer runs a version of this every night on your Search Console data: it flags pages and queries whose clicks are decaying, separates a CTR gap (a page earning fewer clicks than its position should) from a ranking loss, and lets you annotate dates such as an update or a migration in Advanced mode.

What should you do if AI Overviews are taking the clicks?

You cannot turn AI Overviews off for other people, and opting your site out of them removes the citations too. What you can control is whether your page is the one cited, and what you rely on informational queries for.

• Answer the question in the first two sentences under a heading that matches the query, then give the detail. Pages that state the answer plainly are easier to quote. The answer engine optimization guide covers the page patterns.
• Add what a summary cannot: your prices, your data, worked examples, tools, photos, original testing. A click is still worth making when the page has something the overview only points to.
• Rebalance toward queries with intent to act: comparisons, local services, product and pricing pages, where people still click through to decide.
• Fix the snippet where you are not losing to AI. If position held and no AI Overview shows, a better title and description is the fastest win. Preview it with the SERP snippet preview tool.
• Measure brand and AI referrals too. Some of the attention moves to AI assistants. The guide to showing up in AI Overviews and AI Mode explains how sources get picked.

When is a drop in clicks a real ranking problem?

When position falls on the same queries, clicks fall with it, and the pattern covers many pages at once. That is no longer a CTR story. Check indexing first (look for spikes in Crawled - currently not indexed or server errors), then compare against the dates on Google's Search Status Dashboard. If a core update lines up, read Google's own guidance before changing anything, and do not rewrite pages that still rank well.

If the problem is pages stuck just below the top results rather than a fall, the fix is different again: see how to find and fix striking-distance pages.