The Great Decoupling (Or Why Your Clicks Are Down and Impressions Up)

Summary

If your Google Search Console chart looks like an open-mouthed crocodile, with clicks plummeting as impressions soar, here’s why.The roll-out of AI Overviews now creates two opportunities for top-ranking content to log impressions for a given keyword, while simultaneously reducing the number of people who click from the search engine results page (SERP) into your content.Welcome to the era of zero-click SEOIf your boss is giving you a hard time over this, it really isn’t your fault. As this SERoundtable article attests to, this is something being observed across the industry (comments on my recent LinkedIn post corroborate this, too).And we’re impacted. Here’s what this looks like for the Ahrefs blog, via the GSC report in Ahrefs:In the six-month period at the end of 2024, the daily impressions and clicks for the Ahrefs blog showed a positive correlation of 0.425. Clicks and impressions generally increased together. You can see this in the graph above: both lines generally move up and down in tandem.In the first six months of this year, that correlation has changed radically to a negative correlation of -0.352. Now, as impressions climb, clicks tend to decrease at the same time. Impressions are soaring while clicks are plummeting. Clicks and impressions have become decoupled from one another—one can grow while the other declines.Hence what Darwin Santos perfectly dubbed “The Great Decoupling”. One of the few hard-and-fast rules of SEO no longer holds. Thanks Google.The two causes of the great decouplingImpressions are increasing because AI Overviews now give companies two chances to log an impression for a given keyword: once as a “traditional” blue link in the search results, and again as a citation in an AI Overview.Most AI Overview citations seem to be pulled from content that already ranks highly in the traditional search results (per one study, “Three-quarters of the links cited in Google AI Overview appear in position 12 or higher in the organic search results...