Why Are Impressions in Search Console Going Up While Clicks Are Going Down?

Because your page may be getting shown inside an AI answer box. When Google's AI Overviews or AI Mode places an answer above the organic results, your page gets counted as an impression — it was shown — but the user already got the answer they needed and did not click. The click goes to zero even though the ranking did not drop. This is the clearest signal that AI is intercepting your traffic.

What Is the Difference Between AI Overviews and AI Mode?

AI Overviews is a short answer box that appears above the organic search results on the standard Search page — it has been present since May 2024. AI Mode is a separate, dedicated Search tab that lets you have a full conversational exchange with an AI. Both pull their answers from websites they have already indexed and crawled. For an SEO strategy, both behave similarly: you want your content to be the source they cite.

A Good Average Position in Search Console — Does That Mean Customers Are Actually Seeing My Website?

Not necessarily. Average position in Search Console is an average across all display types for that query, including appearances inside AI citations. A position of 3 might mean your link is the third item in the organic list — or it might mean you are cited in an AI box that took up the whole visible area. You have to open the actual search result page for that query and look at what is really there.

How Do I Check Whether AI Is Actually Stealing My Clicks?

Open Search Console and compare clicks versus impressions for your most important queries over the past 3–6 months. Pull out queries that have high impressions but very low or declining clicks. Then manually search those exact queries in Google and look at what you see. If an AI Overviews box appears above your organic result and completely answers the question, that is your answer — AI has taken the click.

Can I Apply the AI CTR Drop Statistics to Thai Websites?

Use them cautiously. Most published data on this topic — including the Pew Research figures in this article — come from US market research. There is not yet equivalent Thai-specific research. The direction of the trend (impressions rising, CTR falling) is consistent with what Thai website operators are also reporting, but the exact percentage numbers should not be quoted as if they apply to Thai traffic without caveat.

If I Find Evidence That AI Is Intercepting My Clicks, Where Do I Start Fixing It?

Start by checking that the key pages matching those high-impression/low-click queries have the answer written directly as readable text on the page — not only in images or behind interactive elements. Then check your robots.txt and technical settings to confirm you are not accidentally blocking AI crawlers from indexing those pages. Those two checks come before any content strategy discussion.

Your Rankings Haven't Changed, But Where Did the Clicks Go? Reading Search Console in the Age of AI Mode

Imagine your storefront. The sign is exactly where it's always been — same location, hasn't moved an inch. Then one day a stranger starts showing up at your door every morning, intercepting every customer who walks by and asking, "What are you looking for?" — and answering for you, right there on the spot.

Some of his answers are perfectly accurate. He even uses information from the price tags inside your own store. The customer listens, nods, and walks away without ever setting foot through your door.

Your sign hasn't deteriorated. The location is still just as good. There's simply someone standing in the way before they reach your door.

This is what's actually happening on Google search results right now. That stranger is the answer box Google calls AI Overviews, and the conversational search mode called AI Mode. And your storefront sign is the website ranking that Google Search Console reports to you every day.

Many business owners I've spoken to are experiencing the same thing. They open Search Console and see that their main keyword rankings are still where they were — sometimes even better. But the number of calls coming in, LINE messages, or form submissions on their website keeps declining without any identifiable cause. This article is an invitation to read Google's own numbers together, and to open your own Search Console alongside, to check whether this is already happening to your site.

Three-Minute Test Before Reading On

Open your website's Google Search Console now. Go to the Performance report and set the date range to compare the last three months against the three months before that. Look at the two top-line graphs: Total clicks and Total impressions.

If those two lines used to move together like twins — but have recently started to diverge, with impressions staying the same or even rising while clicks have flattened or gently declined — that's the pattern worth investigating. And if you check the Average position column alongside and find the number hasn't worsened — or has actually improved — take a screenshot of this right now. It's the most relevant piece of evidence for everything in this article.

Why Rankings Stay the Same While Clicks Disappear

AI Overviews and AI Mode Are Different, But They Play the Same Game

AI Overviews is an answer box that appears on a normal search results page, positioned above the familiar blue-link results. AI Mode is a full conversational search tab where users can ask long, open-ended questions and continue a back-and-forth dialogue like a chat. Both work in a similar way: they pull content from websites they can access and understand, summarize it into an answer the user can read right there on the results page — without having to click through to the source website.

The Position Search Console Counts Is Not the Same as What a Customer Actually Sees

This is where many people get confused. The Average position figure in Search Console is the average ranking position at which your page appeared in search results, averaged across every time it surfaced — whether it appeared as a traditional blue link, or was cited as a source inside an AI answer box. Both count as an impression. That means your site may genuinely be referenced, may have a strong ranking, and may have been seen — but no one clicked, because the answer they needed was already right in front of them on the search results page.

Which Types of Queries Are Hit Hardest?

Not all queries are affected equally. Queries that include your store's name — where someone types your name directly because they already know you — don't often get an AI box inserted in between, because Google understands the user wants to reach your site directly. But broad, open queries with no specific brand name in them — such as "which sign shop is good near here" or "how much does a website cost" — are the ones hit hardest. These are exactly the kinds of questions AI can summarize into a short answer instantly. When reviewing keywords in Search Console, it's worth separating these two groups and paying particular attention to the broad, non-branded queries.

Separating these two groups in Search Console isn't difficult. Go to the Performance report and add a Query filter, entering your store or brand name. The system will group queries that contain your name into one set. Then switch the filter to "Doesn't contain" the same name to get the broad group you need to watch. Sort this group by impressions from high to low, then look at the CTR of each keyword alongside its Average position. There's no hard rule here — personally, I use a rough approach: if a query is in position 1 to 3 but has a CTR below 10%, I flag it for a closer look. That doesn't automatically mean something is wrong, but it's worth opening the actual search results page to see whether an AI box is sitting in the way.

A related point worth mentioning: even when someone does find your site through an AI answer and clicks through, will they trust your store enough to call or message on LINE? The question of credibility for first-time visitors is something I've written about separately at Signals Thai Buyers Use to Decide Before Transferring Money to an Online Store. This article focuses only on measurement.

Numbers That Google Itself Has Stated

I don't want you to take my word for it, so let me point to verifiable figures and say clearly who said them.

On the Thai side, Google announced AI Mode availability in Thailand from August 22, 2025, initially supporting English only, then expanding to full Thai language support from October 8, 2025. That means Thai users have now been able to ask long questions directly in Thai through AI Mode for nearly a year.

On global usage, Google revealed in May 2026 that AI Mode has over 1 billion monthly users, with the volume of queries processed through AI Mode roughly doubling every quarter. These figures came directly from Google's official blog — they are not estimates from anyone else.

Now for the part most people want to know: when an AI answer box appears, how much does it reduce clicks on the regular links? The figures I can cite with enough confidence in their methodology are from the Pew Research Center, published July 2025, which analyzed the actual search behavior of 900 American adults across nearly 70,000 searches in March 2025. It found that when an AI summary box appeared on a results page, people clicked on regular search result links in only 8% of total sessions — compared to 15% on pages without an AI box, almost double. The same study also found that people who encountered an AI summary box left the search results entirely without clicking anything in 26% of cases, compared to 16% on pages without one.

To be clear: all of these figures are from the US market only. There are no comparable verified studies for Thailand. I can't claim Thai websites would see the same exact proportions. What can be applied is the direction of the trend, not the precise numbers. And that direction is clear enough: AI answer boxes do draw clicks away from regular links.

"Our Rankings Are Still Good, Sales Are Still Normal"

I hear that often. And it's entirely true. I'm not arguing against it.

The one thing worth thinking about is that the clicks that disappear don't vanish all at once in a single large drop. They tend to fade gradually, month by month. By the time you actually feel that new customers are coming through less, several months have typically passed already — because your existing customers who already know your store keep returning as usual, so the total figures still look stable, even though the proportion of new customers who "found you on their own" through Google has been quietly shrinking the whole time.

It's like a well-located shop that's about to have a new road built in front of it. Today's numbers are still good — but the map people use is about to change.

This is why looking at the Search Console graphs picks up the signal earlier than waiting to see it in your sales numbers. The graph changes before customer behavior actually shifts — they don't change at the same time.

We've Experienced This With Our Own Website

I want to be straightforward about this, because I think honesty here is more useful than polished numbers. Our team currently has a clear set of targets we're working toward: getting Lighthouse scores to 100 on both mobile and desktop, while pushing our main keyword rankings to genuine first-page Google positions. We've broken this into 22 sub-tasks and are working through them. To know whether the work is actually moving the needle, on September 16 we stopped relying solely on the Search Console graphs and went to open the actual live search results on mobile and look with our own eyes. We started with our primary keywords — "รับทำเว็บไซต์" (website development services), "รับออกแบบเว็บไซต์" (website design services), and "บริษัทรับทำเว็บไซต์" (website development company) — and found something that made us rethink everything.

The Average position figures in Search Console for these three keywords were 5.4, 6.1, and 5.8 respectively. That sounds quite good. But when we manually checked the actual search results pages with our own eyes, we couldn't find our website's link in the visible results for any of those three queries. Meanwhile, a more specific query like "รับทำเว็บไซต์ กรุงเทพ" (website development Bangkok) had us at position 4, and "รับทำเว็บไซต์ sme เชียงใหม่" (website development SME Chiang Mai) had us at position 1. The pages that were actually ranking, and the pages that should be answering the broader queries, were completely different pages.

What happened? The strong average position figures were being pulled from a different, older URL of ours that had surfaced in a special search feature on the results page — not the page that should directly answer those queries. Search Console was averaging the impressions from both types of display together, which made the numbers look significantly better than the reality.

This particular case wasn't directly caused by AI Mode — I want to be accurate about that. It involved a different search feature. But the lesson is identical: a single average position number never tells the whole story. You have to open the actual search results and check with your own eyes periodically — you can't rely on the graph alone. We don't yet have clean enough data on the direct impact of AI Mode on our own website to share — the data is too mixed with other variables. But when we can measure it clearly, we'll write it up.

Before You Can Measure Anything, Your Site Needs Something to Measure

No matter how precisely you read the signals, if your website doesn't have enough readable text content for AI to reference in the first place, there's nothing for the measurement to work with. This is covered in detail in the article Customers Are Now Asking AI Instead of Google — Where Does That Leave Stores With Only a Facebook or Instagram Page?. And if you want to understand the term AEO before going further, read What Is AEO and How Is It Different from SEO and GEO?. For anyone who has done their checks and wants a step-by-step actionable checklist, see Website Checklist for AI Search Readiness 2026. This article focuses on one thing only: how to measure whether this is already happening to your site.

If your review reveals that your site doesn't yet have enough text-based content — prices are buried in images, or frequently asked questions have never been written out anywhere — we handle everything from complete website restructuring. You can see our scope of work and pricing at tumwebsme.com/package.

A 30-Day Plan to Make Measurement a Habit

Week 1 — Record Your Baseline: Screenshot the Search Console report comparing clicks, impressions, and average position for your top ten keywords over the past six months. This is the baseline you need before anything can be compared.
Week 2 — Find the Most Suspicious Keywords: Identify five to ten queries with high impressions but unusually low CTR. Then manually type each of those queries into Google to see whether AI Overviews or AI Mode is appearing between the search bar and your link.
Week 3 — Audit What You Have: Open the pages on your site that correspond to those queries. Check whether the answers AI would likely pull from them are written clearly as readable text — or buried in images the system can't read.
Week 4 — Schedule Your Next Check: Set a reminder to open the same Search Console report one month from now, compare it against the Week 1 baseline, and then decide which things to address first.

How to Keep Measuring Going Forward

There are three figures worth revisiting every month. First: the CTR of each of your main keywords — is it up or down compared to the month before? Second: the proportion of new customers who say they "found you on their own" versus those who came through referrals or paid ads. If the first number keeps declining even while total revenue looks healthy, that's the early warning signal — it always shows up before the revenue numbers do. Third: once a month, type a question the way a real customer would into AI Mode or ChatGPT and see whether your store's name comes up.

All three need to be read together. Look at any one of them in isolation and you'll misinterpret it every time.

Closing Thoughts

The stranger standing at your door wasn't trying to steal your customers. He was simply answering questions using whatever he could find. If what he picked up to answer with came from your own website, he becomes someone recommending your store — not someone taking business away.

The one thing I'd like to leave you with: don't rely on a single ranking number the way even we once did. Open Search Console, look at the full picture of the graphs regularly, and you'll see the signals before they become real problems.

If after checking you're not sure what the numbers you're seeing mean — or you'd like to know how ready your site is for AI to reference — feel free to reach out and tell us how customers currently find your store. We'll help you figure out what the right starting point looks like for your situation.