This is one of the most confusing and frustrating positions to be in. You check your rankings, everything looks solid, some keywords are even sitting in position one, and yet your actual visitor numbers keep sliding in the wrong direction. It feels like the numbers are contradicting each other, but there is usually a very real explanation behind it.
Ranking well no longer guarantees a click the way it used to
The biggest shift behind this pattern is the changing relationship between position and clicks. Research from Ahrefs, which analysed 300,000 keywords, found that when an AI Overview appears above the traditional results, the page ranking in position one sees a significantly lower click through rate than it would have received without one present. In a follow up study using December 2025 data, that gap had widened even further, with the click through rate for top ranking informational pages continuing to shrink year over year. In practical terms, this means you can hold the exact same position you always have and still receive noticeably fewer visitors, simply because Google is now answering more of that search directly on the results page before anyone even needs to click through.
It is not only about AI Overviews
While AI Overviews are the headline cause, they are not the only reason this happens. Search results pages have generally become more crowded over the last few years, with more space taken up by features like People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, and shopping results, all competing for attention above or alongside the traditional organic listings. Even a genuinely strong ranking can end up visually pushed further down the page than the position number alone suggests, simply because there is more sitting above it than there used to be.
Rankings can also be more volatile than they look day to day
It is also worth remembering that a keyword ranking is rarely a single fixed number. Google’s own guidance on traffic fluctuations explains that rankings can shift for reasons unrelated to your own site, including seasonal changes in search behaviour, algorithm updates, and competitors improving their own content or relevance. A tool showing you sitting in position one for a single tracked date does not necessarily reflect the full picture of how that keyword performs across an entire week or month, particularly for searches where personalisation, location, or device all quietly influence what different people actually see.
What this actually means for how you should be tracking success
The practical takeaway here is that position alone is no longer a reliable proxy for traffic, and traffic alone is not a fair judge of whether your SEO is working. It is worth watching impressions, clicks, and click through rate together, since a rising impression count alongside a falling click count is a strong sign that visibility is intact but something in that middle step, whether that is AI Overviews, a crowded results page, or your own listing simply not standing out, is quietly costing you the click.
If your rankings look healthy but your traffic tells a different story, the answer usually is not to panic about your SEO strategy itself, but to look specifically at what is now sitting above and around your listing, and consider how your content earns the click once someone actually sees it.
Sources referenced:
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/
- Search Console Help, Why did my site traffic drop?: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9079473?hl=en
