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Honestly, not trying to start a holy war, but I’m seeing more of these AI answers soak up the click and leave the actual site with scraps. I’ve got a few pages that used to pull solid long-tail traffic and now it’s like people get the answer right there and bounce. Maybe that’s the whole point, but it’s rough when you’re the one doing the work and the SERP just eats the visit. What’s weird is some of the pages still rank fine, impressions are there, but CTR is just ugly. I keep wondering if this is more of a visibility problem than a ranking problem now. Feels like the old “position 3” thing doesn’t mean much if the user never even gets that far. Anyone else seeing the same, or am I just getting unlucky with my niche?
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Usually, yeah, I’m seeing it too. Not everywhere, but enough that it’s hard to call it noise anymore. The annoying part is exactly what you said — rankings look “fine,” impressions stay up, but the click just… evaporates. So if you’re only staring at position reports, it looks like nothing changed, which is kind of a joke. I don’t think it’s just a niche thing either. Anything with a clean factual answer seems to get hit hardest. The stuff that still gets clicked usually has some reason to leave the SERP — comparison, nuance, current info, or just something the AI box can’t fully flatten. At this point I’m treating a lot of those pages more like visibility assets than traffic assets. Not ideal, but that seems to be where this is headed unless Google backs off a bit, which… yeah, good luck with that.
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Realistically, yeah, that’s the ugly part nobody wants to say out loud. It’s not even always a straight “AI box killed it” thing either. I’ve got pages where the SERP got more cluttered, CTR went to crap, and there isn’t even some obvious AI answer sitting there. Google just keeps stuffing more crap above the result and people stop scrolling. “Position 3” feels pretty meaningless on a lot of these queries now. If the intent gets satisfied in the SERP, you’re basically fighting for leftovers.
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Yeah, I’m seeing that too, and it’s not just one niche thing. The annoying part is the CTR drop doesn’t always line up cleanly with some big obvious AI box. Sometimes the SERP just gets more bloated in general — snippets, PAA, junk modules, whatever — and your “good” ranking turns into a dead click. So yeah, position 3 starts feeling kind of fake on a lot of queries. I’d be careful calling it purely a ranking issue. A lot of the time the page is still “winning” visibility, but the click is getting intercepted before the user ever reaches you. Which is basically the same pain either way, I guess. Den’s making it sound cleaner than it is. In practice it’s messier — some pages get hit hard, some don’t, and sometimes the same page will swing depending on query intent and how much crap Google stacks above it that week. From what I see,
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Yeah, I’m seeing it too. Not even always the shiny AI box either — sometimes Google just piles on enough junk above the fold that the click’s dead before you get a chance. CTR’s definitely getting uglier while impressions still look “fine,” which is the annoying part. Honestly, Feels less like “you dropped rankings” and more like “you got quietly robbed.”. Could be wrong though.
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Realistically, realistically, yeah, that’s pretty much what we’re seeing too. The annoying bit is clients still look at “ranking” like it means something by itself, and then you show them impressions are up but leads are flat or down and they act like you’re making excuses. It’s not a clean drop anymore, it’s just the click getting mugged before it reaches the site. And honestly, Google keeps stuffing more junk in there every month so even when you *do* hold a decent position, it’s not the same result anymore. “Position 3” sounds nice in a report, but in practice it can be basically worthless on some queries. Honestly,
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Usually, yeah, pretty much. The “ranking” report is getting kind of fake at this point if the SERP itself is doing the stealing. I’ve got a couple client pages sitting in the same spot they’ve always been, but the click-through is just garbage now because Google throws a wall of crap in front of the actual result. And the annoying part is you can’t even point to one clean problem. It’s not like “oh we lost positions In most cases,.” It’s more like the query got diluted to death. Makes reporting a pain too, because clients see impressions and think things are fine until the phone isn’t ringing.
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From my experience, yeah, that’s basically what it is on a lot of queries now. We’ve had a couple pages hold their spot and still lose a chunk of clicks because the SERP’s doing the answering for them. Rankings look nice in a report, but if nobody scrolls past the junk above it, who cares. At least lately.
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Personally, Yeah, it’s real. Not “maybe in some niches” real — just flat out real. We’ve got a few pages that didn’t move much position-wise, but the clicks fell off a cliff once those AI boxes started showing up. And it’s always the same annoying pattern: impressions hold up, rankings look “stable,” then the CTR gets wrecked and everyone acts surprised. The part that bugs me is clients don’t care about the nuance. They see “still ranking” and assume nothing changed, meanwhile the SERP’s basically answering the query before they ever hit the site. So yeah, visibility is kind of a joke metric now on a lot of terms. I don’t think it’s just your niche either. Some queries are getting gutted harder…
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