Is your Google Search Console showing a trend of plummeting clicks and soaring impressions? Welcome to “The Great Decoupling,” a seismic shift in how people are using the web driven by AI Overviews. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom explains how AI is fundamentally changing user behavior and what it means for your website’s strategy. Discover if you should embrace impressions as a new metric or fight to reclaim your clicks in this evolving search landscape.
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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk about a hot topic in the industry lately, which a lot of people are calling “The Great Decoupling.”
What is the Great Decoupling?
So this is the decoupling of clicks and impressions. So a lot of sites, maybe yours as well, a lot of sites have charts in their Google Search Console right now that look a bit like this.
So you’ve got clicks, which sometime around May or April this year took a bit of a dive. And then you’ve got impressions, which in the same period have gone up.
And these metrics for most sites have historically been linked. So historically, it’s been the case that when you get more impressions, you’re appearing in more searches, you’re ranking higher, and that means you get more clicks.
That’s how it’s worked. What’s happened is that for a lot of sites, that seems to have broken. So they’re suddenly getting more impressions and fewer clicks. This is particularly true for sites which exist at the top of the funnel, informational content, and this kind of thing.
Why is this happening?
Now, a big part of how and why this is happening has to do with AI Overviews.
So, this chart at the bottom is from a STAT blog post I recently put out, which will hopefully be linked below. It shows the prevalence of AI Overviews in a bunch of markets. In red, I’ve got December 2024, and in blue, I’ve got May 2025.
So you can see in the US, it’s a 50% increase, or thereabouts, in prevalence. In the UK, it’s more than doubled. And in the EU, it’s not all countries in the EU, I think, that have these now, but it used to be that there were no AI Overviews in EU countries at all. I’ve used Ireland for this chart, just because I can use English language keywords to make it a bit of a fairer comparison. And obviously, it’s gone from 0% to 14%. So, Ireland is already at a higher prevalence than the US was in December.
So all of this taken together means a huge increase in the number of search results that have AI Overviews on them. And the thing with AI Overviews is they do count towards your impressions in Search Console. So a lot of people are seeing their impressions go up, but they are not driving a lot of clicks.
Are you losing traffic to AI Overviews?
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When Google first started working on SGEs, as they called them back then, and more recently with the official AIO launch about a year ago, they said that these were going to drive more clicks for many sites, and that has just not been very many people’s experience at all.
And that’s a big part, in my opinion, of where these charts are coming from for so many sites.
Why should we care about impressions?
So, I want to talk a little bit about whether we care and how we should view this increase in impressions.
So caring about impressions, so I’ve actually been an advocate for a long time of impressions as a sort of underrated KPI for SEO, and there are a few reasons for that.
1.Other channels do
One is that other channels do. If you work in a large business, there will be teams within your business that are paying a fortune for things like billboard advertising, TV advertising, and print advertising. These drive no or almost no clicks. They’re very expensive. They’re all about impressions.
SEO is almost certainly a more cost-effective way to get impressions. So if parts of your business care about impressions, then maybe you should be taking credit for that as well.
2. They are indirectly good for rankings
Secondly, impressions are indirectly good for rankings. Now, I’m not saying impressions are a ranking factor or something strict like this. But what I mean is that the more people have heard of you, the more likely they are to click on your results, and the more likely you are to get traffic.
And we know now, for all these reasons, that Google is using user signals to influence rankings. That’s gone from being a conspiracy theory to hard fact in the last few years. And impressions is a way of improving some of those user signals. It’s a way of people gaining familiarity and trust with your site and your brand.
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3. Impressions are good data
Thirdly, impressions are just good data. There are a lot of things in SEO that we don’t have good data for. Impressions, we do have pretty good data for. It’s in Search Console. It’s free. It’s universal. It’s comparable with other channels.
Okay, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of weirdness in how Google Search Console works. Okay, it’s only showing you SEO. But compared to a lot of things we deal with, this is actually pretty hard and fast data, and it’s free. So that makes this more tempting to work with as a metric.
4. Top of funnel content does not have to be about clicks
And then, this is the controversial one, really. So I think maybe his words were taken out of context, perhaps, but I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media lately about a statement that Martin Splitt made at an event.
I can’t remember exactly what the event was now, but we’ll put that in the description below. Martin Splitt is a Googler, and he’s a guy that I have a lot of time for. So I’m not trying to criticize him here. And like I said, I think maybe it was taken out of context as well. But the point that he was taken to say was that top of funnel doesn’t have to be about clicks, that maybe top of funnel can just be an impression, and then people will still make their way to a purchase in some other way.
The trouble is, I think it doesn’t quite work like that for a lot of sites. Sure, there are sites where that model is fair. There are sites where your top of funnel doesn’t have to involve a click, and then people will make a purchase at the bottom of the funnel on your site, and that’s fine. Or maybe even they’ll make a purchase off your site, and that’s fine. But for a lot of sites, that’s not realistic. If you’re a publisher and you monetize by display adverts or affiliate links on your site, this model doesn’t work.
You need that click at the top of funnel. And this is also a bit of a paradigm break, by which I mean we have this whole ecosystem called the web, where there is an incentive for people to /learn/seo/google-eat because it gets clicks and they can monetize those. If there’s no incentive to publish that content, then why will people keep doing it?
Now, this is a critical aspect to how the web works as an ecosystem. If the only incentive is to write about people’s products on other people’s sites and then not get the click yourself, but the product benefits, how do publishers work as a business? So this is a big problem.
So what now?
So what can we actually do? I think you have two options in terms of how you think about this.
1. Embrace impressions
The first is option one, you can embrace it, by which I mean embrace that you are just going to get fewer clicks, and lean into the impressions. Presumably, if this is you, you think that impressions are valuable to you in some other way, perhaps because you have brick-and-mortar businesses that people are going to go and make purchases at that they’re going to be more likely to do that if they have a good affinity with your brand, something like this.
So if you’re viewing SEO as this kind of brand channel, you’re going to focus on offsite work, being mentioned on other sites, this kind of thing. You’re going to focus on generative engine optimization, because a lot of that work to appear in things like ChatGPT and AI mode is also about impressions rather than clicks.
And you’re probably going to focus on things to improve your Brand Authority, such as PR in the old-school sense, but also digital PR. So you’ll be looking at all these things that are very brand-focused SEO activities.
2. Fight the decline in clicks
If, on the other hand, you think that’s not going to work for you, that’s not going to pay the bills, you want to fight it, there are three tactics I’d suggest.
So firstly is diversify, and that’s tough medicine. But that basically means stop relying on Google as a channel.
Move down the funnel. It’s hard to know how this will pan out. But in a lot of verticals, the lower you go in the funnel, the more Google is still sending clicks, partly because that’s how their business works. But even in cases where that is true now, I do wonder about things like product feeds, Google becoming a marketplace in their own right, and then it’s a bit of a race to the bottom. So even here is not totally safe.
And then lastly, in your keyword research. So we just added a feature to Moz Pro, where you can view in your keyword research which keywords have AI Overviews. So that can help you to sort of find what the gaps in Google’s armor might be and where you can still play the old game, as it were. But yeah, good luck with that.
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It is tough out there. In any case, I hope this has been useful to you. If you’ve had a different experience, we’d love to hear about it on our socials. Thank you very much.