Impressions doubled. Clicks didn’t.

The two lines leave October together and never meet again. By January the median site was being shown two-thirds more often than in October, with barely more clicks. By August it was shown 2.18× as often and clicked 1.22× as often. The space between the lines is the zero-click era: Google showing these pages more than ever, increasingly inside an answer that does not need the visit.

This is not a story about sites failing. These sites kept publishing and kept gaining visibility. The exchange rate between visibility and visits is what moved.

Between September 10 and 13, 2025, Google stopped honoring the &num=100 parameter that rank trackers and AI scrapers used to pull a hundred results in one request. Each of those scraped pages had been counted as an impression for every site on it, mostly deep in the results where no human ever looks.

Across 1,503 sites the median site lost 33% of its impressions in days. Clicks moved +4%. Average position improved from 29 to 13 for 99% of sites without a single ranking changing. If you celebrated a ranking jump that week, it was not one.

Cleaned of bot traffic, October 2025 showed the real click-through rate of these sites for the first time: a median of 1.19%. It slid to 0.71% by March and never recovered. By August 2026 the median site’s CTR was 40% below October, and 79% of sites were down.

Zoom out and the year nets to nothing: the median site ended August 2026 with a click-through rate within 1% of August 2025 (1.01×). Bots inflated impressions before; AI answers deflate clicks now.

The obvious objection is that these sites publish a lot, and new pages start on page two where nobody clicks. So we isolated the 129 sites whose average position barely moved (within two places). Their CTR still fell 31%, and 77.5% of them lost CTR. Same rankings, fewer clicks.

The niches that lost most are the ones AI answers best: marketing advice, software comparisons, legal and financial explainers. Questions with a text answer get answered on the results page. Home and garden, B2B services and fashion held up better because people still want to see the product, the provider or the photo. If your niche is at the top of this list, a traffic plan built on informational articles alone is already out of date.