Why is my SEO not working? Your rankings didn't drop, your clicks did
By Olly, AEOscore founder8 min read
Reviewed quarterly; figures re-verified before each update.
If your rankings look fine but enquiries keep falling, your SEO is probably not broken: the clicks it used to earn are being answered away. When Google shows an AI summary, people click a traditional result on just 8% of searches, against 15% without one (Pew Research Center, July 2025). At the same time, 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, and the paid clicks you buy instead cost roughly twice what they did a decade ago. The searches did not stop. They moved to places your rank tracker cannot see. Measuring and fixing your presence in AI answers is the job of AEO (answer engine optimisation).
You still rank. So where did the clicks go?
The most honest measurement of this so far comes from Pew Research Center, which watched 68,879 real Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025. When the results page included an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, versus 15% when it did not. They clicked a source cited inside the AI summary just 1% of the time. And 26% of searches that met an AI summary ended the session entirely: question asked, question answered, nobody visited anybody.
The trend line is worse than the snapshot. SparkToro’s clickstream studies put zero-click searches at 58.5% of US Google searches in 2024; by early 2026 the same research series measured 68%. The two years use different data panels, so treat the exact gap as directional, but every study in between points the same way.
It shows up exactly where you would expect: the number one spot. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords in April 2025 and found the average click-through rate of position one fell 34.5% when an AI Overview was present. Seer Interactive, tracking 53 brands and 2.4 billion impressions through to February 2026, measured organic CTR on AI-Overview queries at 0.94% when the brand is not cited in the answer. Below one per cent, for pages that rank.
This is not a niche publisher problem. Similarweb data reported by the Wall Street Journal in June 2025 showed Business Insider’s organic search traffic down 55% in three years and HuffPost’s down by more than half. Informational content gets hit first because informational queries are what AI Overviews answer: Seer’s data shows comparison-style queries trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, and question-format queries 85.9%. Our own UK B2B sample, run in August 2026, shows where that lands for a small supplier by query type: AI Overviews and click-through rates for small UK B2B.
Meanwhile, the clicks you buy cost more every year
The usual response to falling organic traffic is to spend the difference on ads. That trade gets worse every year. WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks, built from 13,474 US search campaigns, put the average Google Ads cost per click at $5.42, more than double the $2.32 of 2016. Their 2025 data measured CPC up 12.88% in a single year, with the average cost per lead at $70.
This is not an agency scare story: it is in Google’s own accounts. Alphabet’s Q3 2025 filing to the SEC reports the average cost-per-click on Google Search up 7% year on year. And aggregate figures flatter the picture; one analysis of long-running accounts published by Search Engine Land in April 2025 found individual advertisers absorbing average CPC inflation of 11.75% a year.
To be fair to paid search: the same 2026 benchmarks show cost per lead falling for the first time in five years as conversion rates improved. PPC still works. It just works at prices that keep drifting up, for a pool of clicking humans that keeps drifting down.
The buyers didn’t stop searching. They moved.
In February 2024 Gartner made a famous prediction: traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026, lost to AI chatbots. The honest scorecard in 2026 is that the number was wrong but the direction was right, and what actually happened is stranger: the AI did not pull people out of Google, it moved into Google. Around 30% of UK keyword search queries now show an AI Overview (Ofcom, December 2025). You did not lose rankings to a rival. You lost the click to the results page itself.
The move outside Google is real too, and the UK numbers are not small. Ofcom’s 2026 media use survey found 54% of UK adults use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, rising to 79% of 16 to 24 year olds. Ofcom’s Online Nation report counted 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT between January and August 2025, around five times the same period a year earlier. Globally, OpenAI reported more than 900 million weekly ChatGPT users in February 2026, handling billions of prompts a day.
Even Apple felt it: their services chief testified in May 2025 that Google searches in Safari had fallen for the first time in 22 years, which he attributed to people asking AI instead. Google disputes the interpretation and says total queries keep growing. Both can be true, and neither helps you if the answers people see never mention your business.
The traffic AI does send is small, but it buys
Here is the part that makes this a budget conversation rather than a doom piece. AI assistants send far less traffic than Google: Similarweb counted 1.13 billion AI referrals to the top thousand websites in June 2025, against 191 billion from Google search. But that AI referral figure grew 357% in a year, and the visitors it represents behave differently.
It makes sense when you picture the visit. Someone who lands on your site from ChatGPT has already asked their question, weighed the options and been told your name. The research happened inside the AI. What arrives is a person ready to act: Salesforce measured AI influencing about 20% of global online sales over the 2025 holiday season.
Being the cited answer is the new position one
The same studies that measure the damage also measure the way out. Seer’s data shows that when a brand is cited inside the AI Overview, its organic click-through more than doubles compared with queries where it is not. Amsive measured branded queries that trigger AI Overviews actually gaining clicks, up 18.68%. Visibility did not disappear; it changed shape. The contest moved from ten blue links to one assembled answer, and the brands named in that answer collect what is left of the clicks, plus the recommendation itself.
That contest is winnable, but only if you can see it. AI answers are not rankings: they differ by engine, move week to week, and draw on sources (community threads, listicles, directories) that classic SEO tools do not watch. Closing that measurement gap is the first job: knowing what each engine says about you, who it cites instead of you, and what changed this week. It is the job we built AEOscore to do, but however you measure it, measure before you spend.
What to do this quarter
- Measure before you spend.Find out what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI actually say about you and your rivals today. The free AEO score does this for you.
- Don’t cancel SEO or PPC. Google is still used by 82% of UK adults (Ofcom). This is about reallocating a slice of budget toward the channel growing 300%+ a year, not abandoning the one that still pays.
- Fix the plumbing AI depends on: crawlable content in the initial HTML, AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, consistent name and description everywhere you are listed.
- Publish answer-shaped pages: question headings, direct answers, real numbers with sources. The queries that trigger AI answers 95% of the time are comparisons and questions; be the page an engine can quote.
- Get cited inside the answer.Seer’s data says the brands named inside the AI answer collect more than double the clicks of the ones that only rank beneath it. Find the comparison articles, directories and threads the engines quote for your category, and get into them.
- Watch it weekly. Engines re-crawl and re-weight on their own schedule, so a fix shipped on Monday needs the same question asked next Monday, and the one after, before you call it.
How sure are these numbers?
More than most in this niche. The click behaviour comes from Pew Research Center watching real searches; the ad costs come from Alphabet’s SEC filing and 13,000+ measured campaigns; the UK adoption figures come from Ofcom. Where a figure comes from a vendor (Semrush, Adobe, Salesforce), treat the magnitude as directional; the direction is the same from every source. Figures verified 7 August 2026; the UK B2B AI Overview sample was added on 17 August 2026. All will be re-checked quarterly.