Impressions Up but Clicks Down? What It Meant on Our Sites
Impressions up but clicks down in Search Console? On a site we run, the new impressions and the lost clicks were on different pages. How to find yours.
By Tyler Phan8 min readLast reviewed
Part of our guide to Search Console and GA4
On this page
Impressions up but clicks down in Search Console means Google is showing your pages more often and fewer people are clicking them. Both lines can be right at the same time, and the chart alone won't tell you why. One of the sites we run had exactly that month in September 2026, and when we used it in what a monthly SEO report should include, we wrote that we hadn't confirmed the reason. This post does the check, on that game news site, on our manhwa site and on elmrank.com in its first week.
What the two numbers count
Google's help defines an impression this way: "An impression means that a user has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site in Search." In general it is counted "whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view." A click needs someone to open the link. So impressions grow whenever Google tries your pages for more searches, including searches where your link sits far down the page, and clicks only follow where people pick you.
Two more details matter for this chart.
The chart and the Pages tab count differently. For the chart, "if two results from the same site appear for one query, they count as a single impression." Data grouped by pages "is aggregated by page," one impression per page shown. On our game news site in September, page rows added up to 1,927,574 impressions while the chart said 1,212,464. Compare pages with each other, and use the chart for the whole site.
AI Overviews are inside the same numbers. Google says sites in AI features "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console," under the Web search type, and that "all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position" as the Overview. In the periods we pulled for this post, the Search appearance grouping on our three sites listed only review snippets, translated results and product snippets, so we had no way to separate AI Overview impressions.
The month we hadn't explained
The game news site's September against August, from the monthly report post: clicks 22,304 to 19,625 (down 12%), impressions 1,102,025 to 1,212,464 (up 10%), average position 8.3 to 7.7. On October 23 we pulled the same two months by query and by page.
The searches Search Console names (it hides the rarest ones) split into one game and everything else:
| Named searches | August | September |
|---|---|---|
| Naming one survival game | 25,449 impressions, 331 clicks | 100,096 impressions, 1,077 clicks |
| All other named searches | 322,153 impressions, 8,777 clicks | 294,295 impressions, 6,102 clicks |
Search Console, web search, final data, calendar months. Counted once per search, like the chart.
Without that one game, named impressions fell 9% and clicks fell 30%. Among named searches, the whole rise in impressions came from that one topic, at an average position of 8.8, with a click rate of 1.1%.
The Pages tab shows where the clicks went (page counts, so the totals are larger than the chart's):
- The 20 pages that lost the most clicks went from 7,781 clicks to 3,234. Their impressions halved, from 237,621 to 118,562, while their average position barely moved (5.2 to 5.5). Together they account for 51% of the clicks lost on pages that had impressions in both months. Fifteen of the 20 were posts from June and July. We had edited 17 of them during August and September, four with new titles.
- The 13 pages on that one game we already had in August went from 95,648 impressions to 432,868 at about the same position (8.4 to 8.6), and their click rate fell from 0.87% to 0.43%.
- The 683 pages with no August impressions brought 244,276 impressions and 3,389 clicks. Almost all of those impressions were on posts published in September.
In short, the site lost impressions at about position 5, where those 20 pages got 3.3% of them as clicks, and gained impressions at about position 9. That matches our sites' own curve: in what a good CTR is in Search Console, position 5 gets 3.3% and positions 8 and 9 get 1.0% and 0.6%. Our reading of the lost clicks is that fewer people searched for what those pages cover, since they kept their place and were shown less often; Search Console doesn't report search volume, so that part is inference. Google's August and September 2026 spam updates also fall in these two months (Google's Search Status Dashboard lists them as starting on August 18 and September 24), and these numbers can't separate them out.
That changes what we'd do next. The report post suggested fixing titles and descriptions where the click rate is lowest. But the new impressions we could trace sat around positions 8 and 9, where a click rate near 1% is about what our sites get anyway. And most of the lost clicks were on pages Google showed less often. We picked the 20 above because they lost the most, so part of their drop may be a bad month after a good one. The 609 other pages whose impressions fell show the same thing as a group: their impressions went from 1,084,778 to 647,685, down 40%, and together with the 20 they lost 8,242 clicks, while the 284 pages whose impressions rose gained 2,036. Four of the 20 got new titles in those months, and we can't separate what that did, but a new title is unlikely to bring back searches that aren't happening. We'd start with the 20 pages: whether people still search for what they cover, and whether a newer post of ours now shows instead.
Three weeks on the manhwa site: same pages, fewer clicks
The manhwa site had three weeks in a row of more impressions and fewer clicks. Comparing the week of September 21 with the week of October 12, impressions rose 6.5% (184,007 to 195,943) and clicks fell 12.7% (4,532 to 3,955), while average position stayed at 6.3 to 6.4.
This time new pages don't explain it. The 95 pages with impressions only in the later week brought 143 clicks. The 438 pages shown in both weeks went from 4,514 clicks to 3,818 while their impressions rose 3%. Among named searches at positions 1 to 3, impressions grew from 8,576 to 12,882 and the click rate fell from 6.65% to 4.05%. The click rate also fell in each of the site's three biggest countries: the US, India and the Philippines.
The pages held their positions and lost clicks anyway, and this is the case we can't explain. We edited every one of the eight pages that lost the most clicks during those weeks, mostly freshness and fact updates, and three of them got new titles. Google's Search Status Dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as starting on September 24, inside the first week we compare. Search Console also can't show one possible cause: if a page started appearing as a link in AI Overviews, those impressions would be counted at the Overview's position. Pew Research found that people who saw an AI summary clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, against 15% for those who didn't. Whether that happened here, we can't tell from the report.
From here we'd read each page's clicks before and after its own edit date, instead of the site's weeks, and search its main queries to see what the results page looks like now.
A new site: impressions with almost nothing to click
On a site's first days, rising impressions and flat clicks are the normal state. Here is elmrank.com's first week:
| Day (2026) | Impressions | Clicks | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 14 | 4 | 0 | 30.2 |
| Oct 15 | 170 | 1 | 70.5 |
| Oct 16 | 370 | 0 | 69.1 |
| Oct 17 | 493 | 0 | 73.5 |
| Oct 18 | 539 | 2 | 72.2 |
| Oct 19 | 571 | 0 | 72.8 |
| Oct 20 | 579 | 0 | 73.0 |
Search Console, web search, final data, pulled October 23, 2026.
Search Console named 390 searches in that week, and 379 of them averaged a position beyond 20. Those 379 carried 2,547 of the 2,573 named impressions. Google was trying the pages for many searches, far down the results, where almost nobody clicks. For a new site, read pages indexed and pages with impressions first, and clicks last; is the Google sandbox real? compares these first weeks with the three sites we run.
How to check your own
- 1Compare equal periodsSame number of days and weekdays; leave out the last two or three days
- 2Queries: sort by impressions changeWhich searches added impressions, and at what position
- 3Pages: sort by clicks changeFor the pages that lost clicks, read impressions and position
- 4Check the datesYour own edits and launches, and Google's Search Status Dashboard
In the Performance report, set Compare to two periods of the same length. Leave out the last two or three days: Google says its data "should be available in 2-3 days." Open the Queries tab, sort by the change in impressions, and note the position of the searches that grew. Then open the Pages tab and sort by the change in clicks, and read the other two numbers for each page that lost clicks:
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Lost clicks, impressions down, position about the same | Fewer searches for what the page covers |
| Lost clicks, position down | The page lost ranking |
| Lost clicks, impressions and position steady | The results page or your snippet changed, or your own edit did |
| New impressions mostly at position 8 or below | Impressions that rarely turn into clicks |
Our reading guide, from the cases above; none of the rows is proof on its own.
Last, put your own change log next to the dates: edits, new pages, redirects, and the updates on Google's Search Status Dashboard. On both of our sites, things we did ourselves overlapped the drop, and that's the first thing to rule out. How to use Google Search Console covers the rest of the report.
Where this sits in our work
This is the check behind the "what slipped" part of our monthly report. The sample report shows it for one month on the card game site, with clicks by page group. In the SEO content service, the monthly report lists what we published and fixed next to your Search Console clicks and impressions, so a drop can be read against what changed. The plan is $500 for the first month and $300 a month after. To see what we'd fix first on your site, send it to us: the list is free, and we reply within 12 hours.
Questions
Is it bad when impressions go up but clicks go down?
Not by itself. More impressions mean Google is showing your pages for more searches, and on a new site that comes first. It's worth a look when clicks keep falling for a few weeks. On our game news site in September 2026, the extra impressions we could trace came from searches where the site sat around position 9, and the 20 pages that lost the most clicks were shown half as often as in August.
Do AI Overviews cause impressions up and clicks down?
They can, and you won't see it directly. Google counts a link in an AI Overview as an impression at the Overview's position, and in Pew Research's March 2025 data, people who saw an AI summary clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one. Google counts these impressions inside the Web search type, and on our sites the report offered no AI Overview filter, so we can't say how much of a drop it explains.
Why do my pages' impressions add up to more than the chart total?
Because Search Console counts them differently. The chart counts one impression per search for the whole site, even when two of your pages appear. The Pages tab counts one per page shown. On our game news site in September, page rows added up to 1,927,574 impressions against 1,212,464 in the chart. Use the Pages tab to compare pages with each other and the chart for the site.
How we know this
Written by Tyler Phan. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Nov 1, 2026.
- Search Console Help, What are impressions, position, and clicks?, accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Search Console Help, Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Search Console Help, About Search Console data, accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website, accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (July 22, 2025), accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Google Search Status Dashboard, Ranking incident history (August 2026 spam update, September 2026 spam update), accessed Oct 23, 2026
- Elmrank, Search Console by page and query for the game news and manhwa sites we run and for elmrank.com, pulled October 23, 2026, accessed Oct 23, 2026
Send us your site.
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