AI citations: why my click rate doubled as rankings fell

Since generative AI came into our lives, the complaint has always been the same. Gen AI models such as Google AI Overview (based on Gemini) answers the question itself, without any attribution or reference inline toward the the source it came from, nobody clicks on the content anymore, and the site that did the work gets nothing.

The numbers backed it up. Chartbeat measured search referral traffic dropping 60 percent for small publishers over two years, 47 percent for medium ones, 22 percent for the large ones. Penske Media has claimed AI Overviews suppress clicks by as much as 90 percent on some queries. AI Overviews now show up on roughly half of US searches.

So Google finally changed something. And this month, for the first time, I can see it in my own numbers.

What actually changed

Back in May, as I mentioned in a previous issue of this newsletter, Google shipped five changes to how AI Overviews and AI Mode credit their sources. Two of them matter more than anything for somebody that publishes their own content.

Citations used to sit in a stack at the bottom of the answer or on the side of the AI overview page, where nobody looked. Now they sit inline, right next to the specific sentence they support. If an AI answer lists three considerations, each one can carry its own link to a different source. So your work could be finally attributed and referenced.

The second one is quieter and I think it is the bigger deal. Hover over a link on desktop and you now get a preview card with the site name and page title before you click. Google's stated reason is that people hesitate to click when they cannot tell where a link goes.

The other three: a "Subscribed" label for news you pay for, suggested articles at the end of responses, and richer attribution for Reddit and forum quotes, with the actual creator named instead of just "Reddit."

What moved in my numbers

I pulled my Search Console this week expecting to see impressions climbing. They had not moved at all.

What actually moved was rather surprising.

Over the last 28 days my clicks went up 58 percent against the previous month. My click-through rate went up by 66% as well. Impressions were flat, up about 2 percent. My average ranking position actually got slightly worse.

This is the direct result of more of your work being attributed and well referenced and as a result more people are choosing to come through.

The report I recommend you open more often

Beside the number of clicks climbing up, there was something I had not expected at all.

Search Console now has a separate report for how you perform inside Google's generative AI features. It is sitting in your Performance view right now. Personally I previously used extensively the same type of report inside of Bing Webmasters but the numbers are slightly different as they are looking around the data they respectively control (Google Search/Gemini vs Bing/ChatGPT)

Every single page referenced in this section came to my surprise as being a programmatic content topic page. This is the topic that on the Pages section showing indexability, Google didn’t even bother to index. So this becomes a paradox.

They are also the pages Copilot cites most often. And the pages that brought me most of my recent subscribers.

I have been writing about this split for months and this is the sharpest version of it I have found so far. And all, I start believing more strongly, that is due to the attribution changes that came in lately.

Two systems, two standards

The way I read it, classic ranking and AI citation are answering to different questions.

Ranking asks whether, based on the data it has, that page deserves to be one of ten results for a broad query. Depth, authority, and competition all weigh in in bringing this decision.

Citation asks something narrower. Does this page answer this specific claim cleanly enough to quote and attribute? This looks more at how extractable your content is and less on the depth of your content.

The authority around your content and what you publish on your website changed. The old approach favored the most complete page on a topic while this new one rewards being the clearest answer to one question.

How to be easier to attribute

Most of what I just said in the previous paragraph has to do with writing discipline more than anything.

For example, answer one question per page and keep your answer near the top of the page (don’t bury it up in the middle or end of the page). Try to put it in the first hundred words in as plain of a language as you can.

Make your content structurally accessible and parseable by the agent. Real headings that match real questions. Actual lists where the content is a list. A comparison table where you are comparing things.

Keep your best pages current. Freshness now feeds citation eligibility in a way it never did for ranking.

Make sure the pages can be reached and read. Crawlable, rendering without JavaScript, present in your sitemap. This actually overlaps a lot with the old SEO world.

And this new and latest point: your name is now visible before the click itself. That hover preview shows your site name to someone deciding whether to trust you. Now brand reputation and building a strong brand would make more and more difference because of this.

The honest ceiling

I do not want to oversell this though. Or not as early as we are at least.

Pew found that about 1 percent of people click a link inside an AI Overview. Better attribution improves that, and it does not turn AI answers into a traffic channel that replaces what search used to send you.

So do not do this work expecting a traffic rescue. Do it because being cited is the thing that compounds similar to how pure SEO may have done for you. My topic pages have been quietly earning citations for months without me touching them, and the citations bring people who arrive already half convinced.

Do this in five minutes

Open Search Console, go to Performance, and look for the prompt about generative AI features. Click through. See which of your pages Google is actually using inside AI answers.

I suspect it will not be the pages you expect. It was not for me and my clients at least.

If you want the full version of this check, the audit I run on my own site is free and ungated.

→ The GEO/AEO Audit Checklist

Run it, and if something turns up that you cannot explain, hit reply and tell me what you are seeing. I am happy to look at your results together with you.

What I'm Thinking About This Week

That the most useful thing in Search Console this year is a report I only found by accident. There is a real gap opening between what is measurable and what people actually measure. Everyone I talk to knows their ranking. Almost nobody knows which of their pages an AI is quoting, and that second number is the one still growing.

Reply to this email with one of:

• Open the AI features report and tell me which page came top. I would bet it surprises you.

• Have you seen your click rate move this year while your rankings stayed flat?

• Which of your pages answers exactly one question, properly, near the top?

P.S. The toolkit, in the order I would use it: Visibility Audit → GEO/AEO Audit Checklist → How to Get Cited by AI → SEO Strategy Playbook → Title & Meta Audit → Sovereign Idea Workflow. All free.

P.P.S. Know someone convinced AI search killed their traffic? Forward this. There is a report in their Search Console that will tell them what is actually happening, and they have almost certainly never opened it. They can subscribe at thesovereigntechnologist.com.

That’s all for this week.

See you next Thursday.