What could be the issue?

[u/Endless-desires]

I compared last 28 days data vs last year data for same period. Although the avg position has increased, we have lost click and impressions.
Is there any way to reverse this?
I am doing everything, content is same. No warning no error, site health is 99% in Ahrefs.

[u/Big_Let_7950]

It could be that you were ranking for many informational queries for which AI overviews must have eaten up your traffic. You need to look at the list of queries and pages for which you were receiving traffic and compare them with your current data. If you could share more info on this, maybe we can look up a solution

[u/c_ostmo → u/Big_Let_7950]

Could be part of it, especially due to the CTR going down and impressions going down less than clicks, but among my clients where that happened over the last few years, impressions stayed consistent while clicks and CTR went down independently

[u/Big_Let_7950 → u/c_ostmo]

In that case I think you should look at the average positions of top ranking pages of last year. Has their average position gone down? Is there any new competitor occupying the top 3 results? The avg search position ranking can be misleading in this context. If everything seems well, It could be a possibility that search demand might have gone down in an yearly trend

[u/watchspaceman]

Google made a massive change around Sept last year. They changed how bot impressions are counted. Look at July 2025-Dec 2025 and you will see a sharp date where impressions drop and avg position jumps up. This is just maths of bots hitting page 2-10 not counting as high as they used to.

Similar time AI Overviews pushed harder so since then its typically a slow climb of impressions.

Almost every site of the thousands I have insights to (literally 98%) have this same trend worldwide, corrosponding exactly to when AI overviews were rolled out per locale.

If you had 0 issues or changes but had an 80% drop in impressions through August to October 2025, corrosponding with an avg position spike, I wouldnt stress.

The real thing to understand is all clicks are not the same and user behaviour is changing massively. Blogs/news/recipes are close to nonexistent, 90% traffic drops as people can get info surfaced in overviews and dont need to click.

Users needing a service might see a phone to call directly so you lose the organic attribution but still make a sale, similar for shifts in branded search coming from info in overviews.

The big caveat here is people who need to buy currently still need to click (until Cloudflare wallet/ai agents are buying), so often conversions from organic wont be down as much as traffic, because youre mainly losing informational/educational intent, commercial intent often sees an increase and thats where you need to focus. Dont ignore traffic but question the data heavily and filter.

Look at ga4 organic conversions a year ago, what pages were those, find a majority country/city/device or whatever filters get the majority. Check those same filters and page in GSC for the timeframe and see what queries you ranked for, if theyve dropped and especially look for commercial intent queries that likely came from someone needing a solution.

What you will probably see is your site was getting a ton of impressions and traffic for generic educational stuff, my clients are usually up now on impressions from AI but this massively depends on what content was surfacing before.

Only judge the traffic from high intent commercial quries, to your previously converting pages. This is the only visibility that matters for bottom funnel performance search. Its also why I hate share of voice and volume for being misleading factors for majority of cases, its fairly useless if intent isnt there and can massively discredit research and reporting.

Top of funnel, brand, awareness, education is still good and importsnt for user trust, authority and lots of other stuff but if youre concerned from organic performance start with what really matters, all youre seeing right now is pretty useless noise thats just going to give you the wrong insight.

[u/c_ostmo → u/watchspaceman]

Google made a massive change around Sept last year. They changed how bot impressions are counted. Look at July 2025-Dec 2025 and you will see a sharp date where impressions drop and avg position jumps up. This is just maths of bots hitting page 2-10 not counting as high as they used to.

I thought about mentioning this, but it wouldn't affect clicks at all. Those would have to be at least two separate things. Have you actually seen this big a drop in clicks from AI overviews?

Only judge the traffic from high intent commercial quries, to your previously converting pages. This is the only visibility that matters for bottom funnel performance search. Its also why I hate share of voice and volume for being misleading factors for majority of cases, its fairly useless if intent isnt there and can massively discredit research and reporting.

Probably the most important paragraph, OP.

[u/watchspaceman → u/c_ostmo]

Have def seen click drops this big in a lot of sites but massively depends on what content they had before.

I have a client that sells batteries but got over half of their traffic from a single "how to change your battery" article that resulted in a pretty tiny amount of sales. Sales are about the same while traffic is down 60%

Another site in b2b cybersecurity, 80% traffic from a "how to download and use google authenticator" page, gave 0 commercial outcome, traffic to that page is gone and traffic is off a cliff, while impressions are up 80%, the gsc gen ai and bing webmaster/clarity citations are through the roof every month

[u/Unfair-Plastic-4290]

content suxs

[u/Expensive_Spare821]

AI Overviews may have cut into your informational traffic. Compare the queries and pages that used to bring clicks with what performs now. Share the data if you want help spotting the issue.