Most people who sell SEO would not publish the numbers in this post. I'm going to, because the uncomfortable ones are the interesting ones.
Here is a line straight out of my own Google Search Console. The query is "web development". Two hundred impressions. Average position 5.0 — top five, first page, the thing an SEO invoice usually points at as evidence of a job well done.
Zero clicks. Not a low number. Zero.
The short version
Average position stopped describing traffic some time ago, and most people are still reporting it as though it does. A top-five organic result now frequently sits below an AI overview, a map pack, four paid results and a set of rich panels — which is to say, below the fold, on a page where the user already got their answer.
Meanwhile the queries that actually feed my business look nothing like the ones a keyword tool would recommend.
What converts, in my own data
| Query | Click-through rate |
|---|---|
| "divyansh sood" | ~50% |
| "divyansh sood web developer kangra" | 13.2% |
| "web development" (position 5.0, 200 impressions) | 0% |
Read that table twice. The two queries carrying my business both name something specific — me, or me plus a place. The generic industry term, ranked respectably, produced nothing at all and always will.
There's a second pattern in the same account worth naming: the homepage takes roughly 95% of all my search impressions. Dozens of service pages, location pages and articles, and one URL absorbs almost everything. That is a structural problem, not a content problem — it means internal linking was funnelling authority nowhere, which I've since spent real effort fixing.
The part that was genuinely my fault
Before blaming the search results page, I checked the boring things, and found two.
On desktop the site had 327 impressions and one click at position 6.1. My title tag was 62 characters and my meta description 172 — both long enough to be truncated, so the snippet was being cut mid-phrase. Nobody clicks a sentence that stops halfway.
Worse, the old title was "Freelance Web Designer & Developer — Divyansh Sood® Studio". Look at what's missing: any geography whatsoever. Every query that converted for me was branded or local, and my most prominent piece of text mentioned no place at all.
The fix was unglamorous — a 58-character title carrying the role, the name and the country, and a 148-character description that finishes its own sentence. If your click-through rate is poor, check truncation before you write a theory. It's free.
What changed on the results page
But truncation doesn't explain a flat zero across two hundred impressions. Something structural did that.
Open any broad commercial query on a phone and inventory what appears before the first organic link: frequently an AI overview that answers in place, a pack of local businesses with a directions button, paid results, People Also Ask, sometimes a video carousel. On many queries the first organic result is the second or third screen of scrolling.
So "position 5" no longer means "fifth thing the user sees". It means fifth in a list that may itself be well below where attention ends. The metric didn't change. The page around it did.
This is not unique to my site. I see the same shape on client properties in a completely different sector — a Kangra taxi operator averaging position 5.4 across 19,100 impressions and converting at 1.4%, which I've written up with the full data. Different industry, different country of customer, same story.
What to do with this
Four changes, in order of how much they'll change your decisions.
1. Stop reporting average position as a headline
It blends every query you appear for into one number that describes nothing. Use it as a diagnostic — a sudden drop still means something — but never as a measure of success. If a report you receive leads with average position, ask what it's hiding.
2. Read click-through rate per query, not in aggregate
Sort your queries by impressions. Anything with high impressions and sub-1% CTR is a query where something above the organic block is answering. Anything with modest impressions and a double-digit rate is where your revenue lives. Those two groups deserve completely different treatment, and an aggregate CTR blends them into mush.
3. Build pages for the specific query, not the category
"Web development" is a category. "Gaggal airport to Dharamshala taxi fare" is a question with an answer. The second kind is where clicks still exist, because the searcher needs a specific thing your page can uniquely provide — and because a page that answers precisely is also the page an assistant quotes.
4. Optimise to be named in the answer
If the AI overview is taking the click, the goal shifts from ranking above it to being cited inside it. That is a different discipline — quotable factual sentences, structured data that identifies you unambiguously, and corroboration from sources you don't control. I've laid out the mechanics in GEO vs SEO and the practical steps in getting recommended by ChatGPT.
The honest summary
I rank in the top five for a term in my own industry and have received nothing from it. That isn't a failure of the ranking — the ranking is real. It's a failure of the assumption underneath it: that a position on a list still equals a visit.
The businesses that will do well over the next few years are the ones that noticed the click was optional before their reporting told them so.
I'm Divyansh Sood, a freelance developer in Himachal Pradesh. I publish my own numbers because most of what's written about search is written by people who won't. If you want this done properly in your codebase rather than in a monthly PDF, that's the service — or start with the free audit and I'll tell you which of your queries are lying to you.