Your Rankings Are Fine. So Why Have Your Enquiries Fallen Off a Cliff?

Something strange is happening to businesses that have been doing SEO properly.

Their rankings are holding. In some cases improving. Their average position in Google is the best it's ever been. And yet the phone isn't ringing the way it used to. Enquiries are down. Click-through rates have dropped. The dashboard looks fine, and the business doesn't.

If that sounds familiar, you're not imagining it and you haven't done anything wrong. The rules changed and most people haven't been told yet.

This is the question we're hearing from almost every business we speak to about AI search optimisation right now. And the honest answer is that Google has inserted itself between your content and your customer.

It works like this. You've spent time and money ranking well for a query — let's say "how much does reputation management cost" or "best digital marketing agency for small businesses." You're on page one. You might even be in the top three. Google has a new trick though. It reads your content, summarises it into an AI Overview that sits above every organic result, and answers the question before the user has any reason to click anything.

You did the work. Google got the credit. The user got the answer. You got nothing.

The metric that used to be the proxy for everything — position — has been quietly decoupled from the outcome that actually matters, which is traffic and enquiries. Nobody in the industry wants to say this too loudly because SEO has been sold on position for thirty years. But there it is.

Yes, unfortunately, and it's becoming more common with every Google update. We're seeing it in our own data. Pages sitting at position one or two with tens of thousands of impressions and click-through rates below 0.1%.

The pattern is consistent: high-volume informational queries, good rankings, AI Overview present, clicks essentially zero. The page exists. Google knows it exists. Google has read it thoroughly enough to plagiarise it into an AI-generated answer. And then nobody visits.

The cruel irony is that the better your content answers the question — the more clearly, the more completely — the more attractive it is for Google to hoover up into an AI Overview. You've been unknowingly writing content for Google's benefit rather than your own.

Because the SERP your content is appearing in has changed significantly, even if your position hasn't. AI Overviews, People Also Ask boxes, featured snippets, knowledge panels — Google is increasingly building the answer on the search results page itself. Organic blue links are still there, but they're lower, they're smaller, and there's more competing for the user's attention before they reach them.

CTR curves that the industry relied on for years — position one gets 30%, position two gets 15%, and so on — are no longer reliable. They assumed a relatively clean SERP. That SERP no longer exists for most informational queries.

What hasn't changed is CTR for commercial queries. Someone searching "motorsport marketing agency" or "outsourced marketing department UK" still needs to click through to find out if you're the right fit. Google can't close that loop with a paragraph of generated text. That's where position still translates directly into enquiries.

The SEO industry has a problem. It built its entire value proposition around rankings. Rankings are now a flawed proxy. Agencies are sitting in front of clients showing them beautiful position reports while enquiries quietly drop, and the conversation about why is deeply uncomfortable.

We're not going to pretend we have a complete answer because nobody does yet. This is genuinely new territory and anyone telling you they've cracked AI Overview optimisation is probably selling you something.

What we can tell you is where the thinking is pointing.

Commercial intent queries are more resilient. The more a query requires a conversation, a relationship, a proposal — the less Google can satisfy it with generated text. Doubling down on content that addresses real purchasing decisions rather than abstract information is the more defensible strategy right now.

Brand visibility is the new ranking. If your content gets cited in AI Overviews repeatedly, people start searching for you directly. They've seen your name enough times that you become the shortlist rather than a search result. Being the source Google trusts enough to quote is a different game to ranking, but it's a game worth playing. It's why AI visibility tracking — what percentage of relevant AI answers mention your brand — is becoming a meaningful metric.

The enquiry journey has got longer and stranger. People are researching through AI tools, arriving at a shortlist through a process that's completely invisible to your analytics, and then making direct contact. Your actual influence on someone's decision might be significantly greater than your click data suggests. Which is cold comfort for the phone not ringing, but it does mean that giving up on content is the wrong response.

Direct traffic and branded search are worth watching closely. If your content strategy is working in an AI world, you'll see it in people searching your name, people arriving directly, people who already know who you are before they make contact. That's the new version of SEO working.

No. But it's killed the version of SEO that was essentially just a ranking game. The businesses that are going to navigate this well are the ones that understand the difference between getting found and getting chosen — and invest in both.

Getting found is still a search problem. But getting chosen is a brand problem, a content quality problem, a credibility problem. The two have always been connected. AI Overviews have just made that connection impossible to ignore.

If your enquiries have dropped while your rankings held, the first thing to do is stop staring at your position data and start looking at your CTR. Then look at which queries are being answered by AI Overviews before anyone reaches your result. Then have an honest conversation about whether your content strategy is built for the world that exists, not the one from 2022.

We're having that conversation with every client right now. It's not a comfortable one. But it's the right one.

James Foster is the founder of SuperHub, a digital marketing agency based in Devon specialising in AI search optimisation, motorsport marketing and content that actually drives revenue. If your rankings look great but your enquiries don't, let's talk.