Rankings no longer predict traffic
Position 3 used to mean something. Now it means your listing exists below an AI overview, a shopping carousel, a People Also Ask box, and three ads. The click never arrives.
A brand ranks position 3 for a high-intent commercial keyword. Ahrefs estimates 12,000 monthly searches. The team expects 1,500-2,000 clicks.
Actual clicks: 340.
The common explanation is that the keyword difficulty was miscalculated. In practice, the ranking is accurate. The traffic model is broken.
What's changed is the architecture of the SERP itself. Position 3 in 2022 was the third thing a user saw. Position 3 in 2026 sits below an AI overview that answers the query directly, a shopping carousel with images and prices, a People Also Ask expansion, and in many cases a featured snippet extracted from a competitor.
The organic result is physically below the fold on mobile. Many users never scroll to it. The ranking exists. The click doesn't.
This decoupling of rank and traffic is not a temporary fluctuation. It's structural. Google has systematically moved SERP real estate toward its own surfaces — AI overviews, shopping, local packs, knowledge panels. Each addition pushes organic results further down.
The teams navigating this well have stopped using estimated search volume as a traffic proxy. They measure actual click-through rate per keyword, per SERP layout. And they're discovering that many of their highest-volume keywords generate less traffic than long-tail terms where the SERP is still clean.
Ranking isn't the goal. Clicks are. And the correlation between the two is weaker than it's been in twenty years.