TEST — The AI answer box ate your click-through rate

This is a sample episode used to preview the episode-page design. It is not a real Hot Bytes episode.

Google’s AI answers now sit above the ten blue links for a growing share of queries, and the click that used to come with a number-one ranking increasingly does not arrive. Dan and Miss Pepper work through what that actually changes for a service business: which queries still send traffic, which ones now end on the results page, and how to tell the two apart in your own Search Console data.

They also get into the measurement problem underneath it — if impressions hold and clicks fall, the ranking report still looks fine while the pipeline does not. The fix is not another rank tracker.

In this episode

• Which query types lose the click, and which ones never did convert anyway
• Reading the impressions-up / clicks-down pattern in Search Console
• What to measure instead of position when the answer box owns the top
• The pages worth defending first