A Reddit case shows impressions exploding in Google Search Console while clicks and CTR decline, with no site changes. Here’s what may be going on.
A discussion on Reddit caught my attention this week.
A site owner said their Google Search Console impressions jumped from around 10–15K per day to 150K almost overnight. At the same time, clicks were actually decreasing and CTR dropped from roughly 4% to 0.3%.
According to the post, nothing significant changed on the website. No redesign, no new content push, no technical overhaul. The spike just happened.
Here’s the original Reddit thread.
Source: Reddit r/SEO
Digging into Search Console, the site owner noticed most of the impressions were tied to Product snippets and review-related search appearances. Around 71K impressions were attributed to Product snippets and another 6K to reviews.
But when filtering down to the query level, the numbers didn’t seem to add up. The top Product snippet queries were showing only a few dozen impressions each. Nowhere near the tens of thousands reported at the appearance level.
That’s where the confusion started.
John Mueller responded in the thread and clarified that simply having more impressions does not cause ranking problems and is not necessarily a bug in Search Console.
Source: John Mueller on Reddit
So if this isn’t a penalty and not a reporting bug, what could explain it?
We’re seeing more situations lately where impressions increase dramatically while clicks stay flat or even decline. This tends to happen in areas heavily influenced by rich results, Product features and increasingly AI-driven search enhancements.
If a page is surfaced more often inside expanded SERP features, it can accumulate impressions quickly. But if users get enough context directly in the search results, they may not need to click through.
From a reporting standpoint, that looks like a problem. CTR drops. Click volume shrinks. It feels like performance is deteriorating.
But it may simply reflect a change in how search results are consumed.
Search is doing more interpretation on the results page itself. When intent gets satisfied there, impressions go up while traffic does not follow at the same rate.
This doesn’t mean CTR is irrelevant. It means CTR might no longer tell the full story on its own.
More visibility does not automatically translate into more traffic.
And cases like this are a reminder that as Google evolves its SERPs, the way we interpret Search Console data has to evolve as well.
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Stefano Galloni
Head of SEO, NetContentSEO
