[ Simon Bayliss ](https://creativeorbit.com.au/contact-about) 12 August 2026 Last Updated: 13 August 2026 # The AI SEO Paradox: ## Ranked #3 for “AI SEO Audit Sydney”. Zero Clicks in 90 Days. Here’s a number that made me stop mid-coffee. Creative Orbit is in position. 3.2 on Google for “AI SEO Audit Sydney”. 50 impressions over 90 days. No clicking. Not a one. Zoom out, and things get stranger. We saw 21,919 impressions for those same three months for over 500 AI-related search queries – think “AEO services”, “agentic optimisation", and “answer engine optimisation”. How many clicks did it all get? 41. The overall CTR is 0.187%, with an average position of 20.3. Let me be clear: this is not a Creative Orbit ranking problem, and it is not a content quality problem. This ranking is what search looks like today in the AI era, for everyone, across an entire new category of queries. I looked at our own Google Search Console data to get a closer look at what’s really happening and what that means for how we measure success going forward. ## The Numbers The chart below tells the story better than I can in a paragraph. On the left, our top AI-related queries by impression volume — every single one converting at zero or near-zero clicks. On the right, that same pattern set against our traditional local search terms, where clicks still flow the way they always have. ![](https://creativeorbit.com.au/images/2026/blog-2026/ai-seo-paradox-creative-orbit-illawarra.png)Source: Google Search Console, creativeorbit.com.au, 7 May – 5 Aug 2026. Break the 500+ queries down by category, and the pattern holds with unsettling consistency: AEO 5,922 impr. 79 queries · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR Agentic / AO 1,101 impr. 36 queries · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR AI SEO / AI Search 936 impr. 30 queries · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR AI Visibility 113 impr. 12 queries · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR GEO 13 impr. 4 queries · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR LLMO 2 impr. 1 query · 0 clicks · 0.00% CTR There are two points of data worth a closer look. The “AEO services” keyword itself generated 1,617 impressions — a healthy chunk of search volume for a term that hardly existed eighteen months ago — and zero clicks. Then there’s the one that kicked off this whole investigation. “ai seo audit sydney”, sitting at position 3.2, effectively at the top of page one. 50 impressions and not one click. If you had a page-one-top-three ranking with zero conversion, the old SEO world would have audited the meta description, the title tag, and maybe the page altogether. I’ve seen all three. They're okay. It’s not the page. It’s the question. ## Why This Is Happening — Three Forces ### AI Overviews Are Absorbing the Click When someone types “what is agentic optimisation” or “what is AEO”, Google increasingly answers the question right there on the results page, before a single blue link appears. The user reads the definition, gets what they came for, and closes the tab. Pew Research Centre tracked these results directly: when an AI-generated summary appears, people click through to a website in just 8% of visits, compared to 15% when no summary is shown — and only 1% of visits result in a click on a link inside the summary itself [\[1\]](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/). Separately, Ahrefs found that pages ranking first on queries where an AI Overview appears now see click-through rates roughly 58% lower than they would without one [\[2\]](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/). Our numbers sit at the extreme end of that pattern, which makes sense — acronym-heavy queries like “AEO” and “GEO” are almost tailor-made for a quick AI definition. ### The Intent Is Exploratory, Not Transactional If you’re one of the people Googling “agentic optimization” right now, you’re likely a marketer, a founder, or just an inquisitive SEO trying to figure out what the term actually means. They haven’t looked for a vendor yet. Now compare that to ‘seo wollongong’, a phrase with commercial intent baked right into it – someone typing that has already decided they want an agency, and our data shows it: 2,654 impressions, 6 clicks, a 0.23% CTR. It’s small by the standards of history, but 40 times larger than our best AI query. The acronym searches haven’t reached that level of buyer intent yet. Give them a year. ### AI Answers Are Bypassing Verification Entirely But here is the part that should concern every business owner more than the CTR numbers: a growing share of this “search” never touches Google at all. People are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini directly – “What agency does AEO in Sydney?” and “How do I optimise for AI search?” — and getting an answer that references sources without the user ever seeing a traditional results page. But being #3 on Google for a term means very little if the real buying conversation is happening in an AI chat window that never even queries Google in the first place. Getting cited within those answers is quickly becoming worth more than ranking for that same term the old way. ## What This Means for Business The old KPI chain was simple: rank, click, convert. For the entire class of AI related searches we break that chain at step two. Impressions still happen. Google still knows we are relevant and shows the page. But the click, the traffic, the thing that every SEO report has been built around for two decades, mostly doesn’t anymore. That doesn’t mean the visibility is worthless. It means we need a different scoreboard: - **Citation frequency** — how often your business gets named inside AI-generated answers, not just how you rank on Google - **Brand mentions** in AI-generated summaries and comparison lists, tracked over time - **Direct branded search volume** — which is still converting exactly as it always has. Our own “creative orbit” branded query pulled a 14.0% CTR over the same 90 days, on 107 impressions and 15 clicks - **Referral traffic from AI platforms** — the small but growing trickle of visits arriving via chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and similar referrers Impressions on AI-category queries are turning into a branding metric rather than a traffic metric. Getting shown to 21,919 people over ninety days still has value — it’s just not the value we’re used to measuring. ## What We Do Differently at Creative Orbit We’ve shifted a good part of our process around one idea: optimise for citation, not for clicks. In practice, this means using structured data that an AI system can parse cleanly, providing entity definitions that clearly and unambiguously state what a term means and who is responsible for it, including first-person authority signals throughout the content, and ensuring clear published-date and author attribution on everything we publish. AI systems weigh trust signals heavily when deciding who to cite, and vague, unattributed content rarely makes the cut. We also track share-of-voice inside AI answers as its own metric, separate from Google rankings. Where we can, we run test prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the terms that matter to a client and note who gets named. And we say this to every client up front now, because it saves an awkward conversation three months later: the click-through rate on your AI-related keywords is going to look terrible on paper. That is not failure. That is the new normal for this category of search. The actual win is becoming the source those systems cite when someone asks the question — whether or not that translates into a visit tracked in Google Analytics. ## What to Do If You See This Pattern in Your Own Data If you run a Search Console export on your own AI-adjacent queries and see the same shape — big numbers on the left, nothing on the right — here’s where I’d start: - Check GSC for your own AI-related impression volume — most businesses have far more of it than they realise, sitting quietly under the radar - Stop measuring CTR on those queries in isolation; it will always look broken against traditional benchmarks - Start tracking citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for your core terms and services - Watch branded search growth as your real leading indicator — it tends to move a few months after AI visibility improves - Publish clear, entity-rich content that states facts plainly enough for an AI system to quote directly - Invest in becoming the named source in an answer, not just the ranked result on a page nobody scrolls past the fold on anymore The bottom line Zero clicks on “AI SEO Audit Sydney" at position 3 would have been a five-alarm fire back in 2022. In 2026, it’s a signal — that this particular query type is getting answered by AI before Google’s results page ever gets the chance to earn a click. Once you see it that way, the number stops looking like a failure and starts looking like data about where the industry actually is right now. Want to see what your AI visibility looks like against this same framework? Have a look at our [AI SEO and answer engine optimisation services](https://creativeorbit.com.au/ai-seo/), or get in touch for an [AI visibility audit,](https://creativeorbit.com.au/contact/) and we’ll run your Search Console data through the same lens. References↓- 1[Pew Research Center — Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/)Analysis of browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025, showing an 8% click rate on traditional results when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one. - 2[Ahrefs — AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (2026 update)](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/)Study of 300,000 keywords using aggregated Google Search Console data, comparing click-through rates before and after AI Overviews rollout.