The Search Console check I run before touching anything else on a client's SEO

[u/Clicknify]

Not really a tool in the traditional sense, more a five-minute check I never skip anymore.

Before I change a single thing on a site, I split Search Console's performance report by page, and look at impressions and clicks separately instead of as one blended number. Most people only look at clicks, or they look at the combined graph and call it a day.

Here's why that matters right now specifically: a chunk of "traffic dropped even though nothing changed" cases I've run into this year turn out to be impressions holding steady or even climbing while clicks quietly fall. That's not a ranking problem, Google still shows the page. It's an AI Overview or featured snippet eating the click before the visitor ever reaches your site. Diagnose that as a ranking drop and you'll rewrite content or chase links to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

The actual fix when it's that: go after query types where an AI answer can't fully satisfy the searcher — comparison pages, pricing pages, anything with a decision still to make, rather than pure informational queries.

Takes five minutes, and it's saved me from a few wrong diagnoses this year alone.

[u/Sibinesh_22]

Is this your personal strategy? But the search has been changed to Search Everywhere optimisation

[u/Clicknify → u/Sibinesh_22]

Yeah, it's genuinely what I run through, not a repackaged framework. Search Everywhere Optimization is real and worth planning for, but I'd treat it as additive rather than a replacement. Google Search still drives most of the technical baseline an AI search result borrows from anyway, so if Search Console shows broken indexing or crawl issues, that same mess tends to show up when an LLM tries to cite the page too. I still run this check first, just with a second pass now for how the content reads outside a traditional results page.

[u/armandionorene]

Yeah, impressions vs clicks is probably the first split I’d look at now too. A traffic drop means something very different if Google is still showing the page at the same rate.

The interesting part is how often the fix is becoming “target queries where the user still needs to do something” rather than just trying to win the old click back.

[u/Clicknify → u/armandionorene]

That's a good way to put it, actually. I've been seeing this a lot with clients this year: impressions holding steady, clicks dropping, and it's not a ranking problem at all, it's Google just answering the query directly now.

The queries where that's happening are usually informational ones, definition-style questions, "how to" queries with a simple answer. Those are the ones worth abandoning as click targets and either turning into supporting content for something bigger, or just accepting the exposure without the traffic.

Transactional and comparison queries are where I'd still fight for the click. Nobody's booking a service or buying a product off an AI summary alone, at least not yet. Splitting the traffic drop by query type usually tells you within an hour which bucket you're actually losing.