AI SEO for Agencies: What Changed, With Our Own Search Console Data
Every article about AI and SEO is written by someone selling an AI SEO tool. This one is written from our own Search Console, and the numbers are not flattering to us.
We rank on page one for a commercial keyword. It sends us almost nothing. Here is exactly what that looks like, why it happens, and what we think agencies should do instead of buying another subscription.
The number that should change how you report to clients
One of our pages, a comparison article targeting a commercial buying keyword:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Impressions | 16,064 |
| Clicks | 79 |
| Click-through rate | 0.49% |
| Average position | 9.3 |
Period: 11 June to 7 September 2026, 89 days. Source: Google Search Console, sc-domain:inflowave.io, filtered to that single URL. Pulled 9 September 2026.
Position 9.3 has historically returned somewhere between 1.5% and 3% click-through. We are getting 0.49%. The page is not broken. It is indexed, it renders server-side, it carries Article, ItemList, FAQPage and SoftwareApplication schema, and its title is fine. It ranks. It simply does not get clicked.
If you are still reporting average position to clients as a proxy for traffic, that relationship has quietly stopped holding.
The query log is the actual story
Search Console lists 141 individual queries for that page. The interesting ones are not keywords at all.
Real queries, verbatim, with their position and click count:
- "best platform to manage whatsapp and instagram dms with a shared agent inbox" - position 1, zero clicks
- "what is the best software for managing customer conversations across whatsapp, instagram, and facebook in one inbox?" - position 1, zero clicks
- "our managers need a dashboard of first-response times, agent workload and sales conversion across whatsapp, instagram and facebook. which chat platform integrates with our crm to show these metrics in one place?" - position 1, zero clicks
- "best omnichannel crm for businesses managing sales over whatsapp instagram and email" - 193 impressions, position 3.2, zero clicks
- "what is the best crm for tracking instagram handles?" - 190 impressions, position 2.7, zero clicks
Position one, zero clicks, repeatedly.
One "query" is a 500-word buyer persona document that somebody pasted into a search box. It lists key personas, business context, buying triggers, decision criteria, organisational change tolerance and an AI boundary section, and ends with the actual question. That is not a search. That is a prompt.
62.2% of that page's impressions come from queries too rare for Google to name. 6,070 of 16,064 impressions are attributable to the 141 listed queries. The other 9,994 sit in the anonymised bucket, which is where unique, never-repeated, sentence-length queries end up.
That distribution is the fingerprint of AI-mediated search. People are not typing "instagram crm" any more. They are describing their situation in full paragraphs and reading a synthesised answer.
What this means commercially
Being cited in an AI answer is not the same as being visited. Our page is doing the first job well and the second job barely at all.
Three consequences agencies should plan around:
Impressions inflate while clicks stay flat. Across the same period, one of our tool pages grew impressions 140% with average position unchanged and click-through falling from 10.6% to 6.5%. If your monthly report leads with impression growth, you can show a chart going up while the business gets nothing. That is worse than no report.
Informational keywords are the worst affected. Definitional and how-to queries are exactly what an assistant answers inline. If a content plan is full of "what is" and "how to" topics, it is optimised for the queries least likely to produce a visit.
Your best content may now be a sales asset rather than a traffic asset. A thorough comparison page that gets quoted to a buyer mid-research still influences the decision. It just will not show up as a session.
What actually works now
None of this is a reason to stop. It is a reason to change what you optimise for.
Write to be quoted, not just ranked. Assistants extract. Direct answers near the top, explicit comparison tables, named criteria, real prices, clear definitional sentences. Burying the answer under 600 words of preamble is now actively costly.
Target the queries assistants cannot resolve alone. Anything needing current pricing, a real comparison across named products, or first-party data. Generic explainers are commodity output. Original measurement is not, which is the entire reason this article exists.
Publish numbers only you have. We can publish our Search Console data. A tool vendor writing about click-through decline cannot publish yours. First-party evidence is the one axis where a small site beats a large one, because authority does not substitute for access.
Stop treating position as the KPI. Track branded search volume, direct traffic, assisted conversions and, where you can, citation appearance in assistants. Position alone now overstates performance.
Keep Search Console central. It is free, it reports real impressions and clicks including AI-shaped surfaces, and the anonymised-query ratio is a usable proxy for how much of your visibility has moved into AI answers.
The tools, honestly
Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 9 September 2026. Verify before quoting to a client, because this category changes pricing constantly.
AI visibility tracking
Profound. $99/month and $399/month self-serve tiers plus custom enterprise. Widely described in roundups as enterprise-only, which is no longer true. Prompt-level tracking and historical data. The strongest option if you need to show clients where they appear in assistant answers.
Peec AI and Otterly.ai are the mid-market and entry-level alternatives most commonly named. We could not verify either price at source (Peec renders pricing in JavaScript, Otterly returns a bot challenge), so we are not quoting figures other articles have copied from each other.
Content and optimisation
Surfer SEO. Discovery EUR 49, Analytics EUR 82, Standard EUR 99, Pro EUR 182, Peace of Mind EUR 299, Enterprise EUR 999 per month billed yearly. The plan names have been rebuilt around AI visibility rather than classic content scoring.
Frase. $39/month billed yearly ($49 monthly) for solo use, $103/month ($129 monthly) for teams including 40 articles and 250 audit pages, and a $299/month tier. Still one of the better value briefs-and-optimisation tools.
The free ones that matter more than the paid ones
Google Search Console. Everything in this article came from it. Nothing you buy will tell you more about your own AI-era performance than the anonymised-query ratio you already have for free.
Screaming Frog. Still the fastest way to find the technical problems that no amount of AI content will outrun.
A category to approach carefully
Several AI SEO platforms bundle a backlink network as a headline feature, offering contextual links from thousands of partner sites. Those partner sites are usually other customers of the same platform. Reciprocal link networks operated by a single vendor are a link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the shared platform is exactly what makes the footprint detectable.
For an agency the asymmetry is bad. The upside is faster link acquisition. The downside is a manual action on a client's domain, on a site you do not own, for a subscription you chose. Read what the link feature actually is before putting client sites into one.
What we would actually do
If you run an agency and you are deciding where to put effort this quarter:
- Pull the anonymised-query ratio for your top five commercial pages. That tells you how much of your visibility has already moved into AI answers. It costs nothing.
- Change the client report before the client changes it for you. Lead with branded search, direct traffic and conversions. Keep position as context, not as the headline.
- Rewrite your best commercial pages to be extractable. Answer first, table second, prose third.
- Pick one thing you can measure that nobody else can, and publish it. This is the highest-leverage content you can produce right now.
- Buy a visibility tracker only once you can name the decision it will change.
If the reporting problem above is really a systems problem, the tool that holds the client relationship matters more than the tool that measures the ranking. We compared the options in the best CRM for SEO agencies.
The honest summary: AI has not killed SEO, but it has broken the link between ranking and traffic that the entire reporting model was built on. The agencies that adjust what they measure will keep the retainer. The ones still selling position will lose it the first time a client checks their analytics.
FAQ
Does ranking still matter?
Yes, but as an input rather than an outcome. You generally have to rank to be cited. You just cannot assume that ranking converts into a visit at historical rates. Our own page ranks 9.3 and converts 0.49% of impressions into clicks.
Is AI-generated content penalised by Google?
Google's stated position is that it rewards helpful content regardless of production method, and penalises scaled content abuse. In practice the risk is not the generation, it is publishing volume with no editorial judgement, which is also the failure mode of most autoblogging tools.
Should agencies buy an AI visibility tracker?
Only when you can name the decision it will change. If it produces a slide nobody acts on, it is a reporting cost. If it tells you which pages to rewrite for citation, it earns its price.
What is the single most useful free signal?
The share of your impressions that Google cannot attribute to a named query. It is in Search Console today, and a rising ratio means your audience has moved into assistants.
