Two out of three Google searches now end without anyone going anywhere.

In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click — up from 60.45% in 2024. Only about 276 of every 1,000 searches now reach the open web at all.

The part that should land hardest for anyone maintaining a coaching blog: SparkToro's panel of tens of thousands of sites saw the traffic share Google sends them fall 8 percentage points between June 2025 and May 2026 — a roughly 22% drop — and these are sites run by professional marketers actively working to grow traffic.

If people whose full-time job is traffic lost a fifth of theirs, your Tuesday-night blog post was never going to hold the line.

The posts that are donating answers

Search intent now decides almost everything. Seer Interactive's analysis of 49,353 queries found AI Overviews appear on 36% of informational queries, versus 8% of commercial and 5% of transactional ones.

So far, so reassuring for anyone with a pricing page.

Then the format data ruins it. Comparison queries — the "X vs Y" format — trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time. Question-format queries trigger one 85.9% of the time, review queries 86.3%. Those are exactly the formats most commercial content gets written in, even when Google files the query as informational.

"Life coach vs therapist." "What is executive coaching." "Is business coaching worth it." Written in the two shapes most likely to be answered above you.

And the damage on those pages is measurable. Across 3,119 informational queries and 25.1 million organic impressions, Seer found organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell from 1.76% to 0.61%. Per million impressions on informational queries, a query with no AI Overview yields roughly 33,500 clicks; a cited brand gets about 20,743; an uncited brand gets about 9,445.

Being named inside the summary is now worth more than ranking beneath it.

The tell in your Search Console

Impressions flat or rising, clicks falling. That's the signature.

But check before you panic. Seer's own guidance is to look at whether impressions grew in the same window a CTR drop appeared — if clicks held flat while impressions doubled, visibility went up, which is a different problem from losing traffic.

One more thing worth knowing before you delete half your site: organic CTR on AI Overview queries bottomed at 1.3% in December 2025 and rose to 2.4% by February 2026, an 85% move in two months — though Seer calls it a leveling off rather than a recovery and warns against forecasting from two months of data. CTR on queries without AI Overviews also climbed, from 2.8% in January 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026.

The triage

Stop writing definitional explainers in question and comparison format. Google answers those now, and it answers them above you.

Keep writing the pages that carry commercial and transactional intent — what you charge, how the engagement runs, who it's for, how to book. Those sit in the 5–8% trigger band.

And write the things a summary box can't synthesize: your client data, your failures, your method with the numbers attached.

Rand Fishkin's read is that search optimization hasn't lost its value — the value now shows up as lower advertising costs and shorter sales conversations rather than raw traffic.

Which reframes what the blog was ever for. Not a traffic machine. A reason to be named, and a way to capture an email address from the shrinking minority who still click through.