10 is the lonliest number

Remember when the great decoupling rocked the SEO world? Impressions went up. Clicks tumbled like the floor of an ancient tomb just dropped out.

At the time, it clearly seemed like the scorched earth impact of AI Overviews. So… so many studies were written about it. What did we learn? Well, the overlap in links between AI Overview and traditional SERPs is somewhere between 5% and 77%. Traffic is more qualified. Unless it's not.

The chasm of clicks wasn't the only weird behaviors in GSC. Did the youths start replacing spaces with plus symbols for the lolz? Do the youths know what a lolz is?

When Brodie Clark made similar jokes about GSC was a customer of DataForSEO, SEOs like Mark Barrera and Malte Landwehr highlighted the connection between the spike in impressions in recent times and scraping from SEO tools.

Even OpenAI got in on the joke. The company's use of scrapped Google results in ChatGPT made news last month. Google never publicly responded because actions speak louder than words. On 12 September, the company tested dropping support for a parameter than increased the number of search results to 100. By Monday, the change was rolled out to 100% of users. That broke most rank tracking tools.

Do I have definitive proof that Google's change is in response to OpenAI's scraping? Absolutely not, but the bots are fighting. Google Search opened up a fresh job posting for an anti-scraper engineer analyst.

The funniest part of all this? The sudden plummet in impressions. It's as if all the rank trackers were inflating impression. Brodie Clark explored how we might have gotten the great decoupling very wrong.