Check your desktop vs mobile CTR in Search Console. Mine is 0.22% vs 2.57% at the same average position.

Ran a three month export on a site I work on and found two things I haven't seen posted here. Both are checkable in your own console in about two minutes, so I'd rather hand you the diagnostic than the conclusion.

The device split

Desktop sits at 0.22% CTR, average position 9.94. Mobile sits at 2.57% CTR, average position 9.3. Nearly identical positions, roughly 11x difference in click rate.

That alone isn't damning. Mobile and desktop behave differently. What makes it damning is the impression volume. Desktop generated more than ten times the impressions mobile did, on a site whose audience skews mobile in every other analytics source I have. So the desktop side is accumulating a mountain of impressions at the same average position while converting almost none of them into clicks.

That is not a ranking problem. Rankings are the same on both. It's a surface problem. Something is showing my pages on desktop in a context where clicking isn't the intended action.

The queries confirm it

Go sort your queries by impressions and read the top twenty out loud. On my export, the biggest impression drivers are strings no human types. Long, comma-free, weirdly specific phrasings that stack four concepts and a year together. Things structured like "free traffic sources for X on Y platform 2026" or "product category positioning revenue benchmark." My single highest impression query pulled over 1,500 impressions at position 6.79 with exactly zero clicks.

Position 6.79. Fifteen hundred impressions. Zero clicks. That does not happen with human queries.

Those are query fan-outs. The AI layer decomposes one user question into many synthetic sub-queries, runs them, and each one registers as an impression against your site. You get counted as a source. You do not get counted as a destination. And it inflates your impression count while pushing your CTR into the floor, which makes your Search Console look like you have a title tag problem when you have nothing of the sort.

If your impressions grew this year while clicks stayed flat and you've been rewriting titles to fix it, this is probably why.

The noindex result nobody expects

Separate experiment on the same site. There were roughly 2,700 thin programmatic pages generating a large share of total impressions and almost no clicks. I noindexed all of them and consolidated a set of competing pages with 301s.

Impressions dropped about 60%. Clicks went up 5x. Site-wide CTR went from around 0.16% to around 0.80%.

The dashboard looked worse for three weeks. The business got better. If you're sitting on a pile of programmatic pages that print impressions and nothing else, they are not free. They are diluting the signal Google uses to decide what your site is about, and they are hiding the performance of the pages that actually work.

What I'd actually do with this

Stop treating impressions as a health metric. On a normal 2026 site a meaningful chunk of them are fan-out artifacts that were never going to click. Segment by device before you diagnose anything, because a blended CTR number now averages two completely different surfaces together and tells you nothing.

Then split your pages into two buckets and treat them differently. Pages targeting queries an AI layer can fully resolve are no longer click assets. Either make them worth citing and accept that the return is brand mention rather than traffic, or consolidate them into something with a reason to click. Pages targeting queries that need a tool, a file, a calculation or a decision still behave like 2019 search, and mine still pull normal CTR at normal positions. On the same site, at nearly identical positions, my informational pages run around 0.1% CTR and my functional pages run 2 to 6%.

Same domain, same authority, thirty times the click rate. The variable is whether the answer fits in a summary box.

Go look at your own device split. Genuinely curious whether an 11x gap is common or whether I've got something unusual going on.