---
title: "The Cited #4: More Impressions Is Not More Readers"
url: https://hostmy.blog/more-impressions-is-not-more-readers/
date: 2026-10-13
modified: 2026-10-13
lang: en
author: "Aditya Sharma"
description: "Pinch of Yum's Google impressions doubled while its clicks slipped. Six headlines worth your minute, and a free 15-second check on whether AI can read your blog."
categories:
  - "The Cited"
word_count: 1558
---

# The Cited #4: More Impressions Is Not More Readers

Open Search Console, the free Google tool that shows how your posts do in search. Go to Performance, then Search results, and switch on Clicks, Impressions and CTR, the click rate. Compare the last three months with the same three months a year earlier. It takes about a minute.

Write the numbers down. Impressions is how many times your site appeared in Google, clicks is how many times someone clicked through, and click rate is clicks divided by impressions. Search Console keeps only 16 months of data, so use the earliest month you can see.

**Most of us are glad when Google shows our posts more. Far fewer of us check whether more people clicked.**

Welcome to issue four of The Cited. In the last issue, [What Each of Your Visits Earns](https://hostmy.blog/what-each-visit-earns/), we looked at what a blog earns from each visit, and why it helps to know whether visits or earnings moved. Thank you for reading it.

The Cited is a short note from Host My Blog for people who run a blog, food or otherwise. Each issue has one number, the news worth your minute, and one small thing about whether AI can read your blog. This page is the longer version, with the charts and every source. You can also [get it in your inbox](https://hostmy.blog/the-cited/).

This time: why ‘Google shows my posts more’ and ‘Google sends me more readers’ are no longer the same sentence. Then six headlines worth your minute, and a quick way to see whether AI can read your blog.

## One number to hold onto

**+100.9% is how much more often Pinch of Yum’s pages appeared in Google over one year. Its clicks fell 4.1%.**

That comes from [Food Blogger Pro](https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/blog/pinch-of-yums-seo-strategy-what-changed-from-2024-to-2026/), which published Pinch of Yum’s own Search Console numbers on 24 September 2026, comparing August 2025 with August 2026. Pinch of Yum is one very large food blog, so it is a picture and not a promise for yours.

![Bar chart of Pinch of Yum](https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/cited-4-showed-up-more-clicked-less.svg)Source: Food Blogger Pro, Pinch of Yum Search Console figures comparing August 2025 with August 2026, published 24 September 2026.

The click rate shows it most clearly. Sitewide, it fell from 3.3% to 1.6%, which Food Blogger Pro describes as roughly cut in half.

![Bar chart of Pinch of Yum](https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/cited-4-click-rate-a-year-apart.svg)Source: Food Blogger Pro, Pinch of Yum Search Console figures comparing August 2025 with August 2026. Click rate is clicks divided by impressions.

The numbers fit together. Twice the impressions with 4.1% fewer clicks means each appearance earns about half the clicks it used to. That arithmetic is mine, and it lands on their 1.6%. Food Blogger Pro reads it as AI answers on the results page doing more of the answering, in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. That is their reading, not something Search Console reports.

So here is the question worth holding: when you check Google, are you looking at how often you show up, or at how often people click?

## It is not only you

If your impressions have climbed while your clicks sit flat, you are in good company. Food Blogger Pro says it suspects publishers across the space are seeing similar declines. Search is still Pinch of Yum’s biggest source, but its share of total traffic went from 67.7% to 54.7% between August 2024 and August 2026.

There is also a reason the picture gets muddy. Dan Taylor explained in [Search Engine Journal](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/search-console-uses-block-flattening-for-aios-forget-position-focus-on-outcomes/589582/) on 24 September that Search Console counts a whole AI answer box as one block and gives every link inside it the same position, usually position 1. A link card under the first sentence and a link tucked behind ‘Show More’ both read as position 1, and links shown by default count as an impression even if nobody scrolls to them.

Food Blogger Pro also split Pinch of Yum’s established top searches from the new ones. New pages ranking for the first time lift the sitewide average position, but among the established top searches, 63.4% lost position, 29.3% gained and 7.3% held steady.

![Bar chart of what happened to Pinch of Yum](https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/cited-4-what-happened-to-top-searches.svg)Source: Food Blogger Pro, Pinch of Yum Search Console figures comparing August 2025 with August 2026. Established top searches only.

The readers who did arrive from search stayed longer: average time engaged rose 8.6% and pages per visit rose 5.7%, year on year.

One more number to put beside those. SparkToro estimated that 68.01% of US Google searches from January to April 2026 ended without a click to any website, as [The Blog Herald](https://blogherald.com/seo/a-less-than-one-in-three-google-searches-actually-sends-a-visitor-to-someone-elses-website-anymore-heres-what-that-2026-number-means-if-your-blog-still-lives-on-search-traffic/) reported on 17 September 2026. It is one firm’s estimate and covers the US over four months.

## Why is this interesting?

Because more impressions feels like good news.

It can be, but it is not the same as more readers. Clicks and click rate tell you whether people chose you. Position only tells you where Google put you, and with AI answers it is no longer a clean number. If you have been checking average position every morning, you can stop. Dan Taylor suggests watching outcomes that impressions cannot distort, such as visits and real enquiries.

So here is the one thing to look at: the clicks on your top posts. Open the Pages tab in the Performance report and compare this year with last. If clicks held, that is good news whatever the impressions did. If clicks fell while impressions rose, you have the same gap as Pinch of Yum.

## Worth knowing this week

Six headlines, each linked to the original, with a line or two so you can decide in a minute whether to read on.

**[WordPress 7.1.3 is out with seven security fixes](https://wordpress.org/news/2026/10/wordpress-7-1-3-maintenance-and-security-release/)**
It also has four bug fixes. The security fixes include a flaw on the comments screen, a flaw in the export tool, and a bug that could show comments on private posts to people who are not logged in. Sites with automatic updates will update on their own, and WordPress.org says everyone else should update straight away. *WordPress.org News, 6 Oct*

**[Google’s September spam update has finished rolling out](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-september-2026-spam-update-complete/592283/)**
Google says it was complete on 8 October, after 13 days and 16 hours, longer than the three earlier spam updates this year. Google has not said what it targeted. Search Engine Journal says a dip in this window does not prove the update caused it, so check Search Console first. *Search Engine Journal, 8 Oct*

**[Search Console’s performance report ran more than 64 hours behind](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-performance-report-delayed-42271.html)**
Search Engine Roundtable called it incredibly unusual. It was back to normal on 12 October, and Google had not commented. Google’s help page also says the newest days of data may be preliminary, shown as a dotted line. If the last few days looked low, that may be why. *Search Engine Roundtable, 11 Oct*

**[Rank trackers are struggling because Google is blocking them more often](https://www.seroundtable.com/third-party-google-rank-tracking-broken-42272.html)**
SE Ranking, Sistrix, DataForSEO and others posted notices about their Google data. Nozzle says Google is blocking more of its requests and in some cases serving bad data, and that 8.0% of the results it checked were bad. The report includes no comment from Google. A good week to trust the clicks in Search Console over a tracker. *Search Engine Roundtable, 12 Oct*

**[Google warns against fake author details, including AI-generated headshots](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-against-deceptive-authorship-information-42238.html)**
Google added a paragraph to its helpful content guidance: made-up names, false credentials and AI-generated headshots are a form of deception, and any deception makes a page untrustworthy to readers and to its quality systems. Search Engine Roundtable notes Google had earlier said it was not concerned, so this is a change in stance. Nothing to do if your name and photo are real. *Search Engine Roundtable, 6 Oct*

**[OpenAI is testing labels on ChatGPT product results](https://www.seroundtable.com/product-labels-on-chatgpt-results-42237.html)**
Labels such as ‘best all-rounder’, ‘best for beginners’ and ‘best cushioning’ sit next to each product. Brodie Clark spotted the test, and the report mentions no confirmation from OpenAI. Worth a look if you write gear or product posts. *Search Engine Roundtable, 6 Oct*

## Now the other half. Is your site AI ready?

Everything above is about people finding you and what they click. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s crawlers read blogs too, and whether they can read yours is a separate question from whether your posts rank.

### Find out in about 15 seconds

We built a free audit tool for it, the [AI Readiness Checker](https://hostmy.blog/plugins/rankready/ai-readiness-checker/). It takes about 15 seconds, needs no account, and reads your site the way ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s crawlers do.

![The AI Readiness Checker page on hostmy.blog. The headline asks whether an AI agent can actually read your site, with a box to enter a site address and a Run the check button. A dark scorecard beside it lists the layers Reach, Read, Understand and Quote, and shows 41 signals.](https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/cited-2-ai-readiness-checker.png)The free AI Readiness Checker at hostmy.blog. Screenshot taken 28 September 2026.

### And if it finds gaps

You can fix them with [RankReady](https://wordpress.org/plugins/rankready-ai-llm-seo/), our free WordPress plugin. Install it if you like. It works alongside Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO and will not fight them. The [documentation](https://hostmy.blog/docs/rankready/) walks through each setting.

![The AI Visibility tab in RankReady 1.3.0, described as making your site readable to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, with sub-tabs for Brand Identity, Robots.txt, LLMs.txt, Markdown, WebMCP and OKF.](https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/rankready-130-ai-visibility-hd.png)The AI Visibility tab in RankReady 1.3.0. Screenshot taken 26 August 2026.

The honest limit: RankReady cannot promise rankings or citations. It helps AI read your site.

**[Run the free check](https://hostmy.blog/plugins/rankready/ai-readiness-checker/)**

## The bit at the bottom

So in short: more impressions is not the same as more readers, so watch the clicks on your top posts, and it pays to know whether AI can read your blog.

Which do you look at first in Search Console, how often you show up or how often people click? Hit reply on the email, or write to [support@hostmy.blog](mailto:support@hostmy.blog), and I will read it. And if a friend runs a blog, [The Cited is here](https://hostmy.blog/the-cited/).

Warmly,
Aditya Sharma
Host My Blog