My search impressions are flat but my clicks and calls are down. Is that AI answers eating my traffic, or did I just get outranked?

The two causes look identical from the outside and have opposite fixes, so it is worth ten minutes to tell them apart before you fire an agency or rewrite a site that was working.

Getting outranked moves impressions. If a competitor pushed past you, you are shown to fewer people, and impressions fall alongside clicks. Zero-click search does something different: you are still shown, so impressions hold steady, but the answer is delivered on the results page and nobody needs to click through. Same lost revenue, completely different diagnosis.

So look at rank and click-through rate separately. Held your position but your click-through rate fell off a cliff? That is the answer being read without you. Position slipped and everything fell together? That is a ranking problem and the old playbook applies.

If it is zero-click, chasing rank harder will not help. The work shifts to being the source that gets quoted, and to owning the parts of the journey that cannot be answered on a results page — a phone call, a quote, a booking.