12% of Our Google Impressions Were 8-Word Prompts. They Got 10 Clicks Out of 842.

The finding

Between August 31 and September 27, 2026, Google showed justinmckelvey.com for 2,388 search queries that were eight words or longer. They were 12.3% of the site's query-level impressions. They ranked better than the short queries, at an average position of 7.3. They produced 10 clicks. The shorter queries produced 832.

That is a click-through rate of 0.046% against 0.539%, almost twelve times lower, on queries where the page was already on page one. If you have watched impressions climb in Search Console while clicks sat still and assumed your titles were broken, this is the first thing to check. It takes two minutes, and the filter is at the bottom of this post.

The data, by query length

Google Search Console, justinmckelvey.com, August 31 to September 27, 2026. Only queries Google attributes to a row are included (more on that in the method section).

Look at the shape. CTR rises from one-word heads to six- and seven-word questions, which is what search marketers have said about long-tail queries for twenty years: the more specific the search, the more likely the click. Then at eight words it falls off a cliff. The long tail used to be where the clicks were. In this data, past seven words, it is where they stop.

August says the same thing at a smaller size: 8,403 impressions from 8+ word queries (13.1% of the month), 5 clicks out of 196, a CTR 5.8 times lower than the shorter queries.

What the long queries look like

These are real strings from the September rows, each ranking in the top three with zero clicks:

• "i need the most recommended platforms for tracking brand citations in claude and gemini on a budget of under five hundred dollars a month." (position 2.9)
• "is tracking 10-20 prompts enough to understand ai visibility, or do i need broader real buyer query coverage?" (position 1.3)
• "lovable vs cursor for non-developers who want a finished product, not just code" (position 2.8)
• "buying an ai server vs paying for openai api tokens" (position 1.3)

Nobody types a budget and a full stop into a classic search box. These read like prompts, the kind of thing people type into an AI answer box. 223 of the September queries were over 99 words long, which is a pasted document, not a search.

I want to be careful here, because the tempting headline is "12% of our impressions were AI Mode." Search Console does not tell you which surface showed your page for a given query, so I can't prove that. What I can say is that the long queries are prompt-shaped, rank on page one, and almost never click, on two of our sites, and on this one in two separate months.

It is not just one site

superdupr.com is the stronger example of the trap. Its long queries rank at 10.1 on average while its short ones sit at 29.6, so the prompts are where it looks most visible, and they sent nobody. getlocalcall.com has too few clicks to read either way, so I'm listing it, not arguing from it.

What this means if you own the site

1. Your CTR is two numbers now, not one. A blended CTR mixes queries that click with queries that structurally don't. As the long share grows, the blended number falls even if every page is doing its job. Split it before you rewrite a single title.
2. The long rows are a list of your buyers' questions. Each one is someone asking an AI tool something your page was considered for. That list is the best FAQ source you have, and it is free. Answer the question in one plain sentence near the top of the page, the way the answer engine optimization playbook describes.
3. Count them as visibility, not traffic. Being a candidate source for "which tool should a non-developer use" is worth something, even at zero clicks. It just isn't worth a visit, so don't put it in the traffic report. This is the same split as the GEO vs SEO difference: one is measured in citations, the other in clicks.

The Bing numbers, and a mistake we made

Same blocks of 28 days, pulled from Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console on October 1:

Bing gets clicked about twice as often per impression. Google still sends about 4.6 times as many clicks, because it shows the site about nine times as often. On superdupr.com the CTR gap is wider (1.16% on Bing against 0.14% on Google), and Google still sends more than twice the clicks.

The mistake: on September 1 our internal notes said Bing was sending us twice Google's clicks. That figure came from a partial export. The full Search Console totals for the same weeks are almost five times larger, and they reverse the conclusion. I'm putting it here because it is the same lesson as the rest of this post: a single aggregate number hid what was underneath it. For clicks, Google is still the bigger engine for us by a wide margin. If your goal is getting into the AI answers themselves, that is a different job, and how to get cited by ChatGPT is where to start.

Check your own site in two minutes

1. Open Search Console, Performance, Search results. Set the date to the last 28 days.
2. Click Add filter, then Query, then Custom (regex).
3. Paste ^(\S+\s+){7,}\S+$ and keep Matches regex. That keeps queries of eight words or more.
4. Write down impressions, clicks and CTR. Then switch the filter to Doesn't match regex and write down the same three.
5. Divide the first impressions number by the sum of both. That is your long-prompt share. Compare the two CTRs.

If your long share is under 5%, your CTR story is probably about titles and positions. If it is over 10%, like ours, some of the "lost" clicks were never available.

Method

• Source. The Search Console API, query dimension, up to 25,000 rows per site and window, plus the date dimension for property totals. Bing Webmaster Tools API, daily rank and traffic totals. All pulled October 1, 2026.
• Windows. August 3 to August 30 and August 31 to September 27, 2026. Bing's API had no data after September 27 on the day of the pull, so both engines use the same 28-day blocks.
• Word count. The query string split on whitespace. "8 words or more" means eight or more tokens.
• The big caveat. Google anonymizes rare queries. In September only 176,095 of justinmckelvey.com's 670,719 impressions (26%) came with a query attached. Long prompts are rare by nature, so they are probably under-counted in the query rows, which would make the real long share higher than 12%, not lower. We can't confirm that from the data.
• What we did not measure. Which Google surface (classic results, AI Overviews, AI Mode) served each impression. Search Console's query rows don't carry it.

The earlier piece in this series, who AI engines actually cite, looked at the answers. This one looks at the questions. If you want the same split run on your own buyer queries, with which engines cite you and which competitors they pick instead, that is the AI Search Audit ($1,500 flat, done in five business days).

Sources

• Google Search Console API, properties justinmckelvey.com, superdupr.com and getlocalcall.com, query and date dimensions, pulled October 1, 2026.
• Bing Webmaster Tools API, GetRankAndTrafficStats for the same three sites, pulled October 1, 2026.