What is the difference between clicks and impressions?

An impression is counted when a link to your site is shown to a searcher. A click is counted when that searcher actually goes through to your site. Every click starts as an impression, so impressions are always the larger of the two numbers.

What counts as an impression

• Your URL appears on the result page the user is looking at. A result on page two only earns an impression once the user opens page two.
• Results below the fold count when the user scrolls to them, and items in a carousel count when they are scrolled into view.
• The same rules apply to image, video, news and Discover surfaces, which you can isolate with the Search type filter.

What counts as a click

• The user clicks a result that takes them away from Google and onto your site.
• Clicking, pressing back, and clicking the same result again inside one session counts once.
• Interactions that keep the user on Google, such as expanding an image thumbnail or opening a "People also ask" panel, are not clicks on your site.

Why the gap between them varies

Two pages with the same impressions can produce very different click counts. Position is the biggest factor, but snippet wording, the presence of ads and other search features above you, brand familiarity and intent mismatch all move the number. The ratio between them is CTR, covered in CTR in Search Console.

Three things that trip people up

• Aggregation changes the count. Grouped by property, one query that shows two of your URLs is a single impression. Grouped by page, each URL gets its own.
• Rows do not add up to the total. Queries issued by very few people are anonymised and left out of the query table, so per-query impressions sum to less than the property total.
• Recent days are incomplete. Search Console data runs roughly two days behind and reaches back 16 months.

Tip: never rebuild a total by summing the rows of a filtered table. Read totals from the unfiltered chart, and treat query-level rows as a ranked sample of what happened.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO reads the same rows through the Search Analytics API rather than the 1,000-row UI export, so query and page tables are complete rather than truncated, and adds period-over-period comparison badges on both metrics at once.