Ranked, and read underneath the answer
The machinery itself has barely moved. A crawler fetches pages, an index keeps what it understood of them, and a retrieval step decides which sources are worth pulling for a given query. What changed is the top of the page a searcher sees. On a great many queries the results open with a written answer assembled from sources, with the links arranged below it, so the reader usually has the substance before reaching anything to click. A position therefore stopped being one unit of value. Where the query has a settled answer, a definition, a conversion, an opening time, the answer is supplied and the visit is redundant. Where somebody has to choose between options, spend money, check a claim against their own circumstances or decide whether a named person can be trusted, the summary is only a starting point and the visit still happens. Anybody who quotes you a figure for how that splits is guessing: the search companies hold the data and nobody outside them does.
Which makes one question more useful than any keyword: what does a page offer once its facts are common property? A page whose purpose was to define a term is in real trouble. A page quoting a current price, showing what is in stock, comparing two options with the awkward trade-off left in, taking a booking, or reporting something the writer did that nobody can copy, still gives a reason to open it, and is incidentally the sort of material those written answers draw on. For your own site the only honest instrument is Search Console, because it reports what happened to your listings rather than a simulated results page. A query whose impressions hold steady while the clicks drain away is one where the answer is being handed over upstream, and that is an editorial problem, not a technical fault. Third-party rank trackers describe a results page that varies by person, place and moment, and they have been describing something close to fiction for longer than most of their subscribers realise. Technical health has not stopped mattering; it has stopped being an advantage, since a page that cannot be fetched and parsed is not in the running at all.
- Sort out retrieval, then wording. A page that resists crawling, needs a fight to render, or resolves to three addresses instead of one wastes everything downstream. This work is cheap, thoroughly documented and finite, which is also why it settles nothing on its own.
- Consolidate instead of publishing. Four thin pages circling a single question compete with each other, divide whatever standing the site has, and hand a summariser nothing it lacked. One page that answers properly outperforms all four and costs less to keep accurate.
- Read queries, not positions. Search Console shows the wording people used on their way to you, which is evidence about what they wanted. A rank report shows a number about a page no two people see alike.
- Publish what a summary cannot carry. Prices, dates, availability, a named practitioner's judgement, the result of having done the thing. Everything else is being restated for free, above your listing, by something that will not credit you for it.