A page that holds a top ten spot and gets almost no clicks used to mean something was wrong with it. Bad title, weak description, mismatched intent. You rewrote the snippet, waited a few weeks, and the clicks came.
I ran exactly that repair on one of our own pages in May. New title, sharper and more specific, written against the search intent rather than the topic. Then I left it alone for two months and measured. The click-through rate stayed where it was, around a tenth of a percent, while the page held its position and kept collecting impressions.
That result was more useful than a success would have been. It ruled out the explanation everyone reaches for first, and it forced me to look at what had actually changed.
For a growing share of informational searches, Google answers the question above the results. The user reads the summary and never scrolls. Your listing is still there, still ranked, still counted as an impression. It simply sits below the point where the search ends.
I should be precise about what I can and cannot prove here. Search Console gives you position and clicks; it does not tell you which result page carried an answer box. What I have is a strong correlation on our own data plus the failed title test, and the explanation that fits both. If you want certainty for your own pages, search the affected queries yourself and look at what sits above the first organic result. That takes ten minutes and beats any inference.
For the page I tested I did run that check, and what sits above the organic results explains the flat click line better than anything on the page does. So for this one case I am comfortable saying it was neither a penalty nor a content problem. For your pages that remains a hypothesis until you look.
What makes it hard to see is that every dashboard still reports the old metrics as if they meant the old things. Position two looks like a win. Impressions climbing month over month looks like growth. Only the click column tells you the truth, and it is the one column people explain away.
There is a signature, and you can check it in Search Console in about ten minutes without any tools.
Look for pages with a high impression count, a stable position in the top ten, and a click-through rate near zero. Not low, near zero. A weak title still produces a real rate, just a disappointing one. What I am describing produces something closer to nothing at all, across hundreds of impressions, month after month, without moving.
Then look at what those queries actually are. On our own pages the affected ones were questions. Definitional searches, "what is" and "how does", the exact shape of query that an answer box handles completely. The commercial queries on the same domain still converted impressions into clicks at an ordinary rate, because a summary does not finish that job.
That split is the useful part. It tells you which of your pages are affected and which are not, and it stops you from applying the wrong fix to the whole site. I would not assume our split generalises to your site, but the check takes ten minutes and tells you your own.
I want to stay on the title rewrite for a moment, because the way it failed is the most useful thing in this article.
The standard advice would have had me rewrite, see no improvement, and conclude the new title was not good enough either. Then rewrite again. That loop can absorb months, and it never terminates, because you can always imagine a better headline.
What stopped it was writing down beforehand what a success would look like. A meaningful lift within eight weeks on a page whose position was already stable. When the eight weeks produced nothing, the hypothesis was dead and I had to look elsewhere. Without that number written down in advance, I would have squinted at a flat line and found something encouraging in it.
This applies well beyond titles. Most SEO work is untestable in practice because nobody says in advance what would count as the measure failing. If your agency proposes a change, ask what result would prove the change did not work, and by when. A proposal that cannot fail cannot be evaluated, and you will pay for it either way.
Look at other search engines, because they did not all change at once. This was the finding that surprised me most. I took a page whose Google click-through rate had collapsed and pulled the same query set from Bing Webmaster Tools. Same page, same search terms, roughly four percent click-through rate against a Google figure that rounds to zero.
Bing is smaller, and for most businesses it will not replace Google traffic. But it is not nothing, and the effort required is close to zero because your pages already rank there. In the client accounts I have looked at, a claimed Bing Webmaster property is the exception rather than the rule, which means the channel is usually not even being measured. Whether that traffic converts as well as Google's is something I have not measured and would not claim.
Push the position instead of polishing the snippet. If the answer box is taking the click, cosmetic changes below it are wasted. The lever that remains is moving genuinely higher, and the cheapest candidate is internal linking, because most sites have valuable pages carrying a single incoming link from their own navigation and nothing else. I would call this the best available bet rather than a proven fix: it is cheap, it is under your control, and unlike a title rewrite it addresses the thing that actually changed.