The Great Decoupling
From ChatGPT's launch to AI-powered search: A journey through the transformation of discovery
The Decoupling Effect
Illustrative chart only: these hard-coded values demonstrate the impressions/clicks pattern and are not measured traffic or CTR data.
Key Trends & Insights
This dated chronology collects product announcements, search interface changes, reporting updates, and selected research from November 2022 through July 2025. It provides context for the impressions/clicks pattern called “The Great Decoupling”; it is not an independent audit or causal measurement of each event’s impact.
Historical snapshot: 27 embedded events from November 2022 through July 2025. Two entries have been corrected against their primary sources. This copy is not synchronized with the linked Sheet.
Showing 27 of 27 events.
| Date ↕ | Type ↕ | Company ↕ | Event ↕ | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-17 | 🟢 Product announcement | OpenAI | ⭐️ ChatGPT Agent is released | View |
| 2025-07-16 | 🟠 Product upgrade | More advanced AI capabilities are coming to Search. Gemini 2.5 Pro, Deep Search & AI business-calling roll out to AI Pro/Ultra users. | View | |
| 2025-07-09 | 🟠 Product upgrade | AI Mode arrives in Circle to Search & adds in-game help | View | |
| 2025-06-30 | 🔴 Algorithm update | June 2025 Core Update begins | View | |
| 2025-06-24 | 🔵 Product expansion | AI Mode launches in India (Labs; voice, text & Lens support) | View | |
| 2025-06-16 | 🟧 Reporting update | AI Mode traffic now counted in Search Console totals | View | |
| 2025-06-03 | ⚪ Industry terminology | Darwin Santos formalises term "The Great Decoupling" | View | |
| 2025-05-20 | 🔵 Product expansion | ⭐️ AI Overviews available in 200+ countries & 40+ languages | View | |
| 2025-04-17 | ⚫ Market research | Ahrefs | Ahrefs: AI Overviews correlate with 34.5% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page | View |
| 2025-04-01 | 🟤 Community insight | Community | Community reports impressions ↑ / clicks ↓ spread on social | View |
| 2025-03-31 | 🔵 Product expansion | AI Overviews enter first EU markets (DE, IT, ES, etc.) | View | |
| 2025-03-13 | 🔴 Algorithm update | March 2025 Core Update begins (14-day rollout) | View | |
| 2025-03-05 | 🟠 Product upgrade | ⭐️ Gemini 2.0 upgrade + experimental AI Mode launch | View | |
| 2024-10-30 | 🔵 Product expansion | AI Overviews reach 100+ countries | View | |
| 2024-10-28 | 🔵 Product expansion | AI Overviews launch in Canada | View | |
| 2024-07-18 | 🟠 Product upgrade | OpenAI | GPT-4o mini released | View |
| 2024-06-25 | 🟡 UI change | Continuous scroll removed; pagination returns | View | |
| 2024-05-14 | 🟣 Major release | AI Overviews roll out to all U.S. users | View | |
| 2024-05-13 | 🟣 Major release | OpenAI | GPT-4o multimodal model released | View |
| 2024-01-10 | 🟣 Major release | OpenAI | GPT Store launch | View |
| 2023-11-08 | 🔵 Product expansion | SGE expands to 120+ countries & 4 languages | View | |
| 2023-11-06 | 🟢 Product announcement | OpenAI | OpenAI Dev Day: GPT-4 Turbo & GPTs announced | View |
| 2023-08-30 | 🔵 Product expansion | SGE expands to India & Japan | View | |
| 2023-05-10 | 🟢 Product announcement | SGE announced; Search Labs sign-up opens (U.S.) | View | |
| 2023-03-14 | 🟢 Product announcement | Anthropic | ⭐️ Claude & Claude Instant launch | View |
| 2023-02-06 | 🟢 Product announcement | ⭐️ Bard conversational AI announced | View | |
| 2022-11-30 | 🟢 Product announcement | OpenAI | ⭐️ ChatGPT research preview | View |