The Robots Are Taking Exams in My Search Console

Over a recent 28-day window, my site collected 3.78 million impressions in Google Search Console, and 91% of them came from queries no human typed. 1 The tell was a blog post about Claude Code hooks that looked like a breakout: 30,000 impressions in its first two weeks, at a click-through rate of 0.14%. Every SEO playbook says a page with big impressions and a dead CTR needs a title rescue. Then I pulled the actual queries, and the top ones were multiple-choice exam questions, pasted into Google verbatim, six slightly different ways: “a developer wants to prevent claude from reading sensitive.env files. which type of hook…” Nobody clicks, because nobody is there. The searcher is a certification quiz checking its own answer key.

TL;DR

A 13-day-old post drew 30,105 impressions at 0.14% CTR, the classic profile of a broken title. The queries behind it were verbatim exam questions and SDK jargon strings; genuine human queries numbered in the single digits. The title was fine. The audience was synthetic. 4

Site-wide, 3.78M impressions in 28 days shrink to 340K (9%) once you exclude queries containing a double quote or an underscore, a cheap but effective machine-query signature. Filtered CTR nearly triples, from 0.42% to 1.10%, and average position improves from 11.2 to 7.7. 1

The machine queries split into three species with completely different value: exam takers (natural-language test questions, zero clicks ever), error pasters (verbatim error strings, 3-10% CTR, the highest-intent visitors I have), and retrieval sweeps (quoted phrases and snake_case identifiers at bulk scale, ~0.35% CTR).

No regex separates humans from machines cleanly. The exam questions read as human and are not; the error pasters look robotic and are people in trouble. Query shape lies; click behavior tells the truth.

The practical shift: never optimize a title, or panic about a “declining” page, before splitting its queries into human and machine. Impressions stopped being a vanity metric…