Search is generating fewer clicks, and that trend is increasingly difficult to dispute. In the first four months of 2026, 68% of Google searches in the United States ended without the user clicking any result at all, according to clickstream data from Similarweb analysed by SparkToro. In the UK, the figure was even higher at 69.5%. The full study provides a useful comparison of zero-click behaviour across six major markets.
This is what marketers increasingly refer to as zero-click search behaviour. For businesses that have historically measured SEO primarily through rankings, organic sessions and clicks, those numbers can look alarming. If almost seven out of ten searches no longer produce a click, it is easy to conclude that SEO must be losing its value.
That conclusion is too simplistic. People have not stopped searching, and there is evidence that AI is actually encouraging more search activity for certain types of queries. Google reports that AI Overviews have increased usage by more than 10% for the types of queries where they appear in major markets, while overall and commercial search volumes have continued to grow. Google discusses the impact of AI on search behaviour here.
What is changing is what happens between the search and the eventual action. A person might get an immediate answer and leave, refine the question and search again, learn about a brand without visiting it, or only click once they are considerably further through their research.
Zero-click search therefore represents an evolution in search behaviour, not the end of search or SEO. Understanding that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
What Is a Zero-Click Search?
A zero-click search occurs when someone performs a search but does not click a result afterwards. The most obvious example is a simple factual query where the answer is provided directly in the search results. Search for the capital of Sweden and Google can tell you “Stockholm” immediately, leaving little reason to visit another website simply to confirm it.
But zero-click behaviour is broader than simple answer boxes. A search may end without a click because an AI Overview provides enough information, a knowledge panel resolves the query, a local result gives the user a telephone number or directions, or the searcher simply decides to refine the query and search again.
This distinction matters because zero-click does not automatically mean that the user received an answer and disappeared. SparkToro and Datos’ 2024 analysis found that around 37% of US searches ended the session, while approximately another 22% resulted in a follow-up search. In the latest 2026 US data, 39% ended the session while 29% resulted in another Google search. In the UK, 43.1% ended the session and 26.4% resulted in another search. The 2026 country comparison provides the full breakdown.
These are very different behaviours. In the first scenario, the user’s need has genuinely been satisfied without a website visit. In the second, the user is still actively researching, and the zero-click search is simply one stage in a longer journey.
Zero-Click Search Is Not New
AI has accelerated zero-click behaviour, but it did not invent it. Search engines have answered questions directly for years through weather results, calculators, exchange rates, sports scores, knowledge panels, local results, featured snippets and other SERP features.
Historical analysis from Similarweb and SparkToro estimates that roughly 45% of searches were zero-click in 2016 and around 49% in 2019. By 2024, the figure had reached roughly 60%, before climbing further in 2026. Similarweb’s zero-click analysis explores the broader trend over time.
The direction of travel matters more than any one number because individual studies use different methodologies, samples and definitions. What we can say with much more confidence is that the proportion of searches producing external website visits has been declining for years, and that AI-generated search experiences appear to be accelerating the trend.
This makes zero-click search a structural feature of modern search rather than a temporary anomaly.
AI Overviews Are Accelerating Zero-Click Behaviour
Google AI Overviews are one of the clearest contributors to the recent acceleration in zero-click behaviour.
A Pew Research Center study of 68,879 Google searches found a significant difference in user behaviour depending on whether an AI-generated summary appeared. When no AI summary was present, users clicked a traditional search result in 15% of visits. When an AI summary appeared, that dropped to just 8%. Links cited directly within the AI summary were clicked in only 1% of visits.
Independent SEO data points in the same direction. Ahrefs’ original analysis of 300,000 keywords found that AI Overview presence correlated with a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the number-one organic result. When the study was repeated using later data, the estimated reduction grew to around 58%. Ahrefs’ updated analysis provides the methodology and comparison.
It is therefore reasonable to expect some queries to generate substantially less organic traffic than they once did, even where rankings remain strong.
That does not necessarily mean the SEO work has stopped performing. It may mean that the search result itself has changed.
Which Searches Have the Highest Zero-Click Rates?
Zero-click behaviour is not evenly distributed across every query, and this is one of the most important distinctions for businesses to understand. Simple informational and factual searches generally have the greatest zero-click risk, particularly where the answer can be expressed as a sentence, number, definition or short summary.
Queries such as “What time is it in New York?”, “How many kilometres are in a mile?” or “What is the capital of Sweden?” provide relatively little reason to visit a website once the answer is displayed directly in the search results. Similarweb’s analysis places queries with 70% to 100% zero-click rates predominantly within pure informational, factual and definitional searches, while commercial and navigational searches are more commonly found towards the lower end of the spectrum. See the zero-click search analysis and intent classifications.
The relationship between informational intent and AI-generated results is also supported by wider industry data. In Ahrefs’ original analysis, 99.2% of keywords triggering AI Overviews had informational intent, while Semrush found informational queries represented 91.3% of AI Overview-triggering searches at the beginning of 2025. The exact percentages vary by dataset and have changed considerably as Google has expanded AI Overviews, but the broader pattern is clear: queries that can be answered directly are generally much more exposed to zero-click behaviour than searches where the user still needs to complete an action.
Which Searches Tend to Generate More Clicks?
At the other end of the spectrum are searches where the user needs to do something.
Someone searching for a specific website generally needs to reach it. Someone intending to buy a product often needs to visit a retailer. Someone booking an appointment needs a booking interface, and someone requesting a quote needs to contact a provider. Similarly, a user researching a complex purchase often needs more detail than can realistically fit within one short generated answer.
Commercial, navigational and transactional queries therefore tend to retain stronger click potential than straightforward informational searches. Similarweb’s practical classification places 0% to 30% zero-click queries primarily in the commercial, navigational and high-intent category, with 30% to 50% representing more mixed informational-commercial behaviour.
That distinction matters enormously for SEO strategy. Imagine two keywords each receiving 10,000 searches per month. One has an 85% zero-click rate and answers a basic factual question. The other has a 20% zero-click rate and represents someone actively comparing suppliers. Treating those opportunities as equally valuable because they have the same search volume would be misleading.
Modern keyword research increasingly needs to consider traffic potential, zero-click behaviour, search intent and commercial relevance together.
AI Overviews Are Moving Further Down the Funnel
There is an important caveat: AI-generated results are no longer confined to purely informational searches.
Semrush found that informational queries represented 91.3% of AI Overview-triggering searches in January 2025, but that proportion had fallen to 57.1% by October. The remaining queries were commercial, transactional or navigational. Its wider analysis showed commercial, transactional and navigational searches all increasing their share of AI Overview exposure as Google expanded the feature.
This means businesses should not assume that only top-of-funnel informational traffic is vulnerable. AI-generated answers are increasingly appearing in search journeys that influence product research, supplier consideration and commercial decisions.
The boundaries are moving, which is one reason SEO strategies need to remain flexible rather than assuming today’s SERP behaviour will stay fixed.
Zero Click Does Not Necessarily Mean Zero Value
This is where zero-click search becomes more complicated than a traffic problem.
Imagine somebody searches for:
“best cordless vacuum for pet hair”
An AI Overview compares several products and mentions three brands. The user does not click anything immediately, so traditional analytics records no organic session. But one of those brands has now been placed into the user’s consideration set. The user may later search specifically for that brand, visit a retailer, watch a review, ask ChatGPT another question or purchase through a completely different journey.
The original search generated no click, but it may still have created awareness and influence.
There is emerging evidence that this kind of effect is real. A 2026 observational study linking opt-in AI assistant usage with subsequent web behaviour found that when an AI system recommended a brand to someone with no recent observed engagement with that brand, subsequent same-name Google searches increased by 4.3 percentage points, while visits to the brand’s own website increased by 2.4 percentage points. The research paper discusses the methodology and limitations in detail.
This does not prove that every AI mention creates a later conversion, but it does demonstrate why the immediate click is not the only useful measure of search visibility.
Some Lost Clicks Were Never Particularly Valuable
There is another uncomfortable truth hidden within zero-click statistics: not every organic click that disappears was commercially valuable in the first place.
Consider somebody searching:
“how many ounces are in a litre?”
Five years ago, they might have clicked a website, found the answer within a few seconds and left. Analytics would have recorded an organic session and the website would have gained “traffic”, but commercially very little may have happened.
In older analytics terminology, many of these visits would have looked very similar to the behaviour marketers often complained about as a bounce: someone arrives, consumes one piece of information and leaves without exploring the site or taking a meaningful action. Modern analytics handles engagement differently, so zero-click behaviour should not literally be equated with bounce rate, but the commercial comparison is useful.
If Google answers that person’s question directly today, the website loses a visit. It has not necessarily lost a customer.
This is why traffic declines need context. A 20% fall in organic sessions can be commercially serious, or it can represent a large reduction in low-intent visits while leads, revenue and meaningful engagement remain relatively stable. Those situations require completely different responses.
People Are Still Searching, and in Some Cases Searching More
Another common misconception is that zero-click behaviour means people are simply searching less.
The available evidence suggests the opposite.
Google says it processes more than five trillion searches annually and reports that AI Overviews have increased usage by more than 10% for the types of queries where they appear in major markets. Overall and commercial search volumes have also continued to grow. Google discusses the growth in search activity and AI-driven discovery here.
Earlier clickstream research from Datos and SparkToro reached a similar conclusion independently. Its panel showed searches per searcher rising to historical highs despite growing zero-click behaviour. The 2024 study provides the wider clickstream context.
The emerging pattern is therefore not:
People search less → SEO becomes less important.
It is closer to:
People continue searching, ask more detailed questions and increasingly receive part of the answer without leaving the search environment.
That is a very different strategic problem.
Users Are Becoming More Selective About When They Click
AI answers allow more of the research process to happen before a website visit. A user might ask Google or ChatGPT an initial question, refine the requirements, compare several possibilities and only then decide that one particular website deserves deeper investigation.
The website may therefore receive fewer visits, but those visits can come from people with considerably more context and a clearer idea of what they need.
Google claims that clicks originating from search experiences containing AI Overviews tend to be higher quality, with users spending more time on the websites they eventually visit. As the platform owner, Google has an obvious interest in presenting AI Search positively, so that claim should be interpreted with that context. But it is directionally consistent with the idea that AI can absorb simple research while leaving deeper investigation to websites. Google discusses click quality and AI search here.
This makes conversion and user experience more important. If fewer people click, wasting the clicks that remain becomes considerably more expensive. A page that ranks well but provides vague information, poor usability or no obvious next step becomes a bigger commercial problem when each qualified visitor matters more.
Zero-Click Search Does Not Mean the End of SEO
SEO has always adapted to changes in the way search works. Featured snippets changed click behaviour. Local packs changed local search. Knowledge panels answered factual questions directly. Google Shopping transformed product search, and mobile changed how people interacted with websites.
AI is another major evolution, albeit a particularly significant one.
But the underlying objective remains familiar: make your organisation as discoverable, relevant and trustworthy as possible when people search for the problems, information, products and services connected with your business.
Sometimes that visibility produces an immediate click. Sometimes it contributes to recognition or consideration. Sometimes it results in a branded search later. And sometimes the user receives an answer and disappears, in which case the SEO opportunity may genuinely have very little commercial value.
A strong strategy distinguishes between those situations rather than treating all organic visibility as equal.
SEO Optimisation May Be More Important, Not Less
There is an understandable temptation to draw the opposite conclusion. If Google sends fewer clicks, why invest as heavily in SEO?
Because the remaining opportunity becomes more competitive and more commercially selective.
If a simple informational query now produces far fewer clicks, ranking third instead of first can matter even more for the smaller number of clicks that remain. If AI systems choose a handful of sources or brands to reference, being one of those sources becomes more valuable than being an interchangeable page somewhere further down the results. And if users arrive later in their journey, your commercial pages need to answer their more detailed questions convincingly.
This means content quality, technical accessibility, site architecture, authority and search intent become more important, not less. Our guide to why SEO fundamentals still matter looks more closely at why those foundations continue to underpin both conventional and AI-driven search.
The practical implication is that businesses need more sophisticated SEO, not less SEO.
What Should Businesses Optimise for in a Zero-Click World?
The answer depends on the search.
For high-intent commercial queries, the traditional objective remains straightforward: achieve strong visibility and maximise the likelihood that the right user visits and converts.
For highly informational searches, the calculation is different. Ranking may create less traffic than search volume suggests, so businesses need to decide whether the topic still contributes to authority, brand discovery, AI citations, internal linking or the wider customer journey.
A useful modern SEO strategy therefore asks not simply “How many people search for this keyword?” but also “What happens after they search, and what value can visibility realistically create?”
In practical terms, search opportunities should be evaluated using a broader set of factors:
- Search demand: How many people are searching?
- Intent: What are they trying to accomplish?
- Click potential: How often does this type of search produce website visits?
- Commercial relevance: How closely is the search connected to your products, services or customers?
- Visibility value: Is there value in being referenced or recognised even without the immediate click?
- Conversion potential: What could a qualified visitor realistically be worth?
- Authority value: Does covering the topic strengthen your wider relevance and expertise?
This is considerably more useful than prioritising keywords based on search volume alone.
Zero-Click Search Changes How SEO Should Be Measured
Organic traffic still matters, and so do rankings, but neither metric should exist in isolation.
A business ultimately cares about outcomes. That means SEO reporting increasingly needs to connect conventional metrics such as impressions, rankings and clicks with branded search growth, conversions, qualified enquiries, revenue, AI visibility and the wider commercial journey.
This does not mean inventing attribution where none exists. AI and zero-click visibility remain difficult to measure precisely, and marketers should be sceptical of platforms claiming to attribute every LLM mention directly to revenue.
But the opposite extreme is equally problematic. Assuming an exposure has no value simply because analytics did not record a referral click ignores how people actually discover and research brands.
Our guide to measuring SEO ROI explores why SEO performance needs to be evaluated against business outcomes rather than traffic alone.
Zero-Click Search Also Changes Content Strategy
For years, SEO content strategies often followed a relatively simple formula:
Find high-volume informational keywords, create pages, rank them and collect the resulting traffic.
That model now needs more nuance.
If a keyword has enormous search volume but an 85% zero-click rate, the traffic opportunity may be far smaller than the headline number suggests. Meanwhile, a lower-volume commercial query with a strong click rate and high conversion potential may be dramatically more valuable.
Businesses should therefore become more selective about which informational topics deserve investment. That does not mean abandoning informational content. Useful content can still establish expertise, attract external references, support commercial pages, answer customer questions, participate in AI-generated answers and introduce the brand during early research.
But every topic should have a reason to exist beyond “the keyword has search volume”.
Our SEO content strategy services are built around precisely that distinction: understanding where search demand intersects with expertise, user needs and commercial opportunity.
Zero-Click Behaviour Is Particularly Important for Local Search
Local search demonstrates why “zero click” and “zero value” should never be treated as synonyms.
Someone searches for a restaurant, dentist or shop. Google Maps provides the location, opening times, reviews and telephone number. The user gets directions and visits.
From the website’s perspective, there may have been no organic click.
From the business’s perspective, the search may have produced a customer.
Similarweb explicitly identifies local search as an example where a zero-click interaction can generate offline foot traffic rather than a website session. Its documentation on zero-click searches explains these types of outcomes.
The same idea applies to telephone calls, map interactions and other actions that do not neatly pass through a traditional organic landing page.
Search value and website traffic have never been perfectly synonymous. AI is simply making that distinction harder to ignore.
Zero-Click Behaviour Varies by Market
The latest data also shows that zero-click behaviour is not identical everywhere.
Similarweb and SparkToro’s January-April 2026 analysis found:
- UK: 69.5%
- US: 68.0%
- France: 65.3%
- Canada: 63.8%
- Italy: 63.4%
- Germany: 62.1%
The corresponding proportion of searches producing at least one click ranged from 30.5% in the UK to 37.9% in Germany. The study provides the full country-level comparison.
For UK businesses, that makes the issue particularly relevant, but it also demonstrates why universal assumptions about search behaviour can be dangerous.
Markets differ. Industries differ. Query types differ. SERP layouts differ.
And all of those things continue to change.
Today’s Zero-Click Keyword May Not Be Tomorrow’s
Zero-click rates are not permanent properties of keywords.
Search results change constantly. Google may introduce an AI Overview, remove it, change the sources, add shopping results, introduce a local pack, expand a featured snippet, change the AI answer or alter the layout entirely.
A query that drives substantial traffic today may become increasingly zero-click tomorrow. The reverse can happen too.
Semrush’s 2025 data illustrates just how volatile AI Overview deployment can be. AI Overviews appeared for 6.49% of the keywords it tracked in January, rose to 24.61% in July and then fell to 15.69% by November. The study tracks how AI Overview prevalence and intent changed throughout the year.
The mix of intent changed substantially during the same period.
This is why businesses should avoid making permanent strategic decisions based entirely on today’s SERP configuration. The answer is not to stop creating content because one search type currently generates fewer clicks.
It is to continually evaluate where demand exists, how search behaviour is changing and where your visibility creates meaningful value.
Search Will Continue to Change
AI Overviews are unlikely to be the final form of search. AI Mode is already changing the interaction again, while ChatGPT and other LLMs create different discovery journeys. Agentic systems may eventually perform parts of the research and transaction on behalf of users.
The terminology we use today may not even be the terminology we use in two years.
“Zero-click search” itself describes behaviour within a model where a human performs a search and chooses whether to click. If an AI agent researches several providers, compares them and completes an action on behalf of the user, even that model starts to break down.
This is why SEO strategies built around exploiting one particular SERP feature tend to age badly.
Strong strategies are built around more durable principles: understanding demand, creating information people genuinely need, making it technically accessible, establishing expertise and authority, earning visibility and making the eventual customer journey work.
Those principles have survived every major change in search so far.
The Bottom Line: Zero-Click Search Changes SEO, It Doesn’t End It
Zero-click behaviour is real and accelerating. In the UK, almost seven out of ten Google searches now end without a click, according to the latest clickstream data, while AI Overviews can substantially reduce traditional organic click-through rates.
Businesses should not pretend otherwise.
But “fewer clicks” and “SEO no longer matters” are very different conclusions.
People are still searching, and in some cases they are searching more. Users still need websites when they want to buy, compare, verify, book, contact, calculate, research deeply or complete an action. Some zero-click searches represent visits you genuinely would have valued, while others represent visits that might once have lasted seconds and produced no meaningful engagement.
Still others may create awareness, local actions or later branded journeys that conventional analytics cannot neatly attribute to the original search.
The job of modern SEO is to understand the difference.
That means becoming more selective about keywords, more rigorous about search intent, better at connecting SEO with commercial outcomes and more focused on earning meaningful visibility rather than simply accumulating traffic.
At Lemon Pulse, our AI SEO Services approach search this way. We look beyond headline traffic numbers to understand where organic and AI search visibility can genuinely influence discovery, demand, qualified visits and revenue.
Zero-click search does not remove the need for SEO. It raises the bar for deciding which visibility matters, how to earn it and how to turn the clicks you do receive into something valuable.
