Zero-click search

October 20, 2026

A zero-click search is a search that ends without the user clicking any result: they read the answer right on the Google page, type a different query or leave. For a website, it is a search that may have shown your page but sent you no visit.

What is zero-click search?

SparkToro, Rand Fishkin’s audience research company, has tracked this metric with clickstream data for years. Its first study, in 2019, found that 49% of Google searches ended without a click. By SparkToro’s count, a search is zero-click when no click goes anywhere at all, including to ads or to other Google services such as Maps and YouTube.

The cause sits in the results page itself. A great many questions are already answered right there:

Featured snippets and the People Also Ask box.
Knowledge panels, weather, exchange rates, sports scores, calculators.
Local business information: opening hours, phone numbers, reviews.
AI Overviews and AI Mode. According to SparkToro, AI Overviews are the main reason zero-click searches grew quickly from 2024 to 2026.

The latest zero-click data

In 2024, SparkToro used Datos data and found that 58.5% of Google searches in the US and 59.7% in the EU ended without a click. About 37% ended the session outright, and about 22% moved on to another query. For every 1,000 searches in the US, only 374 clicks went to websites outside Google’s ecosystem (SparkToro, July 2024).

The June 2026 update used Similarweb data for the US from January to April 2026: 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. Only 0.34% of searches in that period moved over to AI Mode (SparkToro, June 2026). The author also points out that the 2024 and 2026 figures come from two different data panels, so they can only be compared loosely.

Pew Research Center measured it a different way and got results pointing the same direction: users ended their session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages without one (Pew Research Center, July 2025).

Is zero-click bad news for businesses?

For websites that live on traffic, such as news sites or blogs that earn from ads, yes. For businesses selling products or services, the picture is more complicated. Take someone who searches “phòng khám nha khoa quận 3” (dental clinic in District 3), reads the reviews and taps Call from the Google business profile. That person is still a real customer, even though the website records no visit.

Google says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, with users staying longer (Google Search Central, December 2025). SparkToro, for its part, recommends dropping traffic as the main KPI and investing in getting the brand known where its audience spends time.

What to measure when traffic drops

Metric	Where to get it	What it tells you
Impressions	Search Console, including the generative AI report	Whether Google still shows the page
CTR by query group	Search Console	Which groups of questions now get answered right on Google
Calls, direction requests	Google Business Profile	Actions that happen without a website visit
Number of times AI names the brand	A set of questions run on a schedule	Presence in AI answers

Frequently asked questions

What is the zero-click rate in Vietnam?

Adtek has not found any public study that measures it for Vietnam specifically with clickstream data. The figures above are for the US and the EU. The closest you can get is to track impressions and CTR for your own website in Search Console.

Does zero-click search make SEO useless?

No. Answers on Google and in AI still come from indexed pages. SEO now serves the extra goal of being cited, on top of earning clicks.

If your organic traffic is falling and you want to know how much is due to zero-click and how much to other problems, Adtek’s SEO team can look at the numbers with you through our contact page.