Data & Research March 17, 2026 • Updated: 6 November 2026

Zero-click searches
statistics 2026

50+ verified zero-click search statistics and data points. From the share of Google searches without a click and the impact of AI Overviews on CTR to featured snippets, People Also Ask, devices and what still works in SEO. Compiled from research by SparkToro and Similarweb, Datos, Pew Research Center, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Semrush, BrightEdge, StatCounter and Google, with a source link for every figure.

68.01%

of US Google searches ended without a click (January to April 2026)

Source: SparkToro, 2026

69.5%

zero-click rate in the UK, the highest of six measured countries (2026)

Source: SparkToro, 2026

-58%

lower average CTR for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears (December 2025)

Source: Ahrefs, 2026

1%

of visits to a Google page with an AI summary included a click on a link inside it (US)

Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

Statistics overview

Google increasingly answers questions on the search results page itself, with AI Overviews, featured snippets, knowledge panels and People Also Ask boxes, so users often no longer need to click through to a website. These are called zero-click searches, and they change what ranking in Google is worth. How big is the effect really, and what can businesses do about it?

On this page, you'll find 50+ verified statistics about zero-click searches, compiled from research by SparkToro (Rand Fishkin) with Similarweb and Datos clickstream data, Pew Research Center, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Semrush, BrightEdge, StatCounter and Google itself. Every figure links to its source, older measurements are shown with their year, and most clickstream data covers the US and the EU. From the percentage of searches without a click and the impact of AI Overviews to featured snippet trends and actionable SEO strategies to protect your organic traffic.

Whether you're a marketer building a business case for SEO investments, or a business owner trying to understand why organic traffic is declining despite stable rankings: this page gives you the data you need to make informed decisions.

Section 1

Zero-click searches overview

68.01%

of US Google searches ended without a click (Jan to Apr 2026)

SparkToro, 2026

+7.5 pp

rise in US zero-click searches, from 60.45% (2024) to 68.01% (2026)

SparkToro, 2026

360

clicks to the open web per 1,000 US Google searches (2024)

SparkToro / Datos, 2024

~30%

of all clicks from US Google searches go to platforms Google owns (2024)

SparkToro / Datos, 2024

What exactly are zero-click searches?

A zero-click search is a query where the user finds the desired answer directly on the Google results page (SERP), without clicking through to an external website. Google displays the answer via featured snippets, knowledge panels, direct answer boxes, AI Overviews, People Also Ask, local packs, or calculations. For Dutch companies, how to become visible in AI answers: more on AI search visibility (in Dutch).

The term was popularized by Rand Fishkin (founder of SparkToro and former CEO of Moz). In 2019 his analysis of Jumpshot clickstream data showed for the first time that more than half of Google searches ended without a click. Since then SparkToro has repeated the measurement with different data panels (Similarweb in 2020 and 2026, Datos in 2024), so year-on-year comparisons are approximate, as SparkToro itself points out.

The core zero-click numbers for 2026

  • In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click (Similarweb panel, desktop and mobile browsers, excluding the Google app) (SparkToro, 2026)
  • According to SparkToro, the US zero-click share rose from 60.45% in 2024 to 68.01% in early 2026, an increase of 7.5 percentage points (different panels in both years) (SparkToro, 2026)
  • About ten years ago roughly 45% of Google searches were zero-click; SparkToro puts 2019 at 49% and 2026 at 68% (SparkToro, 2026)
  • Only 0.34% of US Google searches moved into AI Mode in January to April 2026 (SparkToro, 2026)
  • In 2024, 58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU Google searches ended with zero clicks (Datos panel, without iPhones) (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • For every 1,000 Google searches in 2024, 360 clicks in the US and 374 in the EU went to the open web (sites not owned by Google, no ads) (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • In the US, almost 30% of all clicks from Google searches go to platforms Google owns, such as YouTube and Google Maps (2024) (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • In 2020, 64.82% of Google searches worldwide ended without a click; 33.59% led to an organic click and 1.59% to a paid click (35.18% in total) (SparkToro / Similarweb, 2020)
  • In June 2019 the share of Google searches without a click passed 50% for the first time (Jumpshot data, US) (SparkToro, 2019)

Zero-click rates by country (2026)

  • In early 2026 the zero-click rate was 69.5% in the UK, 68.0% in the US, 65.3% in France and 62.1% in Germany (SparkToro, 2026)
  • Canada (63.8%) and Italy (63.4%) were also measured; the Netherlands and other smaller markets were not part of the study (SparkToro, 2026)
Section 2

AI Overviews & SGE impact

-58%

average CTR for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears (Dec 2025)

Ahrefs, 2026

8% vs 15%

of visits with a click on a regular result, with vs without an AI summary (US)

Pew Research Center, 2025

2B+

monthly users of AI Overviews (Q2 2025)

Alphabet, 2025

200+

countries and territories where AI Overviews are available, in 40+ languages

Google, 2025

What are Google AI Overviews?

Google AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of the search results page. The system, powered by Google's Gemini models, combines information from multiple sources and presents an answer before the traditional blue links. Since the US launch in May 2024, AI Overviews have been rolled out worldwide. For SEO professionals this means a new reality: your content can be summarized by AI without the user visiting your website.

How AI Overviews change click behavior

  • US Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, versus 15% when no summary appeared (900 adults, March 2025) (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits to pages with such a summary (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • 18% of the Google searches in Pew's study produced an AI summary; users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary versus 16% without (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • An AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page in December 2025 (300,000 informational keywords, desktop) (Ahrefs, 2026)
  • The first edition of the same Ahrefs study, based on March 2025 data, found a 34.5% lower CTR for position 1 (Ahrefs, 2025)
  • In Seer Interactive's client data, organic CTR on informational queries with an AI Overview fell 61%, from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025 (Seer Interactive, 2025)
  • According to Seer Interactive, brands cited in an AI Overview earned 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that were not cited, but still 38% fewer than on queries without an AI Overview (correlation, not proven cause) (Seer Interactive, 2026)
  • According to BrightEdge, Google search impressions rose by over 49% in the year after AI Overviews launched (May 2024), while click-throughs fell by nearly 30% (BrightEdge, 2025)

How often AI Overviews appear

  • AI Overviews were triggered for 6.49% of queries in January 2025, 24.61% in July and 15.69% in November 2025 (10 million+ keywords) (Semrush, 2025)
  • AI Overviews grew from 3.93% to 27.43% of US desktop SERPs between January and June 2025 (1 million random SERPs) (Ahrefs, 2025)
  • On BrightEdge's own set of tracked queries, AI Overviews appeared about 48% of the time in February 2026, up from roughly 30% a year earlier, and averaged over 1,200 pixels in height (BrightEdge, 2026)
  • AI Overviews are available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages (May 2025) (Google, 2025)
  • AI Overviews had over 2 billion monthly users in Q2 2025, according to Alphabet (Alphabet, 2025)
Section 4

Knowledge panels & People Also Ask

79.13%

of US desktop SERPs showed People Also Ask (June 2025)

Ahrefs, 2025

12.95%

of US desktop SERPs showed a knowledge panel (June 2025)

Ahrefs, 2025

500B+

facts about 5 billion entities in Google's Knowledge Graph (2020)

Google, 2020

Knowledge panels: Google's direct answers

Knowledge panels are information panels that Google displays based on the Knowledge Graph. They appear for searches about businesses, people, places, films, music and other well-known entities. Because they present facts directly, they are a driver of zero-click searches.

  • Google's Knowledge Graph has amassed over 500 billion facts about five billion entities (Google's most recent official figure, 2020) (Google, 2020)
  • Knowledge panels appeared on 12.95% of US desktop SERPs in June 2025, down from 14.09% in January (Ahrefs, 2025)

People Also Ask (PAA): the expanding question box

People Also Ask boxes are accordions with related questions that Google displays on the SERP. They are now one of the most common SERP features and an important part of the zero-click landscape, though they also offer visibility.

  • People Also Ask boxes appeared on 79.13% of US desktop SERPs in June 2025, up from 73.73% in January 2025 (Ahrefs, 2025)

Other SERP features on US desktop (January vs June 2025)

  • Sitelinks appeared on 84.95% of US desktop SERPs in June 2025, up from 8.44% in January 2025 (Ahrefs, 2025)
  • Discussion and forum results rose from 19.49% to 20.26% of SERPs, while local packs fell from 3.48% to 2.96% and shopping results from 3.14% to 0.99% (Ahrefs, 2025)
Section 5

By device & search type

77.22%

of mobile Google searches ended without a click (2020, worldwide)

SparkToro / Similarweb, 2020

2x+

as many mobile as desktop searches ended the search session (US and EU, 2024)

SparkToro / Datos, 2024

59.9%

of worldwide web page views came from mobile devices (October 2026)

StatCounter, 2026

Zero-click by device

Mobile users more often get a quick answer on the results page, while desktop users click through more often. The most recent public study with a separate zero-click rate per device is from 2020; the 2024 and 2026 SparkToro studies only report session behavior or no device split at all.

  • In 2020, 77.22% of Google searches on mobile devices ended without a click, according to Similarweb data analysed by SparkToro (worldwide) (SparkToro / Similarweb, 2020)
  • On desktop in 2020, 50.75% of Google searches led to an organic click and 2.78% to a paid click (SparkToro / Similarweb, 2020)
  • In 2024, almost half of mobile Google searches in both the US and the EU ended the search session, more than twice the desktop rate (Datos panel, Android only) (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • According to Sistrix data (2023) cited by SparkToro, mobile accounts for about 63% of US Google searches and 64.7% of EU Google searches (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • Mobile devices accounted for 59.9% of worldwide web page views in October 2026, desktop for 38.51% and tablets for 1.59% (page views, not searches) (StatCounter, 2026)
  • In a small 2022 US clickstream sample (20,000 users), people typed a new keyword after 17.9% of searches on desktop versus 29.3% on mobile (Semrush, 2022)

Zero-click by search type (search intent)

There is no recent public clickstream study that reports zero-click rates per search intent (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional, local). The studies that come closest are the AI Overview studies above, which mostly measure informational keywords. We have therefore removed the intent percentages that used to be on this page.

Section 6

Impact on SEO traffic

0.61%

organic CTR on informational queries with an AI Overview (Sept 2025, was 1.76%)

Seer Interactive, 2025

26% vs 16%

of Google pages where users ended their session, with vs without an AI summary (US)

Pew Research Center, 2025

<1.7B

organic search visits to news sites in mid-2025, down from 2.3B+ at the mid-2024 peak

Similarweb via SER, 2025

53%

of trackable website traffic came from organic search (2019)

BrightEdge, 2019

How zero-click searches affect SEO traffic

The rise of zero-click searches has a measurable effect on organic traffic, most of all on informational queries where Google shows an AI Overview. The value of SEO is shifting from pure clicks to visibility in the answer itself. Check out our comprehensive SEO statistics 2026 for more context.

  • Organic CTR on informational queries with an AI Overview fell from 1.76% (June 2024) to 0.61% (September 2025); on queries without an AI Overview it fell from 2.74% to 1.62% (3,119 terms, 42 organizations) (Seer Interactive, 2025)
  • US users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% without one (March 2025) (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • US users ended their browsing session on 26% of Google pages with an AI summary, versus 16% of pages without one (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • According to Similarweb data reported by Search Engine Roundtable, organic search traffic to news sites dropped from over 2.3 billion visits at its mid-2024 peak to under 1.7 billion in mid-2025 (Similarweb via Search Engine Roundtable, 2025)
  • In BrightEdge's 2019 analysis, organic search accounted for 53% of trackable website traffic, up from 51% in 2014; organic social was 5% (no newer edition published) (BrightEdge, 2019)

Being cited instead of being clicked

  • About 38% of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for the same query (March 2026), down from about 76% in July 2025 (the 2026 measurement uses an improved method, so the two are not fully comparable); 31% do not rank in the top 100 (Ahrefs, 2026)
  • Brands cited in an AI Overview had about 35% higher organic CTR (0.70% vs 0.52%) and about 91% higher paid CTR (7.89% vs 4.14%) than brands not cited in Q3 2025, according to Seer Interactive (correlation) (Seer Interactive, 2025)
Section 7

Strategies for zero-click SEO

Zero-click searches are not a problem you can "solve": they are the new reality. The question is not how to prevent zero-click, but how to adapt your SEO strategy to it. The verified data points to four approaches.

1. Optimize for SERP presence with structured data, within Google's rules

  • In case studies published by Google, Rotten Tomatoes measured a 25% higher CTR on pages with structured data, and Nestlé's rich-result pages had an 82% higher CTR than pages without rich results (Google Search Central, 2026)
  • FAQ markup is no longer a general tactic: since August 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and How-To rich results were deprecated in September 2023 (Google Search Central, 2023)
  • Google states there are no additional requirements and no special structured data needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; normal SEO best practices apply (Google Search Central, 2026)

2. Aim to be the cited source in AI Overviews

  • Brands cited in an AI Overview earned 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands in 2025, according to Seer Interactive (Seer Interactive, 2026)
  • Only about 38% of AI Overview citations come from the top 10 for the same query (March 2026), so pages outside the top 10 can be cited too (Ahrefs, 2026)

3. Build brand awareness and mentions

  • In an analysis of 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions showed the strongest correlation with brand visibility in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (about 0.737), branded web mentions 0.66 to 0.71, and the number of pages on a site only about 0.194 (correlation, not cause) (Ahrefs, 2025)

4. Measure visibility, not just clicks

  • Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is reported within the overall 'Web' search type in Search Console, without a separate breakdown, so visibility in AI answers needs its own measurement (Google Search Central, 2026)
Section 8

Global market insights

91.05%

Google's worldwide search engine market share (October 2026)

StatCounter, 2026

59.7%

of Google searches in the EU ended without a click (2024)

SparkToro / Datos, 2024

200+

countries and territories with AI Overviews (May 2025)

Google, 2025

6B

people online worldwide, 74% of the world's population (2025)

ITU, 2025

The global search market and zero-click

Zero-click searches are a worldwide phenomenon, but clickstream studies only cover a handful of markets: the US, the EU as a whole, and in 2026 the UK, France, Germany, Canada and Italy. There is no measured global zero-click percentage.

  • Google held 91.05% of the worldwide search engine market in October 2026, followed by Bing (4.8%), Yahoo (1.18%), Yandex (1.14%), DuckDuckGo (0.64%) and Baidu (0.42%) (StatCounter, 2026)
  • In early 2026 the UK had the highest zero-click rate of the six measured countries (69.5%) and Germany the lowest (62.1%) (SparkToro, 2026)
  • In 2024, 58.5% of Google searches in the US and 59.7% in the European Union ended without a click (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • Of every 1,000 Google searches, 360 clicks in the US and 374 in the EU went to the open web in 2024 (SparkToro / Datos, 2024)
  • Google AI Overviews are available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages (May 2025) (Google, 2025)
  • About 6 billion people, 74% of the world's population, were online in 2025, up from 5.8 billion in 2024 (ITU, 2025)

Impact on businesses worldwide

For businesses worldwide, the zero-click reality means that traditional SEO strategies alone are no longer sufficient. No public study measures how much organic traffic individual businesses lose to zero-click searches; what the data does show is that informational queries with an AI Overview lose the most clicks. Want to learn how to maximize SEO in the zero-click era? Explore our page about outsourcing SEO or discover what an SEO agency can do for you.

Section 10

Frequently asked questions

What are zero-click searches?

Zero-click searches are queries where the user finds the answer directly on the search engine results page (SERP), without clicking through to a website. This can happen via featured snippets, knowledge panels, AI Overviews, People Also Ask boxes, or direct answer boxes. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click (SparkToro, Similarweb data). Want to know how to handle this? Check out our SEO services page.

What percentage of Google searches are zero-click?

According to SparkToro's 2026 study with Similarweb data, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026. In the UK it was 69.5%, in Germany 62.1%. The previous study (Datos data, 2024) measured 58.5% in the US and 59.7% in the EU; the panels differ, so the rise is approximate. Also check out our SEO statistics 2026 for more context.

How do AI Overviews affect zero-click searches?

Google AI Overviews (formerly SGE) amplify the zero-click effect. Ahrefs found that an AI Overview went together with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page in December 2025 (34.5% in the first edition, March 2025). Pew Research Center measured that US users clicked a regular result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% without. Semrush saw AI Overviews on 15.69% of queries in November 2025. Discover how an SEO agency can help.

What is the difference between zero-click on desktop and mobile?

On mobile, the zero-click percentage is higher than on desktop. The latest study with a separate device figure is from 2020: 77.22% of mobile Google searches ended without a click, while on desktop 50.75% led to an organic click and 2.78% to a paid click. In 2024, almost half of mobile searches in the US and EU ended the search session, more than twice the desktop rate. Read more about search engine market shares by device.

How can websites deal with zero-click searches?

There are several strategies: aim to be cited as a source in AI Overviews, focus on keywords where users still click through, invest in brand awareness and mentions so users search directly for your brand, use structured data for rich results where Google still supports them (FAQ rich results have been limited to authoritative government and health sites since August 2023), and create in-depth content that can't easily be summarized. Also measure visibility in search and AI answers as a KPI alongside clicks.

Do zero-click searches impact SEO ROI?

Yes, zero-click searches impact SEO ROI, but not exclusively negatively. Organic click volume drops most on informational queries with an AI Overview. At the same time, Seer Interactive found that brands cited in an AI Overview had about 35% higher organic CTR than brands that were not cited (Q3 2025, correlation). The key is to adapt your SEO strategy: the focus shifts from clicks alone to being visible and cited in the answer, and to optimizing for search types where users do click through.

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Ruud ten Have

Compiled by

Ruud ten Have

Ruud is a digital marketer with 10+ years of experience in online advertising and AI implementation. At Searchlab, he combines strategic thinking with hands-on AI tooling to deliver measurable results for businesses.

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