Zero-Click Search: what it is, why it's growing, and what to do.
Google searches generated 22% less organic traffic in the US in just one year. Business Insider laid off 21% of its employees citing “extreme drops in traffic beyond our control.” The Daily Mail reported an 80% to 90% drop in CTR for keywords that trigger AI Overviews.
These are not isolated cases. They are symptoms of a structural shift in the search market — driven by a phenomenon that existed before generative AI, but which gained scale between 2024 and 2026: the zero-click search.
In this article, we explain what it is, what the latest data shows, and what strategies work to maintain visibility and generate demand in this new scenario.
What is zero-click search?
Zero-click search is any search performed on a search engine that does not result in a click to an external website. The user searches, receives a response within the search engine itself, and ends the session without visiting any page.
This happens when:
- Google responds directly in the SERP with a featured snippet, knowledge panel, map, calculator, or AI Overview.
- The user repeats the search without clicking on any results.
- The question is answered by the title and meta description of the results themselves.
- A voice assistant or LLM delivers the answer without redirecting to the original website.
The phenomenon is not new. But the arrival of LLMs (large language models) directly in the SERPs — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Bing Copilot — has transformed it into a structural threat to any business that depends on organic traffic.
Nilay Patel of The Verge coined the term. “Google Zero” To describe the moment when Google ceases to be the gateway to the web and becomes an answer engine that keeps the user within its own interface. By 2025, this will no longer be a hypothesis but a measurable reality.
“Google’s plan is elegant, simple, and perverse: to make your work a redundant commodity. To send clicks only when (A) companies pay for ads or (B) offer something that Google can’t deliver directly.”
— Rand Fishkin, SparkToro, May 2026
What the 2025-2026 data show
22% drop in organic traffic from the US
From July 2024 to June 2025, organic search traffic in the US fell from over 2,3 billion visits to 1,8 billion — a 22% reduction in twelve months. During the same period, global search referral traffic to 1.000 monitored domains fell 6,7% year-over-year.
Source: Similarweb, data reported by Digiday in July 2025.
News searches without clicking: from 56% to 69%
Since the launch of AI Overviews in the US (May 2024), the proportion of news-related searches that end without any clicks has increased. It rose from 56% to almost 69%. until May 2025. An increase of 13 percentage points in one year.
Source: Similarweb/Digiday, July 2025.
CTR drops by half when an AI Overview appears.
The Pew Research Center analyzed real browsing data from 900 American adults in March 2025 — 68.879 actual Google searches. The results:
| Situation at SERP | Click-through rate on links |
|---|---|
| SERP with AI Overview | 8% |
| SERP Overview without AI | 15 % |
| Clicking on the links within the AI Overview | 1% |
| Users who log out after viewing the AI Overview. | 26 % |
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025.
In practice: having an AI Overview in the SERP reduces organic CTR by almost half. And only 1% of users click on the links that appear within the AI Overview itself.
AI Overviews Scale in 2025
The AI Overviews didn't arrive all at once — they grew throughout the year:
| Month | Percentage of searches with AI Overview (US, desktop) |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 6,49 % |
| March 2025 | 13,14 % |
| April 2025 | 20,22 % |
| July 2025 (peak) | 24,61 % |
| November 2025 | 15,69 % |
Source: Semrush, December 2025.
Google estimates that approximately 5 billion searches per month trigger AI Overviews. And the types of searches covered are changing: in October 2024, 89% of queries with AI Overview were informational. In October 2025, that percentage dropped to 57%, with significant growth in commercial (+18,57%), transactional (+13,94%), and navigational (+10,33%) queries.
In other words, AI Overviews are invading the middle and lower funnels—and are no longer restricted to factual questions.
Real-life cases of traffic outages
Business Insider: -55% in organic traffic
In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. The reason given by the company was "extreme drops in traffic beyond our control" caused by AI disruption. Organic search traffic had fallen by 55%, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Source: Nieman Lab, May 2025.
Daily Mail: 80-90% Lower CTR with AI Overview
In October 2025, the SEO director of the Daily Mail revealed that when an AI Overview is activated in the SERP, the average CTR of the site is between 80% and 90% lower than when no AI Overview appears. The impact on total traffic is limited by the fact that AI Overviews rarely appear for breaking news—the Daily Mail's main product. But for content keywords, the impact is huge.
Source: Digiday, November 2025.
DCN Publishers: median of -10% to -14%
A survey by Digital Content Next (DCN) of 19 members — including the New York Times, Condé Nast, and Vox — between May and June 2025 showed:
- Most websites reported losses in Google traffic between 1% and 25%.
- Overall median: -10% year-on-year
- For news publishers: -7% year-on-year
- For publishers outside of news: -14% year-on-year
- Losses exceeded gains by a ratio of 2 to 1.
Source: Digiday, August 2025.
One third of global traffic lost
The Reuters Institute, in its report "Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026," estimated that organic traffic from Google to more than 2.500 websites has decreased. one third globally by 2025 (Chartbeat data).
An illustrative case from the British Professional Publishers Association: a keyword like "how to eliminate [insect]" still appeared on the first page of Google with stable impressions. The CTR, however, dropped from... 5,1% to 0,6% in the past year.
The role of LLMs: scale and real impact.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are growing — but still generating little traffic.
AI search tools are rapidly growing in users:
| Hardware | Active users | Year-over-year growth in visits (Sept/2024–Sept/2025) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 900 million (Feb. 2026) | + 90,3 % |
| Google Gemini | 750 million (Dec. 2025) | |
| Perplexity | 45 million (2025) | + 134,5 % |
| Microsoft Copilot | 218 million (2025) | + 169,2 % |
Sources: Business of Apps, Similarweb, April 2026.
Despite the growth, referral traffic generated by AI platforms is still small: according to Conductor (data from December 2025), AI platforms account for only 1% of total web traffic On average, ChatGPT accounts for 87,4% of all AI referral traffic.
StatCounter (April 2026) confirms: AI chatbots represent 0,43% of traffic, compared to 89,97% for traditional search engines.
Google holds 90,39% of the search market (StatCounter, May 2026). The threat to organic traffic doesn't come from ChatGPT stealing users from Google. It comes from Google itself retaining clicks within its interface with AI Overviews.
But the visitor who comes from AI converts much more.
There is one piece of data that changes the perspective: according to an analysis by Microsoft Clarity across more than 1.200 websites, visitors from LLMs convert significantly more than visitors from traditional organic search.
| Traffic origin | Conversion to sign-ups | Conversion to subscriptions |
|---|---|---|
| LLM (ChatGPT, Perplexity etc.) | 1,66 % | 1,34 % |
| Organic search (Google) | 0,15 % | 0,55 % |
| direct traffic | 0,13 % | 0,41 % |
| Social Media | 0,46 % | 0,37 % |
Source: Microsoft Clarity, 2025.
A visitor coming from AI converts about 11 times more into registrations than an organic visitor from Google. The volume is still small, but the trend points to a high-quality channel.
What changed: from SEO to GEO
SEO isn't dead. But the core logic has changed. For those who depend on search visibility, understanding this difference is the first step in adapting their strategy.
| Dimensão | Traditional SEO | GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Rank in the list of links | Being quoted in the AI response |
| Target motor | Search algorithm (PageRank) | LLMs (Gemini, GPT-4, Claude) |
| Content focus | Keywords and backlinks | Clarity, data, and authority. |
| Typical queries | Short (~4 words) | Conversational (~23 words) |
| Key metrics | Position and CTR | Mentions, citations, and share of voice |
| Presence required | Own domain | multiple platforms |
The concept of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) was formalized in an academic paper published on arXiv in November 2023 by researchers from Princeton and the Allen Institute, and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. The study demonstrated that applying GEO techniques increases visibility in generative engines in up to 40%.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024. arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
A relevant piece of data from Semrush (April 2026): Between 65% and 85% of ChatGPT prompts do not match any traditional keyword. in the Semrush database (27 billion keywords). AI-driven search behavior almost completely escapes conventional SEO tools.
What works in practice: strategies for 2025-2026
1. Structure that facilitates AI-powered extraction
LLMs extract excerpts—not entire pages. The content needs to be structured so that each section makes sense on its own.
- Clear and hierarchical H2/H3 headings
- Short paragraphs (up to 4 sentences)
- Comparative lists and tables
- FAQ sections with explicit questions as headings.
- Direct answer in the first lines of each section.
An important technical detail: AI crawlers have difficulty with JavaScript-rendered content on the client side. Use server-side rendering to ensure that the content is visible to AI bots.
2. Data with source + expert citations
The Princeton study tested 10.000 real-world queries across multiple domains and identified that pages containing citations and statistics had... 30% to 40% more visibility In AI responses. The format that works:
- Statistics with explicit source, institution, and date.
- Direct quotes from experts, including name, title, and company.
- Original research — own data is the most citable of all.
3. Authority beyond your domain.
For traditional Google, authority was measured primarily by backlinks. For LLMs, it comes from presence across multiple sources:
- Brand mentions in specialized publications — with or without a link.
- Participation in UGC forums, communities and platforms (Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn)
- Contributions in expert roundups and podcast interviews
- Clear authorship credentials across all published content.
Unlinked mentions carry more weight in generative search engines than in traditional SEO — a significant shift in distribution strategy.
4. Content driven by prompts, not just keywords.
A Google query: "Restaurant accounting software"The same user on ChatGPT: "What is the best accounting software for a family-run restaurant with 12 employees that needs to manage inventory and has a limited budget?"
The average difference is 4 words to 23. The content needs to anticipate this level of specificity.
- FAQs with complete conversational questions
- Use case pages specific to industry, size, and context.
- Guides that address real-world scenarios, not just general concepts.
5. Diversify sources of demand.
The most important lesson from zero-click search is structural: relying exclusively on organic traffic from Google is a fragile strategy.
SparkToro analyzed 400 websites that did not collapse during the major traffic drop of 2024-2026. Common patterns:
- 92% had unique products or services — not just informational content.
- 83% offered task execution, not just information.
- They all had at least one demand channel that didn't rely on organic search.
"An inimitable product is the new 'create great content'."
— Rand Fishkin, SparkToro, May 2026
More resilient companies have built demand across multiple channels: paid media generating interest before purchase intent, authority content positioning the brand outside of search, email marketing to their own database, and ABM for large accounts.
Which sectors are most exposed?
Google's AI Overviews don't appear equally across all search types. The sectors with the highest percentage of keywords affected in November 2025 are:
| Sector | Percentage of queries with AI Overview | Observation |
|---|---|---|
| Sciences | 25,96 % | Consensus answers that are easy to summarize. |
| Computers and Electronics | 17,92 % | High growth throughout 2025 |
| Food and Drinks | Up to 11% | Highest growth of the year (+7,25 pp since March 2025) |
| Health Insurance | High (decreased since March) | Google backtracked on sensitive topics. |
| Real Estate and Shopping | <3% | Google already caters to this with Local Packs and ads. |
| Real-time news | Low | AI Overviews rarely cover breaking news. |
Sources: Semrush, December 2025.
The upside: AI search as a quality channel
There's one aspect that conversion data reveals: despite the small volume, the traffic coming from AI search is of high quality.
Gemini grew 388% in referral traffic from September to November 2025 — compared to 52% for ChatGPT in the same period. Platforms with an active citation model (Perplexity, Gemini) are building a new type of referral channel — smaller in volume, but much more qualified in intent.
eMarketer predicts that by 2029, more than US $ 25 billion Search advertising spending will migrate to AI search — about 14% of the total search budget in the US. The channel is forming now.
Those who are present in the responses from LLMs when the volume increases will have an advantage that is difficult to recover.
Conclusion: visibility without clicks is still visibility.
Zero-click search isn't going away. The presence of LLMs in search engines is a structural change—not a temporary feature.
This doesn't mean SEO is over. It means the goal has evolved: it's no longer just about ranking at the top—it's... to be the source that the market recognizes as a benchmark.Whether it appears in an organic link, an AI Overview, a ChatGPT quote, or a Perplexity answer.
Companies that come out ahead are those that understand that visibility today is multidimensional: it involves authoritative content, presence on multiple platforms, a structure that facilitates extraction by AI, and demand channels that do not depend exclusively on organic clicks.
Sources and references
- Pew Research Center — “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results” (July 2025)
- Semrush — “AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google's Search Shift” (December 2025)
- Digiday — “In Graphic Detail: AI platforms are driving more traffic — but not enough to offset zero-click search” (July 2025)
- Digiday — “Google AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic” (August 2025)
- Digiday — “Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews have killed click-throughs” (November 2025)
- Digiday — “How publishers are modeling a future with significantly less Google search traffic” (June 2026)
- Digiday — “WTF is Google Zero?” (July 2025)
- Nieman Lab — “Business Insider will lay off 21% of staff amid AI disruption” (May 2025)
- SparkToro/Rand Fishkin — “New Research: Search Happens Everywhere” (March 2026)
- SparkToro/Rand Fishkin — “Inimitable Product is the New Make Great Content” (May 2026)
- SparkToro — “5 Strategic Features that Predict Survival in the Zero-Click Era” (April 2026)
- Princeton/Allen Institute — “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024)
- Semrush — “ChatGPT Traffic Analysis: Insights from 17 months of clickstream data” (April 2026)
- Business of Apps — ChatGPT Statistics (updated April 2026)
- StatCounter — Search Engine Market Share (May 2026)
