Zero-Click Rates Over Time

Clickstream panels show a decade-long climb in searches that end without a click, with AI features accelerating the trend sharply after 2024.

1. 01

   58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended without a click on any result in 2024, per the SparkToro and Datos zero-click study.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

2. 02

   68.01% of Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026, leaving fewer than one third of searches (31.99%) sending a click anywhere.

   Source: SparkToro, 2026

3. 03

   45% of searches were already zero-click around 2016 and roughly 49% by 2019, showing the behavior predates AI Overviews by nearly a decade.

   Source: SparkToro, 2026

4. 04

   7.56 percentage points is how much the US zero-click rate grew between 2024 (60.45%) and early 2026 (68.01%), a 12.5% jump in two years.

   Source: SparkToro, 2026

5. 05

   60% of searches now end without the user progressing to another destination site, according to Bain & Company's consumer research.

   Source: Bain & Company, 2025

Where the Clicks Actually Go

Even when searchers do click, a large share of those clicks stay inside Google's own properties rather than reaching the open web.

1. 06

   360 of every 1,000 US Google searches produce a click to a website that Google does not own and that is not an ad, and in the EU the figure is 374.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

2. 07

   Nearly 30% of all Google search clicks go to Google-owned properties such as YouTube, Maps, Images, and Flights.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

3. 08

   1% of all Google search clicks go to paid ads, even though ads earn a 5% to 10% clickthrough rate on the results pages where they actually appear.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

4. 09

   37% of Google searches end the browsing session entirely, while about 22% turn into another search query instead of a click.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

AI Overviews and the Click Decline

AI summaries are the biggest new driver of zero-click behavior, and independent datasets from Pew, Ahrefs, and Bain agree on the direction.

1. 10

   8% of visits to Google pages with an AI summary ended with a click on a traditional search result, versus 15% for pages without one, per Pew Research Center.

   Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

2. 11

   1% of visits to pages with an AI summary produced a click on a source link cited inside the summary itself.

   Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

3. 12

   26% of search visits with an AI summary ended the browsing session entirely, compared with 16% for pages with only traditional results.

   Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

4. 13

   58% fewer clicks reach the top organic result when an AI Overview is present, based on Ahrefs' December 2025 analysis of 300,000 keywords.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

5. 14

   80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, cutting organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%, per Bain & Company.

   Source: Bain & Company, 2025

6. 15

   31.53% of searches on keywords with AI Overviews ended without a click after the feature arrived, slightly below the 33.75% rate beforehand, in Semrush's analysis of more than 200,000 keywords.

   Source: Semrush, 2025

Publisher Traffic Declines

News publishers sit at the sharp end of zero-click search, losing hundreds of millions of monthly visits as AI answers absorb their queries.

1. 16

   69% of news-related searches ended without a click to a news site by May 2025, up from 56% in May 2024, per Similarweb data.

   Source: Similarweb via Press Gazette, 2025

2. 17

   1.7 billion monthly organic search visits reached news publishers by May 2025, down from a peak above 2.3 billion, a loss of more than 600 million monthly visits.

   Source: Similarweb via Press Gazette, 2025

3. 18

   55.2% of searches involving the top 100 US news and media sites were zero-click in May 2025, up from 52.8% a year earlier.

   Source: Similarweb via Press Gazette, 2025

4. 19

   68.8% of Mail Online's AI Overview keywords ended in zero clicks in May 2025, versus 54.9% across all of its keywords.

   Source: Similarweb via Press Gazette, 2025

5. 20

   212% growth in news-related ChatGPT queries occurred between January 2024 and May 2025, while equivalent Google searches fell 5%.

   Source: Similarweb via Press Gazette, 2025

Mobile vs Desktop

Zero-click behavior is not evenly split by device, and the two biggest studies frame the gap differently depending on how a zero-click is defined.

1. 21

   25.6% of desktop searches and 17.3% of mobile searches were zero-click under Semrush's stricter definition, in its study of 609,809 queries from 20,000 US users.

   Source: Semrush, 2022

2. 22

   Almost half of mobile Google searches in both the US and EU end the browsing session entirely, more than twice the rate of desktop searches, per SparkToro and Datos.

   Source: SparkToro / Datos, 2024

Sources

Every statistic on this page links to the publication where the number appears. Data comes from 8 sources.

• SparkToro / Datos: https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/
• SparkToro: https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/
• Bain & Company: https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/
• Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
• Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/
• Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-ai-overviews-study/
• Similarweb via Press Gazette: https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/how-google-ai-overviews-is-fuelling-zero-click-searches-for-top-publishers/
• Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/zero-clicks-study/

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