Rand Fishkin and friends (Sparktoro and Similarweb) released an ongoing Google zero-click study that showed zero-click searches from Google Search have been sending less and less traffic to the open web and are declining at an even faster rate. In fact, the report says 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click and if you look at AI responses, it is more like only 27.6% of clicks go to the open web.
Here is the chart from Similarweb showing the trend:
This chart breaks down whart happens to that 32%, which shows 66% of that goes to the open web, 27% goes to AI Mode, YouTube, Maps, Images, etc and 6% go to paid ads. It shows for every 1,000 US Google searches, 276 clicks go to the open web.
This is obviously an ongoing, disturbing trend, and honestly, it has become way more impactful since Google released AI Overviews within Google Search.
Dig deeper into the study over here.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
