Zero-click search: 68% of US searches end on Google. Which pages lose most?

In January to April 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website, according to SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb panel data, published in June. That's what "zero-click search" means: the searcher gets what they need on the results page itself (from an AI Overview, a featured snippet, a knowledge panel, a map) and never visits a source.

For a site that lives on search traffic, the headline rate matters less than a narrower question: which of your pages sit on queries where the answer is now on Google's page, and what you can do about those.

How the 68% was measured

Three details change how you should read that number:

The two years come from different panels. The 2026 figure uses Similarweb's US desktop and mobile web panel. The 2024 comparison, 60.45%, comes from Datos (now owned by Semrush). SparkToro says plainly that "these aren't the same users or devices," so treat the rise as a direction, not a precise 7.6-point change.
It excludes the Google app. Only mobile searches in a browser are counted, and SparkToro expects the true zero-click share to be higher.
"Click" includes Google's own properties. A search that ends on Maps or YouTube counts as a click here, even though no independent site got the visit.

What counts as zero-click

Anything that answers the query on the results page:

AI Overviews: a generated answer above the results, citing several sources, often complete on its own. Since late August 2026 Google expands some of them into full AI Mode-style answers by default, pushing organic links further down
AI Mode: Google's conversational search tab, where links are part of the answer rather than a list beneath it
Featured snippets: one page's paragraph or list lifted into a box
Knowledge panels: entity facts for people, companies, places
People Also Ask: related questions that expand in place
Direct answers: conversions, time zones, calculations, scores, weather
Local packs: a map plus listings that settle most "near me" intent

How search got here

Each phase moved more of the answer onto the results page. None has been rolled back.

In September Google was also seen testing links inside AI Overviews that open AI Mode instead of a website. If that ships widely, a click from an Overview won't necessarily be a click to you.

How often AI Overviews appear depends on what you count

Similarweb puts AI Overviews on about 43% of queries and Semrush on about 48% (both reported July 30, 2026; neither published its method). SparkToro, measuring all searches in its panel rather than a keyword set, puts them on "20%+" of searches.

Both can be right. Vendor numbers describe their tracked keyword lists, which lean informational, and informational queries trigger Overviews far more often. Panel numbers include every navigational and branded search too. For your own site, neither matters as much as your own query mix, which is why the page-type view below is more useful than any market average.

SE Ranking's analysis of 100,000 keywords also found the January model change raised the average number of sources per Overview by 31.8%, so more pages get a mention, each with a smaller share of attention.

What an AI Overview costs in clicks

Two 2026 studies, measuring different things, both worth knowing.

Ahrefs: the loss at the top. Across 300,000 keywords with December 2025 data, Ahrefs found that an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower CTR for the page in position 1, 50.8% lower for position 2 and 19.4% lower for position 10. Its April 2025 version of the study had put the position-1 loss at 34.5%.

Seer Interactive: the trend, and what citation is worth. Seer's April 2026 update (53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions, January 2025 to February 2026) found organic CTR on queries with an Overview hit a floor of 1.3% in December 2025, then recovered to 2.4% by February 2026. Seer doesn't claim to know why yet. Brands cited in the Overview earned about 20,743 organic clicks per million impressions against 9,445 for uncited brands, about 120% more, though still 38% below queries with no Overview at all.

The Overview appears whether you optimize for it or not. What you can influence is whether you're one of the sources it names.

Why "just rank higher" stopped being enough

For years the answer to featured snippets was to win them. That captured a bigger share of a smaller pool: when the answer is already on screen, total clicks across all results drop. AI Overviews make the pool smaller still, because a synthesis of several pages is often more complete than any one of them. And the old intent buckets assumed informational searches needed a visit. Increasingly they don't.

Which pages are most exposed?

Nobody publishes zero-click rates by page type, so the ordering below is directional, based on how these query types behave. Any article giving you decimals here has made them up.

Page type	Exposure	Why
Quick facts	Highest	Google answers these natively; there's nothing to click through to
Glossary and definitions	High	An Overview assembles a definition from several sources
"Best X" comparisons	High	Overviews summarize the options well enough that many people stop there
Local and location	High	The map pack settles most location intent
Detailed tutorials	Moderate	Multi-step work with screenshots is harder to compress
Transactional	Low	The user wants to act; the click is the point
Long-tail technical	Lowest	Too specific to synthesize confidently; engines defer to specialists

How to check your own pages. In Search Console's Performance report, compare the last 28 days with the same period a year earlier, filtered to one page at a time. A page whose average position held steady while CTR and clicks fell is the signature of an answer being absorbed on the results page. Then open the new AI performance report (worldwide since August 31, 2026) to see which of those pages are getting impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It shows impressions by page, country and device; there are no clicks or queries.

What to do with the result: make the most exposed pages worth citing (an answer near the top, sources, a named author, crawler access), and point new content toward the bottom half of the table, where clicks still happen. Tools, calculators and original data also hold up, because an answer can't use them on the reader's behalf. And keep some of your audience somewhere Google doesn't set the rules: a newsletter, a community, direct visits.

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Can you opt out?

From Google's AI features, yes. Since August 31, 2026, every site can use Search Console's Search generative AI control (Settings, then Search generative AI) to keep its content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover. Google says the setting isn't used as a ranking signal for the rest of Search, and that exclusion takes effect within one to two days, sometimes longer because of caching.

The trade-off is stated just as plainly: opted-out sites get no traffic or impressions from those features. Whether searchers then click your regular result instead is something no one has published data on yet.

Other engines are controlled through robots.txt, and the crawler classes behave differently:

Training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot) only decide whether your content trains future models. Blocking them doesn't affect citations in ChatGPT or Claude search.
Google-Extended is a token, not a crawler. It doesn't affect Google Search or AI Overviews, but it does cover grounding in the Gemini app, so blocking it can cost you Gemini citations.
Retrieval crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot, Bingbot) fetch pages for answers. Blocking one removes you from that engine's answers.
User-triggered fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) fetch a page when a user asks about it. OpenAI and Perplexity say robots.txt may not apply to these.

For most sites, opting out trades a smaller share of attention for none of it. It makes sense mainly where the AI answer fully replaces your page's value and you have reason to think searchers will scroll past it.

FAQ

Should I stop publishing informational content?

No, but the bar is higher. Informational pages still earn visits when they become the source an answer names, and they build the brand recognition that makes people search for you directly. What changes is the standard: an answer near the top, extractable sections, named sources and authors, and crawler access are now the difference between being cited and being one of the pages an answer was assembled from.

Is zero-click search still growing?

The share of searches without a click kept rising into 2026, and Google keeps adding AI features that answer on its own pages. Click-through on queries with an AI Overview behaved differently: Seer Interactive saw it bottom out at 1.3% in December 2025 and recover to 2.4% by February 2026. So the overall direction is still toward fewer clicks, but the loss on AI Overview queries hasn't been a straight line down.

Sources

Updated October 1, 2026: replaced the Seer and Ahrefs CTR figures with their 2026 updates, corrected the description of the zero-click panels, and rewrote the opt-out section for Search Console's new AI control.