A new zero-click search study reveals that nearly 30% of clicks are directed to Google’s properties, while approximately 36% go to the open web.

In the U.S., 58.5% of Google searches and 59.7% in the EU result in zero clicks. Zero-click searches occur when users end their session or enter a new query without clicking on any results.

This data is from a new zero-click search study by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, based on clickstream data from Datos, a company owned by Semrush.

Why We Care: Clicks Impact Google Search Rankings

Clicks are crucial for Google Search rankings, as confirmed during the Google antitrust trial and indicated by findings from the Google Search leak. However, it’s important to remember that not all users want to click on a link and visit a website to get an answer. According to technical SEO consultant Pedro Dias on X, many of those zero-click searchers were never your target user or client in the first place.

Here are more findings from the study:

Clicks to Google Properties: Nearly 30% of all clicks in the U.S. go to Google-owned properties (e.g., YouTube, Google Images, Google Maps), according to the report.

A Few “Yes, But” Thoughts:

• If people click on Google’s YouTube, they will see a video created by a business, brand, or creator. In the case of searches with local intent, if someone wants directions to a restaurant or another type of business, does it matter if that person didn’t visit the website to get the same information?
• Yes, Google is keeping people within its ecosystem, but that shouldn’t necessarily be “concerning” if you’re optimizing for more than just Classic Search, especially if searchers are getting what they want.
• It becomes concerning when Google expands into new verticals and essentially “takes over,” leaving websites to fight for crumbs of organic search traffic.

Traffic to Websites

For every 1,000 Google searches, 360 clicks in the U.S. go to the open web; that number is 374 in the EU.

While the exact number of daily Google searches is unknown, multiple sites estimate it to be around 8.5 billion. This implies that more than 3 billion clicks per day go to the open web in the U.S. alone. That’s still 3 billion more clicks than any other search engine or answer engine gets in a single day.

AI Overviews

The study found that desktop searches increased “a little” while mobile searches fell “a considerable amount” when comparing May to the prior four months. Some context:

• Google launched AI Overviews in May, which was soon followed by numerous examples of AIO providing dangerous and incorrect answers. This led to a significant pullback as Google promised to improve the quality of AI Overviews.
• Google has stated that people love AI overviews (previously called search generative experience) and that AI overviews increase search usage despite offering no actual data to back up its claims.

About the Data

The data was collected by Datos’ US & EU panel between September 2022 and May 2024, representing “a diverse and statistically significant sample of users.” The report acknowledges various limitations and caveats.

While this data could be better (as is the case with all data to some extent), it can help you understand searchers’ evolving behavior as Google increasingly shifts from a search engine to an answer engine.

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