In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click - SparkToro

In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click . Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden. Their financial and stock performance suggests that these changes boosted both ad revenue and investor confidence, and thus, it’s unlikely this evolution will slow or reverse. Credit to the team at Similarweb, whose exceptional mobile and desktop clickstream panel illustrates how the AI age has shifted post-Google-search behavior.

In 2024, US zero click searches on Google stood at 60.45%. That means we’ve seen 12.5% growth (7.5 percentage points) in clickless queries over the last two years. That’s the fastest acceleration of this phenomenon in the last decade, almost certainly driven by the massive growth in AI Overviews (now found on 20%+ of all searches), which, when present, reduce CTR by nearly 60%.

In 2019, SparkToro first published research showing that 49% of Google searches ended without a click. That data inspired my colleague, Amanda Natividad to describe the “Zero Click Web,” an emerging era of platforms (search engines, social networks, and now AI tools) discouraging users from clicking out and reducing the ability of site owners to earn traffic from the places where a majority of online time is spent. That trend has continued, unabated, since.

Similarweb’s panel is far from the only data source telling this story.

In fact, this data likely comes as little surprise to anyone in the world of search — thousands of sites have reported significant losses in traffic, and millions have experienced it. Large-scale studies have been performed to analyze the handful of sites who’ve grown traffic despite the last few years’ decline in referrals. Numerous stories of traffic falling off a cliff have gone viral. The latest, from AllAboutBerlin, showed a decline even more precipitous than what we’ve shown here.

Last year, the Ahrefs team built a monthly tracker illustrating how web traffic flows to over 75,000 domains who’ve opted in to have their metrics aggregated and published.

The decline from June 2025 to May 2026 is 8 percentage points, a ~22% drop in the traffic share Google sends to these tens of thousands of websites. And this panel is far from representative – these are sites with professional marketers actively working to grow traffic!

Since we’ve been advocating for and publishing data about this zero-click search issue for a long time, we’ve got a particular collection of historic numbers to share. Fair warning: the numbers we uncovered from 2016 and 2019 are from the now-defunct Jumpshot clickstream panel. Those from 2024 were provided by Datos, now a Semrush company. And 2026’s are from Similarweb, who had a sizable-enough mobile panel to conduct the cross-device research we required. Thus, the graph below compares a bit of apples and oranges — these aren’t the same users or devices, they’re not even necessarily perfect demographic matches — but they’re the closest we’ve got to a look inside Google’s rising obsession with keeping searchers on their platform.

Ten years ago, ~45% of Google searches were zero-click. Today it’s 68%. That’s a 33.8% increase (23 points) in a decade. And it’s difficult to see a reason Google would slow down the pace of answering questions directly in their results given:

The popularity of AI tools (which send less than 1% of all traffic out) has grown dramatically. 20%+ of Americans now use an AI tool 10X+/month. Google fears being left behind, and has thus pushed heavily to make AI central to their search experience.

The adoption of social networks (especially YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok) as replacements for traditional search engines continues unabated — as our research in March showed: search happens everywhere.

Google knows that the more instant answers they give users, the more users return and search again.

Ad revenue has only increased as Google’s found ways to answer “organic” kinds of queries while growing both paid clickthrough rate and average cost per click.

The US antitrust case against Google was resolved without significant impact on their business, freeing the search giant to aggressively pursue technological and UI changes that keep searchers inside their ecosystem.

For those curious about exactly what’s changed and how, I’ve dug into those details in the chart below, comparing every major metric that reasonably aligns across the two panels/studies/years.

The metric “Clicks 1X+” is the largest and most meaningful change. It includes clicks of any kind (save for another search in the default search box): Google’s other properties (like a search in Google Maps or a visit to YouTube), clicks on organic links to the open web, and clicks to paying advertisers in the search results. That’s where the biggest...