Six out of ten Google searches now end without anyone clicking anything. Not because searchers gave up, but because Google answered the question itself. SparkToro and Datos clickstream data show 58.5% of US searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended with zero clicks in May 2024. Of the clicks that do happen, nearly 30% go to Google-owned properties. The open web gets roughly 360 clicks per 1,000 searches.
That number has climbed for years, but the mechanism has changed. This isn't just featured snippets pulling a definition anymore. The modern SERP is a layered system designed to resolve queries without sending you anywhere, and each layer works differently.
Five Features, Five Ways to Lose a Click
The zero-click SERP isn't one thing. It's several features stacked on top of each other, each extracting value from publishers in a different way.
AI Overviews are the newest and most aggressive. Launched in May 2024, they synthesize answers from multiple sources with minimal attribution. Similarweb found queries that trigger AI Overviews hit 80-83% zero-click rates. The overall zero-click rate jumped from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, per Search Engine Journal's analysis. AI Overviews are the primary driver.
Featured snippets pull a direct answer from a single page. You get a link, technically, but the answer is already displayed. The user got what they needed.
Knowledge panels bypass content creators entirely. Google pulls structured data from its Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia, and other authority sources. If you're not the entity being described, you don't exist in this space.
People Also Ask boxes appear on 78% of informational queries. They expand inline, answering follow-up questions without a pageview. Each opened accordion is a click that stayed on Google.
Local packs serve address, hours, and reviews right in the SERP. For "restaurant near me" or "plumber in Austin," there's no reason to visit a website at all.
Some queries are effectively zero-click by definition. Similarweb found that "weather" queries hit 85% zero-click rates. "Grams to pounds" hits 100%. Nobody needs your content for unit conversions, and they never did. The interesting question is what happens to queries where someone should be clicking through.
Traffic Losses: The Numbers
This isn't theoretical. Publishers are reporting real traffic losses, and the numbers are brutal.
Pew Research Center found a 46.7% CTR reduction when AI Overviews appear: 8% CTR with them versus 15% without. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% click reduction for position-one results. DMG Media reported an 89% desktop CTR decline, from 25.23% down to 2.79%. Chegg saw a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic year-over-year.
The pattern is consistent across studies but uneven across query types. Educational content, news, and informational queries take the hardest hits. Branded searches, interestingly, show an 18% CTR increase. When someone searches for your brand by name, Google still sends them to you. When they search for the thing you wrote about, increasingly it doesn't.
That asymmetry is the whole story. Query intent is the variable that determines whether zero-click search is an existential threat or a non-issue for your specific business.
Why Optimizing for Featured Snippets Backfires
A lot of the SEO response to zero-click has been to optimize for the features that are eating clicks. Write 40-60 word opening paragraphs. Add schema markup. Structure content to win the featured snippet.
This advice isn't wrong exactly, but it misses something fundamental. Winning a featured snippet means Google displays your answer directly in the SERP. You "won" the position, but the user got what they needed without visiting your site. You optimized yourself out of a click.
The same logic applies to AI Overviews, only worse. Your content might be one of several sources synthesized into a blended answer with minimal attribution. Being cited in an AI Overview is better than not being cited, but it's a long way from the traffic that a traditional blue link used to deliver.
SparkToro argues that traffic itself is now "a vanity metric" disconnected from revenue. They found 60% of marketers still target traffic growth and 59% use it as their primary KPI. That's a measurement framework built for a search ecosystem that no longer exists.
The Realistic Playbook
The realistic playbook has three parts.
Protect what's protectable. Branded searches still drive clicks. Every dollar spent building brand recognition is now also an SEO investment, because branded queries are the ones Google still sends to you. First-party research and original data give you something AI Overviews can't fully extract; they can cite your number, but the methodology, the context, the next study all live on your site.
Measure what matters. If your dashboard is still centered on organic sessions, you're watching the wrong number. Leads generated, conversion rates, and revenue per landing page view tell you whether search is actually working for your business. A page that gets half the traffic but twice the conversion rate is a better page.
Diversify distribution. This is the uncomfortable one. SparkToro points out that every major referral source (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, AI tools) sends less traffic year-over-year. A search for "steps to buying a house" now surfaces YouTube videos and Reddit threads, not real estate company blog posts. Building presence where audiences actually congregate matters more than optimizing for a click-through that increasingly doesn't happen.
Our read: the era of building a business primarily on organic search traffic is ending. Not because SEO stopped working, but because the definition of "working" changed. The SERP is no longer a set of doors to walk through. It's becoming the destination. Publishers who accept that and restructure around brand, conversion, and multi-channel presence will do fine. Those waiting for Google to start sending more clicks again are going to wait a long time.