Well, technically the headline should be “More than two out of every three Google searches now end without a single click,” but that felt a bit too long.
The exact figure is 68.01%, and it comes from a new study presented by one of the most authoritative voices in SEO worldwide, Rand Fishkin, current CEO of SparkToro. A few days ago, Fishkin published on his blog that over the past two years, based on Similarweb data for the U.S. market, the percentage of Google queries that do not generate clicks to external websites from users has surged by nearly eight points, up from the 60.45% recorded in 2024. In 2019, the percentage stood at around 50%.
This new report uses data from the first four months of 2026, so it is likely that the percentage is even higher right now. We will see.
In his post, Fishkin explains that “almost certainly” this trend is driven by the massive growth of AI Overviews (which now appear in more than 20% of all searches). When they are present, the CTR of organic search results drops by nearly 60%, building on research we had already explained to you previously.
In any case, the report gives us some additional valuable data. For example, over these two years there has been a 22.9% decline (-9.51 points) in the “1X+ Clicks” metric. This metric includes both visits to external websites and interactions with ads and Google properties such as Maps or YouTube. Interestingly, and to Google’s benefit, users are staying within its ecosystem, and the percentage of people who perform consecutive searches rises by 7.2 percentage points to 28.7%.
On the other hand, paid clicks are up five points, a figure that Fishkin says could even be higher if it were not for the widespread use of ad blockers.
Finally, the analysis makes clear that, just as AI Overviews are behind much of these changes in how people use the search engine, AI Mode (which Meta is now trying to replicate, by the way) is not responsible for these shifts, since it accounted for only 0.34% of searches between January and April 2026. In any case, with more than one billion monthly users announced at Google I/O 2026 and query volume doubling every quarter, I am afraid AI Mode is shaping up to be the key factor that will drive the rise of zero-click searches over the coming years.
Image: ChatGPT
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