In the first four months of 2026, 68% of Google searches in the US ended without a click to any website, according to SparkToro's clickstream study. In 2019 the same measure was about 49%. In 2024 it was just over 60%.
If your Search Console shows impressions rising and clicks flat, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. But the usual explanation, that AI took your traffic, is only partly right, and acting on the wrong explanation leads to the wrong fix.
Most lost clicks were taken by Google answering the question on its own results page, a trend that started long before AI. AI summaries speed it up on informational searches, and they barely touch searches where the person needs to buy, book or visit something specific.
Who actually takes the clicks
Zero-click grew for a decade before AI Overviews existed. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, "People also ask" boxes, maps, flight and hotel modules, shopping carousels, calculators and sports scores all answer on the page. Each one was a reasonable product decision for searchers, and each one removed a reason to visit a website.
AI is the newest layer, not the whole story. SparkToro found that Google's AI Mode accounted for about a third of one percent of searches in early 2026, far too small to explain the shift on its own. AI Overviews matter more, because they appear on a large share of informational queries.
The best independent measure of their effect comes from the Pew Research Center. Tracking the real browsing of 900 US adults, it found people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when none did. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits, and they ended their browsing session on the results page 26% of the time, against 16% without a summary.
Industry studies of click-through rate on AI Overview queries report drops of between roughly 35% and 60%. The numbers vary with method and query mix, and we would treat them as a range, not a fact.
Which clicks still come through
The losses are concentrated in one kind of search. When the answer fits in a paragraph, such as a definition, a conversion, a "how many" or a "what is", Google or its AI can give it without you. When the person needs to act, there is no paragraph that replaces the website: buying a product, booking a table, hiring a specific firm, logging in.
Our own Search Console shows this split clearly. Searches for our free tools and for general topics produce most of our impressions and almost none of our clicks. People searching our name, or something that only we offer, produce most of the clicks. The concession here is real: the informational traffic is not coming back, and a site that was built mostly to rank for "what is" queries has lost the model it was built on.
On a client's online store, the same pattern runs the other way. Google organic still drives about half of all sessions and the majority of revenue, because people search for products they want to buy, and a product search still ends on a product page.
What to do about it
Sort your queries by intent before you react. Split Search Console queries into brand, buying, comparison and informational groups with a few regular expressions. Falling clicks on informational queries are expected. Falling clicks on buying or brand queries are a real problem, and a different one.
Judge informational content by citation, not clicks. An explainer that an AI quotes and links still builds the brand, even when the reader never visits. The trade-off is that you cannot see most of that value in analytics, so it needs a different scorecard, which we describe in measuring a website when clicks fall.
Put effort where a click is unavoidable. Product pages, service pages, pricing, booking and location pages are where searchers must still visit. Most sites have spent years polishing blog posts and leaving these thin.
Make the answer worth quoting. When Google or an assistant does answer on the page, the source it names is the brand people remember. How to be that source is the subject of our piece on getting cited in AI answers.
Where this stops applying
Zero-click figures are averages across all searches, dominated by huge informational volumes. A local plumber, a B2B manufacturer or a niche store may see little change, because their searches were never the kind Google can answer itself. And the data has gaps: SparkToro's panel excludes searches made inside the Google app, where zero-click behavior may be higher still.
Questions for your own Search Console
- What share of your impressions come from searches a paragraph could fully answer?
- Are clicks falling on informational queries only, or on brand and buying queries too?
- Which of your pages must a searcher visit to act, and are those your strongest pages?
- If an AI answered your top informational query today, would it name you as the source?
If you want this split run on your own data, it is the first thing our SEO team does on any new account.