Zero-click search and AI Overviews: how to stay visible

Your Search Console shows more impressions than ever, but clicks are lagging behind: welcome to the zero-click era. More and more searches end on the results page itself, in an AI Overview, a featured snippet or a knowledge panel, without anyone clicking through. That is no reason to panic, but it is a reason to change strategy: if you only steer on clicks, you are measuring a shrinking share of your own visibility. In this article you get the current figures (with source and methodology, because a lot of noise circulates on this topic), the honest story about what Google itself claims, and the concrete action plan we use at ClickForest to make the visibility of SMEs in Flanders pay off even without a click.

What are zero-click searches?

Zero-click searches are queries where the searcher gets their answer without clicking on a result. The answer sits in an AI Overview, a featured snippet, a knowledge panel or simply in the results list itself, and the search stops there. For websites that means: impressions, but no visit.

The phenomenon is older than the AI wave. As early as 2024, largely before the broad rollout of AI Overviews, 58.5% of US and 59.7% of European Google searches ended without a click to the open web according to SparkToro and Datos; per thousand searches in the EU, only 374 clicks went to regular websites. Zero-click is not a temporary quirk but a structural property of modern search, and AI is only accelerating it.

What is an AI Overview and what is AI Mode?

An AI Overview is the AI summary Google shows above the classic search results: a generated answer with source citations, compiled from multiple pages. AI Mode goes a step further and turns Google into a full chat experience. Pew Research measured in March 2025 that 18% of US Google searches already showed such an AI summary.

The broader context: search is also shifting to AI assistants themselves. ChatGPT counts 900 million weekly users according to OpenAI (February 2026), and Perplexity was already processing 780 million queries per month in May 2025. CEO Aravind Srinivas on that growth rate:

“Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate.”

— Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity

What generative engine optimization is exactly and how it relates to SEO is fully explained in our pillar SEO vs GEO; this article focuses on the click impact and what to do about it.

How many clicks do you really lose? The numbers

The honest figures, with their context. In early 2026 SparkToro measured (with Similarweb data) that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click; in the same trend comparison 2024 stood at 60.45%, although that figure comes from a different data panel (Datos), so read the line as a direction rather than an exact measurement.

Pew Research saw that users clicked a classic result only half as often on searches with an AI summary (8% versus 15%), and the source links inside such a summary were clicked in barely 1% of visits.

The sharpest measurement comes from Ahrefs: across 300,000 keywords, the click-through rate of position 1 on desktop dropped by roughly 58% when an AI Overview was present (December 2025 data, versus 34.5% in their first measurement of April 2025). Ryan Law summed it up vividly:

“For every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now ‘keeps’ 58.”

— Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs

Study	What was measured	Key result
SparkToro x Similarweb (2026)	Share of searches without a click (US)	68.01%, versus 60.45% in 2024
Pew Research (2025)	Click behaviour with an AI summary (US)	8% clicks through versus 15% without; 1% clicks AI source links
Ahrefs (2026)	Click-through position 1, desktop, with AI Overview	roughly -58%, versus -34.5% in April 2025
Amsive (2025)	CTR difference per keyword type (US)	Non-branded -19.98%; with brand name +18.68%

Three caveats that honest reporting requires: all of these studies measure correlation, not proven causation; they are US-based and mostly desktop-focused (Belgian research at this scale does not exist, so read them as a direction); and the 58% figure applies specifically to position 1 on desktop for keywords with an AI Overview, not to all your traffic.

What does Google itself say, and who is right?

Google disputes the loss: according to the company, total organic click volume remains stable and the clicks that still come through are higher quality and more purchase-oriented. Independent researchers measure something different, and who is right helps determine where you set your benchmark. So we put both positions side by side, starting with Google itself. Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, wrote in August 2025:

“Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year.”

— Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search

That claim comes without a published dataset, and the independent measurements by Pew, Ahrefs and SparkToro contradict the volume picture. The truth both camps share is more nuanced: total search volume is growing, clicks per search are falling, and the clicks that still come through are often further along in their decision process. For your strategy it hardly matters who wins the argument: in both scenarios your visibility becomes broader than your click statistics, and you need to measure and optimise on more than visit numbers alone.

What is a zero-click marketing strategy?

A zero-click marketing strategy extracts value from searches that do not end in a click: making your brand visible in the answer itself, so the searcher remembers your name, looks you up directly later or trusts you at the moment of purchase. Rand Fishkin, who helped popularise the term, already put it this way in 2024:

“For marketers, this underscores the importance of zero-click content: getting value from searches that don’t result in a click.”

— Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro

Concretely, such a strategy consists of four layers. One: citable content, so AI Overviews and chatbots pick up your facts and brand name (the tactics behind this are in our guide to GEO strategy). Two: presence on the results page itself, via featured snippets, your business profile and strong titles that show your brand even without a click. Three: brand building beyond Google, because people who already know your brand search for it directly. Four: owned channels such as email, where no algorithm stands between you and your audience.

How do you optimise for featured snippets and AI Overviews?

With the same building blocks: answer the question directly and compactly at the top of the page or section, use headings phrased as questions, back your points up with sourced figures, and keep the technical side healthy so systems can easily retrieve and understand your page. No secret file or special markup guarantees access; structured data remains useful as hygiene for entity recognition, not as an entry ticket.

A nuance from the Amsive study (700,000 keywords, US) that many guides miss: the combination of an AI Overview with a featured snippet produced the biggest click-through drop of all (-37.04%). Winning a snippet is therefore no longer a guaranteed traffic tap; it is above all a visibility position that keeps you in view and gets you cited more often as a source in the AI answer. So write your answers first and foremost to be cited and remembered, and treat the click as a bonus. Spoken searches follow the same pattern, as the next section explains.

Want to know how visible your site is in AI answers? ClickForest combines SEO and GEO for SMEs in Flanders; the GEO audit gives you a clear baseline measurement of where you stand today. Prefer an expert right away? Book a no-obligation video call.

What about spoken searches and AI assistants?

A spoken search is the most extreme case of zero-click: the assistant reads out one answer and the interaction ends there. There is no results list to click and no second place. So if you want to be found in spoken and conversational searches, you do not optimise for a separate “voice” technique, but for exactly what is described above: one clear answer that gets cited first.

Three things work here. Write your headings as the question someone asks out loud, and put the answer directly underneath in two or three sentences. Use complete, natural sentences instead of keyword strings, because spoken questions are longer and more specific than typed ones. And make sure your local data is correct, because many spoken searches carry local intent (“where do I buy”, “open now”); that is won by whoever has their local findability in order.

What you should no longer do is treat voice search as a separate channel with its own tactics and budget. That approach dates from the years when the smart speaker was a search engine. The behaviour itself has not disappeared but moved: people now ask their questions out loud or in plain sentences to AI assistants, where the same rules apply as in this article.

Why does your brand become more important than your position?

Because brand recognition is the only factor that wins with AI Overviews. In the Amsive study, click-through on non-branded keywords dropped by almost 20%, but keywords with a brand name and an AI Overview actually rose by 18.68%. Translated: people who already know your name do click through, whatever appears above the results.

That makes brand building the best-performing “SEO tactic” of the zero-click era. Every mention in an AI answer, every consistent business description and every happy customer who types in your name reinforces exactly the signal that both Google and the chatbots reward. How to actively steer recommendations in ChatGPT and co, from your entity to external mentions, is covered in how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business.

How do you measure visibility without clicks?

Broaden your yardstick from clicks to three layers: impressions and positions (Search Console shows how often you are seen, even without a click), mentions (are you named in AI answers to your core questions, and is search volume on your brand name growing) and the AI referral channel in GA4 (small but fast-growing, and often strikingly purchase-oriented).

A practical rhythm for an SME: review the impressions-versus-clicks ratio per core page monthly (a rising impression line with flat clicks means: visible in answers, time to strengthen citability and brand), ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the same set of core questions every month and note whether you are mentioned, and track your branded search volume as the most honest measure of brand building. Keep that rhythm and the zero-click shift stops being mysterious traffic loss and becomes a measurable relocation of value.

Does zero-click replace your SEO?

No: it redefines what SEO delivers. The sources for AI answers largely come from the regular search results, so without a healthy SEO foundation you do not exist in the answers either. What changes is the distribution of returns: fewer raw clicks, more visibility, mentions and purchase-ready visitors.

For a Flemish SME the practical conclusion is twofold. Keep investing in your SEO foundation, because it feeds every answer system. And build the citability layer on top that gets you into AI answers, the core of our GEO approach. ClickForest runs that combination of SEO and GEO for SMEs in Flanders, with the figures from this article as a compass: no panicking about clicks, but building visibility that lasts.

What should you remember about zero-click and AI Overviews?

Zero-click search is structural and accelerating: from 60.45% to 68.01% of US searches without a click in two years, with AI Overviews as the driver and up to 58% less click-through for position 1 on desktop. The winners share three traits: they write to be cited, they build their brand (the only factor that gains clicks with AI Overviews) and they measure impressions and mentions instead of visits alone.

ClickForest helps SMEs in Flanders stay visible in this new search landscape: SEO as the foundation, GEO as the citability layer, and the GEO audit as your baseline measurement. Curious where you stand today? Book a no-obligation video call and we will look at your numbers together.