1.Introduction
Search engines have evolved significantly in this century. From a poorly optimized “here are 100 websites, choose and pick the best for your needs” Google can now perfectly predict what you really want, and gives you an instruction, or information on a specific topic, even before you need to click on a website.
Actually, this is an enormous help for the user, but it causes headaches for SEO experts and website admins. How do we attract visitors to our site, if 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to an external website?
This topic is covered by this article, which tries to offer you some solutions to this well-known problem.
2.What are zero-click searches?
We call a search zero-click if the user leaves a search page without visiting an external website from the query.
They are usually eager to find out specific information, and they get this information inside the Google search page – we will instantly show you the different forms of it. It is important to acknowledge that most of these visitors don’t want to buy anything from the query, as going though a whole purchase journey only appears in a limited way, and only a small percentage of users continue beyond the search results page.
So, you don’t lose those visitors who are ready to convert; rather, you lose those with low purchase intent on your site. Therefore, the issue is the lack of long-term improvement in most cases. Your current loyal buyers are in safe hands, but you can’t bring a great number of first-time visitors to your website, and you can’t scale your business.
3.Why are zero-click searches increasing?
In this section of the article, we will demonstrate why zero-click searches are becoming increasingly common in 2026.
a. The user’s needs
We can think of Google as the main evil character of a film that wants to screw up with all the poor websites. However, this is a little more complicated story. Google is not essentially the bad guy, as zero-click searches were always a dream for most of the users.
Just imagine the main function of most of the searches: to get information about a specific topic. However, blog articles that include this information on specific sites all exist because of another specific reason: to sell something to the users. Therefore, users who are curious to find out information get 4 pop-up ads, a pop-up for a newsletter subscription, and hyperlinks that lead the visitors to a place where they can convert.
These can be really frustrating for the visitors. Even though they only need the one right sentence, they are forced to spend 1 minute on the website, and in most of the cases, they still can’t understand more about the information before they even click on the page.
b. The rise of featured snippets
The first idea that popped up in Google’s developers’ minds for this specific problem was to highlight key information from websites on Google’s search pages. This was called “featured snippets”, and it was a huge success. Featured snippets were introduced in 2014, but at first, it was only available in a limited number of topics and countries. But as soon as Google realized the absolute positive response to this feature, they also implemented it all over the world.
From my point of view, this was one of Google’s best ideas: they both increased the number of satisfied Google users and the SEO performance of websites. As these snippets only occurred, if you passed all of the requirements of Google, which was especially hard for beginners.
c. AI-driven search experiences 
But the key event that really emerged was the number of zero-click searches, which was definitely caused by the AI boom. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, which is a turning point that completely changed our online behavior.
Not long after the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, introduced ChatGPT, Google also came up with its own LLM model: they called it Bard, then renamed it to Gemini.
Later, to gain a competitive advantage, Google integrated Gemini into many of its platforms: Gmail, Google Ads, and its search engine as well. They created an AI mode, which works a little differently from featured snippets: of course, this mode also quotes from websites, but the user never really lands on them. That’s because AI mode (in contrast to featured snippets) not only highlights a key sentence, but also encourages the users to visit the website, if they want to learn more, rather than writing a whole section with all the key information. Moreover, you can also ask Gemini if something is still missing.
This journey doesn’t help websites; they barricade them from the sights of users. This feature is hardly useful for websites and has contributed to several complaints.
4.Impact on website traffic
In this section, we will demonstrate what websites lose because of these features, and how deep the issue is.
a. Declining organic CTR-s
CTR analysis (which is the abbreviation of click-through rate) was one of the best ways to understand your organic power. It calculates the percentage of users who visit your website, divided by all of the users who see your site, or at least the website appears through the search results.
And that’s what makes this calculation less relevant nowadays: users don’t need to click on websites to get the top priority information, therefore organic CTRs declined in every industry.
Even though you have a very strong organic position at most of your keywords, it doesn’t matter anymore: snippets, AI mode, and also paid results (that has a separate place at the top of the search page) all influence organic results negatively, and worsen the CTR numbers.
Some industries are happy with 0.5 CTR numbers, which means that out of 200 people, only one lands on the designated website. And that one person is also far away from an actual conversion.
b. AI’s appearance as a source type
AI not only appears in Google’s AI mode. There are several other AI software that can all direct the readers to an actual site. That’s why marketers not only analyze paid, direct, and organic traffic, but if they want to calculate total website traffic, they also need to include AI traffic.
I heard stories about websites that now have higher traffic volumes from AI applications than from organic results. It’s a very interesting trend that is still under transformation. However, there are more traffic sources than ever, and as a website owner, you need to optimize for many of them.
5.How to respond?
In this section, we will write about the projective solutions that can still offer you various ways to generate high traffic on your website despite the new and new AI features.
a. Optimize for AI
Well, Google’s AI search capability doesn’t offer you various optimizations, but you can still do something to get better AI highlights.
AI search mostly sticks with the best organic findings and gathers information from those. Therefore, it is still needed to earn a good place to achieve the AI’s mentions. However, you have more customization in in-app AI searches. For example, ChatGPT has an option to scan your whole website and see all of your pages. Thus, the software can highlight all of these pages and can share them with the users. Also, ChatGPT now focuses on implementing an in-app purchase function, so visitors can buy your product inside their application. It is only available in certain countries, but if it turns out to be a success, they will definitely get access to European residents as well.
All in all, always read about the latest AI shopping and optimization news, and try not to exclude yourself from it.
b. Focus on high-intent keywords
We mentioned that zero-click searches only influence those queries that search for information, and not trying to make a purchase. Since people will buy even more products online than in the past, the best place to buy something is still the webpage of the designated brand.
So, our advice is, don’t put too much human and material effort into informational queries, they almost never end with actual purchases, even more so after these updates. Your focus should be on purchase intent searches, and double all your efforts into these intents.
This behavior not only saves you money but also leads you to more conversions.
c. Create click-worthy content
Fortunately, there are still some great functionalities that users can not get access to via the search page itself.
All industries have these kinds of offerings, and your objective here is to find them and make an organic strategy around them. For example, an insurance company can make a great widget about how the time period and the ensured object influence their price. Or, an investment firm can depict you with different investment options, and how much money you can make in a 1,5, and 10-year period. Or even a domain registrar company can list you the available domain names, and their projected price on the market.
And there are many more options you can offer to the visitors, which not only make your site unique, but also make it a must-see for many people.
6.Conclusion
In this article, we described what zero-click searches are and why they completely changed the online environment. We also mentioned why zero-click searches are emerging and will be a completely standard behavior in the next couple of years.
We also focused on the solutions. We wrote about three tips that can increase your site’s traffic, even though the trends don’t help you. Don’t forget: even if you don’t get along well with a trend, you can’t change it back. You need to live with it and always search for how you can take advantage of it. That behavior will get you to high places.
