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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
Hey, it's Amanda. We haven't done a Field Notes episode in a while!
So my co-author Rand Fishkin published new research and here's the big news: in the first four months of 2026, **sixty-eight percent of Google searches ended without a click.**
That means less than a third of Google searches still send a click anywhere at all.
So... you do a search. Two times out of three, Google answers you, shows you, or distracts you so thoroughly that you never leave. The click — the thing our entire industry got built on — is now the exception. Not the rule.
I've been talking about the "Zero Click Web" since 2022. And friends, that 68% number? That’s the number where it stops being a trend and starts being... just... how the world is.
Let me give you the trajectory, because the trajectory *is* the story.
Back in 2019, SparkToro published research showing 49% of Google searches ended without a click. In 2022, when this shift began permeating social media a.k.a. our online water coolers, I started talking about the zero click web and the importance of zero click marketing. In 2024, zero-click searches were about 60%. Now, only two years later, it's 68%.
So we picked up seven and a half percentage points in *two years*. Rand calls that the fastest acceleration of this in a decade — and a decade ago, this number sat around 45%.
What changed? *(beat)* Two letters. A. I.
AI Overviews — those answer boxes at the top of the results — now show up on more than 20% of all searches. And when one appears, it cuts click-through rate by almost **60%**. Google answers the question, and the websites that did the actual work to answer it... just don't get the visit.
Pay attention to this: Rand looked at an Ahrefs tracker of more than 75,000 websites that *opted in* to share their data. These are not sleepy little blogs. These are sites with professional marketers actively fighting for traffic. And even *they* watched Google's share of their traffic fall about 22% in a single year.
So if your traffic is down and you've been quietly blaming yourself? It's not just you. It's the new status quo.
Now. What this is not...
A couple of skeptic's notes, because I promised you accuracy. This isn't AI Mode eating the web — AI Mode was basically a rounding error in this data, about a third of one percent of searches. It's growing fast, but it's not the villain yet. The villain is the boring, decade-long machine of Google keeping people *on* Google.
And here's Rand's own line, which I love: your SEO matters as much or more than ever. It just won't earn you traffic the way it used to. We have literally watched companies where traffic is down and revenue is *up*.
So the real takeaway is: **stop using traffic as your scoreboard.** If two-thirds of searches never produce a click, then a click-based scoreboard is measuring a smaller slice of reality every single quarter.
Okay, so the obvious next question — and I had it too — is: if Google's keeping all these clicks, who's still *getting* them? Somebody's winning, right?
Our friend Cyrus Shepard over at Zyppy did the homework on exactly this. He analyzed more than 400 winning and losing websites, and he found five features that strongly predicted whether a site was growing or shrinking in Google.
I'll give you the two that really stuck with me.
Number one: the site offers a product or a service. Seventy percent of the winners did. Only about a third of the losers did.
Number two: the site lets you actually *complete a task*. Almost 84% of winners — versus half of the losers. And "task" doesn't only mean "buy something." It means you can do the thing you came to do. Run the calculator. Check the lottery ticket. Practice the math problem on that tutoring site. Or book an appointment.
The losers? News sites. Pure information sites. Affiliate sites. Places that tell you something and then send you somewhere *else* to actually do it.
Cyrus has this line that's basically the whole ballgame: Google has moved beyond rewarding "good content" to rewarding **what AI cannot replicate.**
And the kicker — these features are additive. Having just one of them barely helps; your win rate's about 15%. But sites with four or five of them won around 68 to 70% of the time.
So the old playbook — find a high-volume keyword, write the best blog post about it, rank, collect the traffic — *that's* the playbook that's losing. You don't win anymore by answering the question. You win by being the place where someone *finishes the job*. Cyrus calls it owning the next step of the user journey. Build a destination, not the doorway.
Alright, stay with me here — because most people read this next part backwards.
The loud take right now is "AI is inevitable, so just surrender to it, don't get left behind." I don't buy it. "Inevitable" is just *prediction*, and predictions can be wrong. Instead, think of the principle. And the principle, I think, is: "Optimize for the machines that serve people." The "inevitable" crowd is making a bet on a specific technology winning — and if the bubble bursts, that bet looks oversized or wrong. The truth is, discovery has been machine-mediated since Google launched in 1998 — SEO has always been optimizing for a machine that serves people. AI is just the most capable version of that machine we've ever had.
And here's the the other thing: most people aren't *choosing* to "use AI." They have no idea they are. They open Google. They open Amazon. That's household technology — but those are AI-powered now, deciding what they see and what gets recommended. Nobody opted in for that. It's already sitting between you and your customer.
When people *do* knowingly reach for AI, here's what happens: roughly three in four US shoppers say they've used AI to research or buy something, but nearly one in three won't let it actually spend their money. *(beat)* The machine advises. The human decides. *That's* what "a machine that serves people" means.
And it's no vanity trend. Adobe found traffic arriving at retailers *from* AI grew almost 400% in a single year — and it converts about 42% better than everything else. The human a machine hands you is turning out to be your best visitor.
So you've got two audiences now: people, and the machines that serve them. And you have to be legible to both — bubble or no bubble. Because even if the valuations crater tomorrow, Google and Amazon are not ripping the AI out of the products your customers already open every day.
Which is exactly why Rand says don't neglect your website even as traffic falls. You publish the clear, correct page — not for the click, but so the machine gets your facts *right* and points to *you*. Your content's new job is to be the source the machine trusts. You're not writing to be clicked anymore. You're writing to be **cited**.
So put the three together, because separately they're news — but together they're a strategy.
Rand says Google is keeping the click. Cyrus says the winners are destinations where you can actually *do* something. And the third shift is the quiet one — more and more, a machine stands between you and your customer, summarizing and recommending on their behalf.
The through-line? *(beat)* The click was never the point. It was just the thing we could measure.
What's durable — what survives every algorithm update and every AI feature Google ships next — is this: show up where your audience already pays attention, and build something inimitable enough that people *and* machines come looking for you. That's Zero Click Marketing. That's the whole thing.
If I were a marketer listening to this, here's what I'd actually do this quarter.
One: fire "traffic" as your North Star metric. Replace it with a correlation dashboard — watch whether branded search, direct visits, and revenue move when you show up in the places your audience hangs out.
Two: do the audience research. Find out where your people actually pay attention — which newsletters, which subreddits, which creators, which podcasts — and then go be there. That's the "market where your audience already is" part, and it's the part most teams skip.
Three: stop shipping commodity content. Build the destination. Give people a task they can complete on your site — a tool, a calculator, a database, a transaction. Own the next step.
Four: publish the facts only you can publish, clearly, so the machines cite you correctly instead of guessing. Remember from my interview with Kaleigh Moore (it's the episode right before this one) — we talked about how the thing AI can't replace is your lived experience. Use it.
And five — because I promised you nuance — keep doing SEO for the searches that still convert: your branded terms, local intent, high-intent transactional queries. That traffic is still there. Go get it.
That's the field note. Rand's research and Cyrus's study are both free, and both worth your time — I've linked them in the show notes. Big thanks to Rand Fishkin and Cyrus Shepard, some of the people who do the audience research that makes all of this make sense.
The click is becoming optional. Your influence doesn't have to be.
I'll see ya next week on Zero Click Marketing. Oh by the way, you can still preorder the Zero Click Marketing book! On zeroclickmarketing.co/book, if you preorder, you'll get a SparkToro credit, Alertmouse discount, and a seat at Zero Click Summer School.