Zero-click Google searches hit 68% in the US

Rand Fishkin published new zero-click numbers for SparkToro on 8 June 2026, built on a Similarweb desktop and mobile clickstream panel covering US searchers. The headline: 68.01% of Google searches in the US ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. SparkToro calls the two-year jump the fastest acceleration of this phenomenon in the last decade. Older comparison points exist - a widely cited ~45% figure from 2016 and 49% from 2019 - but those come from the now-defunct Jumpshot panel, and the 2024 figure came from Datos, so SparkToro itself notes the comparison mixes different panels and users and is only the closest it has.

What drives the increase#

SparkToro attributes most of the jump to AI Overviews, which it says now appear on more than 20% of Google searches and cut click-through rate by nearly 60% on the searches where they show. The report also names instant answers and other on-page UI elements that keep a searcher inside Google’s results as contributing factors, while AI Mode, which SparkToro measured at just 0.34% of US searches for the same January-April 2026 window, has not driven the change yet. SparkToro says the rise is almost certainly driven by AI Overviews, but the report compares two different panels and does not isolate their effect from the other changes Google made to the results page.

What the rate can tell you#

The 68.01% figure is a national average across every kind of query. SparkToro notes that some categories still benefit from SEO, including branded searches, local businesses and high-intent transactional or tactical queries. A publisher whose traffic depends on those terms is exposed to a different rate than this headline number implies, and a publisher whose own click-through and impression data in Search Console has not moved the way the national average has moved learns more from that first-party data than from the aggregate. The zero-click rate says how often Google answers a search itself; it does not say whether a specific site’s own rankings, snippet, or query mix changed.

Why we care#

The direction is real and it is accelerating - a 7.56 percentage point move in two years, which SparkToro calls the fastest acceleration in a decade, is the kind of change that should show up in a publisher’s own analytics too, not stay abstract.

AI Overviews are the report’s leading explanation, not a proven sole cause. Treat “AI Overviews are killing clicks” as this report’s strongest hypothesis, backed by a real CTR comparison, rather than as a settled, fully isolated causal claim.

Query type still matters more than the headline number. A site living on transactional queries is not living through the same 68% world as a site living on informational queries, and that distinction belongs in any plan built on this data.