The State Of Search In 2026: Zero Click Searches At An All-Time High
Webinar New AI Search & SEO KPIs: 4 Real Signals AI mentions and citations are benchmarks, not decisions. Get 4 traffic-predictive signals drawn from real bot data across hundreds of sites. Guide Local Google Visibility Guide + Cheat Sheet Track how your business appears across Google Search, Maps, and Gemini. Listings, reviews, and competitor signals all in one view. Webinar How Freshpet Earned AI's Trust The GEO playbook behind Freshpet's AI Overview citations, plus checks to run on your own brand. Free, live Aug 20. Rundown Why Your Brand Drops Out of AI Answers Five articles on the signals behind citation fluctuation, where models source citations, and how to audit your content for AI visibility gap Webinar New AI Search & SEO KPIs: 4 Real Signals AI mentions and citations are benchmarks, not decisions. Get 4 traffic-predictive signals drawn from real bot data across hundreds of sites. 🔥SEJ Pro Course: Own Your Brand’s Promo Code & Coupon Search Results Before Parasites Do The latest clickstream data from Datos shows the extent of the zero-click world we're living in, while throwing up a few more surprising (and encouraging) statistics. Harry Clarkson-Bennett 1 minute ago ⋅ 4 min read Harry Clarkson-Bennett SEO Director at Telegraph Bio Follow The latest Datos x SparkToro State of Search Report is out, and it’s something of a doozy. AI is certainly on the rise, search still hasn’t been replaced (it’s not even in the process of), and more people than ever stay in Google’s ecosystem. Rather than read it in its entirety, you can watch or listen to me talk about it here: Nothing hugely surprising of course. However, there are a couple of points that piqued my interest without making it into the headline findings. Given the extraordinarily good state of Google’s revenues, I’m surprised to see such a significant reduction in paid clicks between March and June 2026. In the U.S., they dropped from 2.3% to 1.3% and in the EU/UK, 2.4% to 1.4%. Maybe Google has decided now’s the time to try something novel given how strong their advertising revenue base is. This does also coincide with record levels of users that stay on Google, or click through to another Google-owned property: Maybe they have expanded AI Overviews in more territories recently (French rollout took place in July 2026), or given AI Mode a more significant push. We know these surfaces do not monetize as well advertising-wise as traditional interfaces. This data corroborates in the EU/UK, but not in the U.S. One to hypothesize over. In Europe, Wikipedia went from being the seventh most visited domain from search in Q2 2025 to the third most visited in Q2 2026. This feels like the antithesis of what we’d expect to see – who visits websites anymore? Some people obviously, which is encouraging. My only slight hunch is that users are looking for ways to corroborate the information they are ingesting at a furious rate from less reliable sources. Navigational searches fell hardest on smaller engines – Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, et al. – all saw more significant drops in navigational searches than Google’s 22.9% – 16.4% in the U.S. market. But informational searches rose significantly. In the U.S. market, informational searches accounted for 59.69% in Q2 2025 compared to 65.12% in Q2 2026. The EU/UK saw a comparable rise over that same time period – 55.39% to 61.31%. I’m not a statistician, but if this is based on share of search alone, then the “drop” in navigational searches could be down to the far more significant rise in informational searches. We know that AI visibility has measurable downstream impact and that AI excels in the research phase. While search is becoming less valuable here, AI usage may be increasing subsequent informational searches in Google. There is, of course, far more in the report around desktop usage, searches per user, query length to name but a few. But to me, these are the headlines. Read Full Bio Harry Clarkson-Bennett SEO Director at Telegraph SEO Director at The Telegraph with a decade of experience. Unskilled jiu-jitsu guy. Average chess player. Jack of many things. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. The Integrated Search Brief That Aligns SEO, PPC & Content In The AI Search Era 3 CMS Platforms Control 73% Of The Market & Shape Technical SEO Defaults You Can Finally Measure Content Alignment. That’s The Dangerous Part Join 75,000+ Digital Leaders. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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