Zero-click Google searches hit 68% in the US

Rand Fishkin published new zero-click numbers for SparkToro on 9 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 in the metric it has tracked in over a 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, a different data source, so this report treats them as historical context rather than as the same continuous series.

What the report says is driving 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, alongside AI Mode, which SparkToro measured at just 0.34% of US searches for the same January-April 2026 window - too small on its own to explain the shift. The report is explicit that AI Overviews are the largest single factor it identifies, not the only one, and it does not claim to have isolated their effect from the other changes Google made to the results page in the same period.

What a zero-click rate can and cannot tell a publisher#

The 68.01% figure is a national average across every kind of query. SparkToro’s own breakdown shows the range underneath it: informational queries run around 74% zero-click and local queries around 72%, while commercial-investigation queries sit near 46% and transactional queries near 31%. A publisher whose traffic depends on transactional or commercial-intent 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, against a much slower drift over the prior 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.