Eric Siu breaks down why 68% of Google searches now end without clicking anywhere. As clicks to the open web drop to 27%, SEO strategy has to shift from driving traffic to becoming the answer Google displays directly.
So what I've seen here from Rusty Brick is, so this is from SimilarWeb, and I think it's a SparkToro and SimilarWeb collaboration. So it shows only 27% of clicks from Google go to the open web now. It used to be a lot more. So you might be referring to this. I'm showing you a chart over here. So you can see from 2016 to 2026, Google zero-click search growth, meaning that the number of clicks that don't land on a website from search. So in 2026, the number of searches with zero clicks was 45%. Today it's 68%, which is what you're talking about, which is Crazy. You look at this, this is a decade out. It used to be 55% of searchers had at least one click. Now it's only 32%.
Google's also much more popular, so you can still get a lot of traffic. Optimizing solely for traffic, you're losing the game because the game now is to be the cited answer. It's not about ranking. When anyone types in a question, your company, your products, your services are mentioned. That is the new goal.
