What is happening to the click?
Despite online searches growing by an astounding +4061% since 2005, we’re now grappling with a somewhat expected challenge.
How can the search market expand so significantly, and yet we’re seeing a decline in clicks through to our sites?
The answer is that we are hurtling towards a zero-click world.
What is a zero click search?
At Tribus Digital, we define a zero-click search as when a user obtains the information they need directly from the search result page, without needing to click through to a website.
These searches often happen across SERP as featured snippets, knowledge panels, or instant answers, delivering the desired content right on the search engine results page.
Generative AI search, or 'AI Overview' as Google calls it, is the newest SERP feature. This follows Bing's lead from July 2024, when they introduced their own version of generative search, which provides users with instant answers and content relevant to their search query.
Other platforms like ChatGPT search are contributing to a zero click search world where answers to questions are being pulled from informative websites to form generative conversational results. Whilst website sources are being displayed the users would be less likely to click through to your site since the information they are searching for has probably already been obtained.
How a zero click is impacting your website marketing reports
While zero-click searches provide users with quicker and efficient answers, they are starting to affect digital marketers who are challenged with reporting year on year data and results. These are the top trends Tribus Digital is seeing across the market when it comes to website reporting:
Reduced Website Traffic: Users are becoming less likely to visit your website if they find the information they need directly on the SERP.
Shifts in Strategy: Businesses now need to optimise their content for visibility in SERP features like featured snippets and knowledge panels to maintain relevance.
Brand Awareness vs. Clicks: Appearing prominently on SERPs is still enhancing brand visibility, even if it doesn’t result in direct clicks.
Tribus' Digital Opinion on a Zero Click Search Engine World
The big player here, the one that is shaking up the SEO world due to the enormous market share is Google. Their AI overview has dominated conversations and has driven conversation around how generative AI will support users to find out information quickly but takes clicks away from websites.
However, we must remind ourselves that although Google’s mission statement is ‘to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’ their revenue stream comes mainly from paid advertising. AI Overviews pushes these paid search campaigns further down the page. If Google is promoting AI overviews over ad positions then advertisers are going to get annoyed and spend will be reduced.
So has Google launched AI overviews to pull back at a later stage? Will AI overview search be its own search filter like images, video, and news? Will AI overview move to the right-hand-side of the SERP allowing organic and paid website results to appear like before.
However you look at it, Google is still searching for relevant content to push in front of the users and if you are not adopting a SEO strategy that embraces AI search you are going to be dropping further down the SERP.
