Zero-click searches in 2026: what the AI Overviews data actually shows for B2B traffic.

The short answer.

Zero-click searches are now the majority. SparkToro’s 2026 analysis of US clickstream data found that 68.01% of Google searches in January to April 2026 ended without a click. Where an AI Overview appears, studies by Ahrefs and Seer Interactive measured organic click-through rates falling by roughly a third to almost two thirds, depending on the period and the sample.

For a B2B company, that does not mean search has stopped working. The loss is concentrated on informational questions that an AI summary can answer in a paragraph. Questions that lead to a shortlist, a comparison or a call still send visitors, and the visitors who arrive from AI answers tend to be further along. The practical change is in what you measure: impressions in Google’s AI features, whether you are named and cited in answers, AI referrals, and enquiries, rather than clicks alone. Our AI search visibility work is built around that shift.

How many searches end without a click.

Roughly two thirds of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from about six in ten in 2024. The rise is real, but the two figures come from different data panels, so treat the size of the jump with care.

SparkToro, working with clickstream data from Datos, published its 2024 zero-click study on 1 July 2024. It found that 58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended with zero clicks, and that for every 1,000 US searches only 360 clicks reached the open web (374 in the EU). On 8 June 2026 SparkToro published a follow-up using Similarweb data: 68.01% of US Google searches in January to April 2026 ended without a click.

Two cautions from SparkToro itself. First, the 2026 article restates the 2024 US figure as 60.45%, not the 58.5% published at the time, without explaining the change. Second, it describes the comparison as “a bit of apples and oranges”, because the panels differ. The direction is clear. The exact size of the increase is not.

News publishers have seen the sharpest version. Similarweb data reported by Search Engine Roundtable on 3 July 2025 showed zero-click news searches rising from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025, and Similarweb’s report page says organic traffic to news sites fell 26% after AI Overviews launched.

And the forecast that started much of the alarm? Gartner predicted on 19 February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots became substitute answer engines. That was a prediction, not a measurement, and we found no published data that confirms or rules it out.

What AI Overviews do to click-through rates.

Where an AI Overview appears, fewer people click the organic results below it. The two largest public studies, from Ahrefs and Seer Interactive, put the fall at between about 35% and 61% for organic results, and more for ads.

Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords in March 2024 and March 2025 and, in a study published on 17 April 2025, found that an AI Overview was associated with a click-through rate about 34.5% lower for the page in position one. Ahrefs re-ran the analysis for December 2023 against December 2025 and published the update on 4 February 2026: the top result’s click-through rate was 58% lower than forecast where an AI Overview appeared (0.016 against an expected 0.037), with falls of 50.8% at position two and 46.4% at position three.

Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations from June 2024 to September 2025 and published the results on 4 November 2025. On queries with an AI Overview, organic click-through rate fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a 61% drop, and paid click-through rate fell from 19.70% to 6.34%, a 68% drop. On queries without an AI Overview, organic click-through rate still fell 41%, from 2.72% to 1.62%. That last number matters: not all of the decline is the AI Overview itself. Searchers are changing habits everywhere.

BrightEdge, in a release on 14 May 2025 marking a year of AI Overviews, reported that impressions across the content it tracks rose by more than 49% while click-through declined by nearly 30% since May 2024. That is the pattern many B2B teams see in Search Console: more impressions, flat or falling clicks, and a lower click-through rate that looks like a ranking problem but is not.

If impressions rise and click-through falls on stable rankings, check whether those queries now show an AI Overview before you rewrite the page.

What searchers actually do.

Pew Research Center watched real people’s browsing and found that an AI summary roughly halved clicks on ordinary results and that people rarely click links inside the summary itself.

The study, published on 22 July 2025, tracked 900 US adults who agreed to share their browsing, covering 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. Some 18% of those searches produced an AI summary. When a summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the AI summary on just 1% of visits. And they were more likely to end their browsing session altogether: on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% with only traditional results.

Pew measured ordinary adults, not business buyers. And 18% is the share of all searches with a summary. Pew found that only 8% of one- or two-word searches produced one, against 53% of searches of ten words or more and 60% of searches beginning with a question word such as “what” or “why”. Long, question-style searches are how buyers phrase early research. The share in your own category may be higher or lower than 18%, which is why the estimator in chapter 11 lets you set it.

Why the studies disagree.

Different studies measure different things over different periods, and 2026 brought some recovery in click-through rates as well as further losses. If you cite one number, cite the one that conflicts with it too.

Seer Interactive’s 2026 update, published on 24 April 2026 and based on a much larger set of 5.47 million queries, found organic click-through rate on AI Overview queries climbing from a low of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, and paid click-through rate on those queries rising from 14.6% to 16.2%. Over an overlapping period, Ahrefs found the top result’s click-through rate 58% below forecast. Both can be true: the keyword sets, industries and baselines differ.

Google’s own position is different again. In a blog post on 6 August 2025, Google’s head of Search said total organic click volume from Google to websites had been “relatively stable” year over year, with “slightly more quality clicks”, meaning clicks where people do not quickly return to the results. Google published no data behind that statement. Independent tracking points the other way: SparkToro’s June 2026 article cites Ahrefs’ tracker of more than 75,000 opted-in sites showing the share of traffic Google sends falling by about 22% between June 2025 and May 2026.

AI Mode: big audience, small share.

Google’s AI Mode has a large user base on paper but, on the clickstream data available, still handles a tiny share of searches. AI Overviews are the feature that changes most B2B traffic today.

In Alphabet’s second-quarter 2025 earnings remarks on 23 July 2025, Google said AI Overviews had passed 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories, and that AI Mode had more than 100 million monthly active users in the US and India. Yet SparkToro’s June 2026 analysis found that only 0.34% of US searches in January to April 2026 went to AI Mode.

The two features also cite different pages. Ahrefs compared them in a study published on 15 December 2025 and found their answers were 86% semantically similar, but only 13.7% of their citations overlapped. Being cited in one does not mean being cited in the other, so check both if your buyers use both.

Our guide to page patterns AI engines quote covers the structure that gets passages cited. Our guide to llms.txt, schema and AI crawlers covers the technical side.

What this means for a B2B site.

B2B sites are more exposed than average on early-stage research questions and less exposed on the commercial questions that produce enquiries. The job is to sort your traffic into those two piles before deciding anything.

BrightEdge’s May 2025 release named B2B technology among the industries with the strongest AI Overview presence, alongside healthcare, education and insurance, and said longer, more complex queries showing AI Overviews were up 49%. That fits how B2B buyers search: “how do I reduce churn in a usage-based pricing model” gets a summary; “usage-based billing software for mid-market SaaS” more often gets a list of vendors and ads.

Buyers are also starting in AI tools directly. G2’s research published on 15 April 2026, based on a survey of 1,076 software buyers in March 2026, found that 51% now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in 2025.

How to sort your own pages

• Explainers and definitions: expect the biggest click losses. Keep them if they earn citations and support the pages that sell, but stop judging them on sessions.
• Problem and use-case pages: moderate exposure. Answer first, then give the reader a reason to click: a calculator, a template, a worked example.
• Service, comparison and pricing-approach pages: lowest exposure, highest value. These are where an AI answer sends a buyer who has already decided to look closer.

Being cited changes the maths.

Brands cited inside an AI Overview keep noticeably more clicks than brands that are not. Seer Interactive found this in both its 2025 and 2026 studies, though it is careful to say it cannot prove the citation causes the difference.

In the November 2025 study, brands cited in an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than when they were not cited. In the third quarter of 2025, organic click-through rate was 0.70% when cited against 0.52% when not, and paid was 7.89% against 4.14%. The April 2026 update went further: on informational queries, being cited came with 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited.

A strong brand may be both cited and clicked more anyway, so treat this as a correlation. On questions where an AI Overview now appears, the contest is no longer for position one alone. It is for a place in the answer. We cover how to optimise pages for AI Overviews separately. Our article on why being cited is not the same as being chosen covers the commercial step after that.

AI referrals: small, but different.

Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar tools are still around 1% of website traffic on average, but several studies find they convert better than ordinary organic visits. How much better varies enormously.

Conductor’s benchmarks report, covering 1,215 enterprise domains in 10 industries in the US from May to September 2025, found AI referrals made up 1.08% of all website traffic, with IT the highest at 2.80%, and ChatGPT supplying 87.4% of all AI referrals.

On conversion, the published range is wide:

• Ahrefs, writing about its own site on 16 June 2025, said AI search was 0.5% of its traffic but 12.1% of sign-ups, a conversion rate 23 times that of organic search. That is one B2B software site, and Ahrefs says it may be unusual.
• Semrush, on 21 July 2025, estimated that the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times a traditional organic visitor, based on conversion rate. It did not publish the underlying rates.
• Ruler Analytics, on 26 May 2026, reported AI referrals converting at 5.8% on average across industries, against 4.9% for organic search: a lift of about 1.2 times.

The sober reading: AI visitors are fewer and often better qualified. Plan around a modest lift, and measure your own. Our one-page AI visibility scorecard shows how to report it without overstating it.

What to measure instead.

Keep clicks, but add measures that show whether you appear in the answers buyers read, and whether that turns into enquiries. If you plan to buy software for this, we have compared the main AI visibility tools.

Google now gives first-party data for its own AI features. Its Search Central blog announced Search generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026 and, in an update, said they reached all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026. The report shows impressions; Google notes this data is also included in the overall performance report, so do not add the two together.

A checklist for this quarter

• Tag each top-50 query in Search Console as early, shortlist or decision intent.
• Note which of them now show an AI Overview, and re-check monthly.
• Read the generative AI impressions report for your 20 most important pages.
• Set up an AI assistants channel group in GA4 (our AI referral tracking play walks through it).
• Run a fixed panel of buyer questions each month; our guide on checking AI search visibility sets out the method.
• Add a self-reported source field to your enquiry form, and keep its answers separate from tracked sources.

Estimate your click exposure.

A rough estimate of how many of your monthly organic clicks are exposed to AI Overviews. Every input is an assumption you set; the defaults come from the studies above. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

If the result is large, do not abandon those pages: judge them on citations and assisted enquiries. Our GEO and AEO services work on both.

Questions owners ask.

What percentage of Google searches are zero-click in 2026?

SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found 68.01% of US Google searches in January to April 2026 ended without a click. Its 2024 study, on a different panel, found 58.5%. The direction is clear; the exact size of the rise is uncertain because the panels differ.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to my website?

Usually, where they appear. Ahrefs found the top result’s click-through rate 58% lower than expected with an AI Overview in its February 2026 update, and Seer Interactive found organic click-through rate down 61% on AI Overview queries to September 2025. Seer’s 2026 update showed partial recovery, so check your own Search Console.

Is SEO still worth it for B2B if searches are zero-click?

Yes, but judged differently. Shortlist and decision searches still send visits, AI answers draw on pages that rank, and cited brands keep more clicks. What changes is the measure: impressions, citations, AI referrals and enquiries alongside clicks. Our SEO service is built on that basis.

Does AI Mode take traffic the way AI Overviews do?

Not much yet. SparkToro found only 0.34% of US searches went to AI Mode in January to April 2026, even though Google reported more than 100 million monthly AI Mode users in July 2025. AI Overviews affect far more searches today.

How do I see AI Overview impressions for my site?

Use Search Console’s generative AI performance report, which Google says reached all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026. It shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device. Clicks from those features sit inside the main performance report.

Sources: the original publications named in each chapter (SparkToro, Ahrefs, Pew Research Center, Seer Interactive, BrightEdge, Similarweb, Google, Alphabet, Gartner, Conductor, Semrush, Ruler Analytics, G2), all read 10 November 2026. Search demand: Google search data via DataForSEO, US and UK, November 2026.