Zero-click search
Zero-click search is when the user gets the answer on the results page or in chat and never visits you.
Featured snippets started this. AI Overviews and chat made it normal. Traffic can fall while influence rises. Finance will not like that sentence. Measure anyway.
Your job splits: win the click when a click is likely, win the mention when it is not. Different pages for each is allowed.
Examples
- Weather, sports scores, and “what is the capital of” were always zero-click. “Which payroll tool for 20 people” is the new one, and it hurts more.
Related terms
AI-referred traffic is visits that come from chat and answer products. Some show as referrals. A lot show up as direct or brand search.
Google’s position-zero extract. Still a training gym for answer-ready writing, and still a feed into some Overviews.
AI Overviews are Google’s generated summaries on the results page. They sit above the links and eat clicks.
Estimating the business effect of answers that never send a visit: branded search lift, surveys, assisted pipeline.
FAQ
Is SEO dead? +
No. The click graph is sick in some categories. The entity still needs a crawlable home. Adjust KPIs.
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