If you run a business that depends on being found on Google, and who doesn’t, here’s a number worth looking at right now: in the UK, almost 70% of searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website.
That figure comes from new research by SparkToro and Similarweb, and it puts the UK at the top of a six-country table for what we in the industry call “zero-click” searches. According to the findings, we click less than the United States, France, Canada, Italy and Germany. German searchers, at the other end of the scale, click more than 20% more often than we do.
Let’s explain what this means in plain terms, why it isn’t quite the catastrophe the headline suggests, and what we recommend doing about it.
What “zero-click” actually means
A zero-click search is simply a search where the person gets what they need without clicking on any result. Google increasingly answers the question right there on the results page, through featured snippets, AI Overviews, maps, and instant answers. The searcher reads the answer, moves on, and no website gets a visit.
Here’s how the six countries compare:
| Country | Searches ending with no click | Open-web clicks per 1,000 searches |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 69.5% | 232 |
| United States | 68.0% | 231 |
| France | 65.3% | 271 |
| Canada | 63.8% | 268 |
| Italy | 63.4% | 280 |
| Germany | 62.1% | 287 |
Source: SparkToro and Similarweb, June 2026.
The clearest sign of how far things have shifted is in that last column. Not one of these countries now sends 300 or more clicks to the wider web for every thousand searches. The search results page has become the destination rather than the gateway to more.
The good news hiding in the numbers
It’s very easy to read that “70% of searches send no traffic” and you could be forgiven for thinking your website is doomed. It isn’t, and the data itself shows why.
Look again at the table. The UK has the highest zero-click rate, yet it sends almost exactly the same amount of traffic to the open web as the United States (232 clicks per 1,000 versus 231). How can that be? Because a high zero-click rate doesn’t automatically mean less traffic for everyone. It means the clicks that remain are more concentrated, and a healthy share of them still reach ordinary websites rather than Google’s own services.
In short: there’s still real traffic to win. However, it’s vitally important to understand that the competition for it is now sharper, and a growing part of the value comes from being visible on the results page, even when no click follows.
Five things we recommend at 22i
This is the kind of shift we help clients navigate every day, so here’s the practical version of what you can do to defend against this increasingly competitive situation we all find ourselves in:
- Measure more than just clicks. If most searches never produce a click, judging your website purely on visitor numbers misses the point. Visibility, rankings and presence in Google’s answer features all tell part of the story now, and we factor them into how we report performance.
- Make your content easy to quote. When Google answers questions on the page, you want to be the source it pulls from. Clear, well-structured pages that answer real questions directly are far more likely to be featured, and that keeps your brand in front of people even without a click.
- Get the technical foundations right. Behind the scenes, structured data (schema markup) helps Google and AI tools understand your content and present it properly. It’s unglamorous, but it’s increasingly what separates the businesses that get featured from the ones that don’t.
- Focus on the searches that convert. Branded searches, local searches and high-intent queries are where a click is most likely to turn into an enquiry or a sale. These deserve the most attention, and they’re where strong SEO still pays back quickly.
- Review regularly. Search is changing fast, and faster now than it has in our 25 years in business. The right approach now is to track the trend over time and adapt, rather than reacting to any single month’s figures. Think 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month data sets.
And there’s one last point that’s worth noting: this research only counts searches made in a web browser. It doesn’t include the Google app on phones, where zero-click answers are even more common. So the real figure is probably higher still!
Where we come in
So with the fact that 70% of UK Google Searches now end without a click, this isn’t the time to give up on being found, far from it. It’s a reason to be found differently. The businesses that thrive from here will be the ones that show up as the answer, build trust with both people and search engines, and measure success by visibility and enquiries rather than just visits alone.
If you’d like to understand how your website is performing against this new reality, and what it would take to stay visible as search keeps changing, get in touch with the team at 22i. We’d be glad to take a look.