For those uninitiated, Google’s “AI Overviews” are attempts by the search engine to integrate AI into standard search engine queries. These overviews take the content of the search, the user’s history, and other factors to answer the user’s questions without needing to navigate away from the billboarded results. The launch of AI Overviews has been fraught with issues, however. From giving unwanted answers to outright false information, Google’s integration of AI tools has initially been more annoying than convenient. Due to the low quality of these hasty AI integrations, Google has lowered the percentage of when overviews appear from its once height of 50% to now only 7% of queries. The biggest drops in when AI Overviews appear have occurred in the education, entertainment, and e-commerce spaces, ones filled with the most misleading or harmful information. To this end, Google has also cut nearly all citing of Reddit and Quora, sources which often posted incorrect information both intentionally and otherwise.
Despite this massive drop in AI usage, clickless Google searches are still on the rise. A majority of Google searches – 58.5% in the U.S. and 59.7% in the EU – result in zero clicks. This is due to many of Google’s other attempts at answering the user’s query as quickly as possible. From answering questions in knowledge panels, and drop-downs, and giving all the information needed on local businesses through Google Business Profiles, many users are getting their needs met without needing a source outside of the search itself. For those which do see some navigation, rather than ending their session or entering a new query without clicking any results, almost 30% of clicks go to Google properties. This means for the average user, about 36% of clicks go to the open web.
What this means for businesses is that tracking online year-over-year traffic can be difficult. All else remaining equal, businesses should see a drop in traffic due to more Google searches being clickless. If local business traffic is up but online visits are down, this may be due to users finding your business on Google and then visiting without the need for further research. All else cannot remain equal, however, and this means that if there are only slight changes in traffic to your website, you must weigh those changes against the negative force of an increasingly clickless Google.