Zero-Click Search and AI Overviews: How to Measure It

Zero-click search is a search that ends on the results page: the person reads the answer Google shows and never visits a website. It existed long before AI, through featured snippets, knowledge panels, weather and sports boxes. AI Overviews make it more common on informational questions, and the studies agree on the direction: Pew Research Center found people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one. Industry averages do not tell you what happened to your own site, though. Search Console does: list the queries where your pages earn impressions and no clicks, split them by position, and check which of them show an AI Overview and whether it cites you. On our own site, most zero-click pages turned out to rank too low to be clicked at all, which is not an AI problem.

What counts as a zero-click search

A search is zero-click when it produces no click to any result, paid or organic. That covers three different situations, and they need different responses:

• The answer was on the page. A date, a definition, a conversion, a short list. The person got what they needed. AI Overviews extend this from short facts to longer explanations.
• The person searched again. They refined the query instead of clicking. That is a zero-click search followed by another search, and it can still end on your site.
• The click went to Google. Maps, YouTube, Images and other Google properties take a share of what looks like open-web traffic.

For a site owner, the useful unit is narrower: a query where your page was shown and nobody clicked it. Search Console reports exactly that, and it is the number you can act on.

What the studies found

Industry numbers are a backdrop, not a forecast for your site. Each study below measured something different, and each was read on its source page on October 6, 2026.

Three points stand out. First, most searches were zero-click before AI Overviews were widespread: SparkToro’s window ends in May 2024. Second, Pew measured a real gap on searches where a summary appears, roughly half the clicks. Third, Seer found that queries without an AI Overview also lost click-through over the same period, ending at 1.62% in September 2025, a 41% decline, and that being cited inside the Overview was worth more clicks than not being cited. The lesson for measurement is that a falling CTR is not proof that AI took it, and that a citation inside the answer is worth tracking in its own right.

How Search Console counts AI Overviews

Before you go looking for AI traffic in Search Console, know what it already contains. Google’s documentation says appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the Performance report under the Web search type, not in a separate bucket. Its help page on impressions, position and clicks adds the counting rules:

• A click on an external link inside an AI Overview or AI Mode counts as a click.
• Standard impression rules apply.
• An AI Overview occupies one position on the results page, and every link inside it gets that same position.

So your Web numbers already include AI Overview impressions and clicks, mixed in with everything else. You cannot filter them out through the Search Analytics API, and the generative AI view Google added to Search Console is impressions only. We cover what that view shows and where it stops in whether there is a Google Search Console for AI search.

How to find your own zero-click queries

This takes about twenty minutes and needs nothing beyond Search Console.

1. Open Performance, Search results, with the Web search type. Set the date range to the last three months so a short dip does not dominate.
2. Show all four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position.
3. Go to the Pages tab and export it. Keep pages with a meaningful number of impressions (we use 50 over 90 days) and zero clicks. These are your zero-click pages.
4. Remove branded searches. A secondary page listed under a search for your own name loses the click to your home page, and no title change fixes that.
5. Split what remains by average position. Positions 1 to 10 are pages people see and skip. Positions 11 to 20 are on page two, where few people look. Beyond 20, the page is not losing a click; it was never in reach of one.
6. For the page-one group, open the queries. Click a page, switch to the Queries tab, and search the top queries yourself. Note whether an AI Overview appears, and whether it cites you or someone else.

Only the page-one rows with an AI Overview on the results page are candidates for “AI took the click”. The rest have ordinary causes: a weak title, a page-two ranking, or a ranking that was never high enough. The full diagnosis, including how to separate an AI-driven drop from seasonality and lost rankings, is in am I losing traffic to AI search.

A worked example: cituna.com, July 6 to October 3, 2026

We ran this on our own property for the 90 days from July 6 to October 3, 2026, counting pages with at least 50 impressions in that window.

So for 35 of our 42 zero-click pages, the honest diagnosis was authority and ranking, not AI. Rewriting their titles for an AI-era results page would have changed nothing, because almost nobody scrolls far enough to see them. The 4 page-one pages were the only ones where a results-page feature could be taking the click, and they became the short list to check by hand for an AI Overview. This is one young site’s data, labelled as such; a site with strong rankings will see a very different split, which is the point of running it on your own.

Setting zero-click queries against AI citations

A query that stopped earning clicks on Google may now be answered by ChatGPT or Perplexity without a search at all, and Search Console cannot see that. Closing the gap takes a second source: the answers themselves.

For each page-one zero-click query, write down the question a buyer would ask an assistant on the same topic. Then check, per engine, whether the answer names your brand, cites your page, or names a competitor instead. Three outcomes are possible:

• Cited in the AI Overview and still no clicks. You are the source, and the answer is complete enough that people stop there. Seer’s data suggests cited brands still get more clicks than uncited ones, so keep the page and measure presence alongside clicks.
• An Overview appears and cites someone else. This is the case worth working on: the click is gone and the credit went to a rival. The steps in how to get cited by AI Overviews apply.
• No Overview, still no clicks. The cause is your snippet or your ranking, not AI. Fix the title and description against the query that earns the impressions.

Doing this by hand once is useful. Doing it every week across seven engines is where a tool earns its place. Cituna’s Search Console join lists the pages Google shows and nobody clicks, split by cause (branded, snippet, page two, ranking), flags searches worded like AI prompts, and sets them beside the daily answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, so you can see whether a click you lost went to an answer that named you or a rival.

Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.