Rand Fishkin recently published a post showing that two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click. Let that sink in for a moment. Two-thirds of the approximately 5.1 trillion Google searches analyzed by SimilarWeb in 2020 ended with no click. Yes, that does mean that about 1.8 trillion searches were sent to another website, but more importantly, roughly 3.3 trillion of those searches were kept on Google properties.
Once upon a time, search engines were places where you went to find links to content.
However, this has slowly shifted to a world where search engines (which effectively means Google at this point, as they have more than 90% of global market share—can you say, “monopoly?”) now prefer to simply provide the answers by pulling data from other websites (despite DMCA Sections 512(c) and (d) existing) or by sending users to properties that the search engine owns in preference to other sites (can you say, "antitrust?”).
This puts the content creators who want traffic in an impossible position.
Speaking of, let's take a look at the word "impossible." Let's say you are looking for an organic link. Go ahead, go to Google and run a search for it.
Did you notice the results? How many times did you need to scroll down before finding a single organic result?
The results I get on the SERP are the following:
An ad (Google gets paid on a click)
A YouTube video (owned by Google, they get paid)
Lyrics (taken in their entirety from LyricFind, so the user has no need to actually visit the LyricFind site)
Info about where to play the song (notice YouTube Music there? Google gets paid)
Links to fourteen other YouTube videos (owned by Google)
Four "People also ask" entries (which drop down to provide answers taken from other sites, meaning there is no need to click through)
FINALLY, the first organic listings (note: there are only seven of them)
Six Google image search results (keeping the user on a Google property)
Fourteen (yes—fourteen!) more YouTube videos (see above)
Eight related searches (which run another Google search)
Ok. Let's do the math:
1 Google ad + 29 YouTube videos + 6 Google Image search results + 1 YouTube Music listing + 8 related searches = 45 Google listings. Now add to that the 5 entries where Google has simply taken the content from other sites and presented it.
That brings the page to 47 entries that either requires no click or are purely beneficial for Google. Compare that to 7 organic listings (which, let's face it, are buried several screens down the page).
Let's see. 54 entries on the page, with 7 of them being organic, equals just under 13% organic listings on the page.
The math doesn’t lie. Here’s a visual:
The Google Search Liason Twitter account responded to Rand's post with the following: "Each year since Google Search began, we’ve increasingly sent more traffic to the open web. Billions of visits each day. Our post shares more about this & why some recent “zero-click” discussions don’t capture the reality of how search works."
With numbers like those above and those mentioned by Rand Fishkin, how is this possible?
In 2010, Google had roughly 1 trillion searches/year. In 2020, SimilarWeb saw about five times that number. So, let’s look at the numbers and just assume the percentage of zero-click searches was exactly the same (unlikely, but let’s play this out).
If 33.59.% of the searches in 2010 were zero-click (the same as they are now), organic clicks would have gone from 302 billion to 1.8 trillion—an increase of 1.5 trillion. Zero-clicks would have gone from 698 billion to 3.3 trillion—an increase of 2.6 trillion.
So, yes, Google, you are sending more organic traffic—but that is simply a factor of giving sites a slightly larger slice out of a massively larger pie.
It’s bad enough when companies use stats to prove their case, but trying to convince a crowd of SEO folks, who look at numbers for a living?
Can you say, “disingenuous?”
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