You’ll have seen the signs. Organic search sessions declining, less insight into how customers are finding your business, and through it all, sales stay roughly the same. It can leave you scratching your head for answers.
Brands chase the click. After all, getting customers to your website is step one in them making a purchase. But new AI-enabled technologies are undercutting the traditional path to discovery, and it’s causing problems that go deeper than the numbers may initially suggest.
Enter the Zero-Click Search
What is a Zero-Click Search?
A zero-click search refers to any search query where a customer gets the answer to their question without having to click on to an external website. This has historically been self-contained search results pages such as those on Google maps and Social Media apps like Instagram and Twitter, but since late 2022, it has slowly but surely encroached on traditional search tools - namely Google.
You'll have seen this in action. Type "15 USD to GBP" and Google gives you a live currency converter right there on the results page. Ask "when is the next leap year?" and you get 2028 instantly. No click needed. In fact, Google has always had a number of integrations within search, such as a calculator, dictionary, unit converter, and more. However, these tools have never had a measurable effect on a business’ SEO.
But with the wider adoption of AI-enabled chat models like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and more, Zero-Click searches have been dramatically rising for several years. Not only are customers going to Google less, but in a means to compete with OpenAI, Google now presents users with AI Overviews - AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional search results - on an ever-growing proportion of queries.
In fact, according to research by Bain & Company, 80 percent of consumers rely on zero-click answers to at least 40 percent of their searches. For the customers making the queries, zero-click searches can be highly beneficial. They provide information quickly and allow for smoother search journeys.
But for marketers and brands, zero-click searches are causing some serious problems.
What do Zero-Click Searches Mean for Your Business?
Let’s look at the difference between a traditional search and a zero-click search in action
In a traditional click-based search for “best denim jackets” they might go to a sponsored list of the best jackets by publishers like GQ, where they might click through again to a business’s website. Alternatively, they might click a paid link at the top of the results page. Either way, the brand gets a shot at making an impression.
But in a zero-click search, the journey is either interrupted by an AI Overview - where Google directly presents a summary from a variety of sources, without letting a business put their hat in the ring through inclusion in a sponsored article, PPC, or organic search - or the purchase may be entirely self-contained within an LLM like ChatGPT.
The data is unambiguous. A recent Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords found that AI Overviews reduced the clicks on the top-ranking result by 58%. Seer Interactive measured a 61% decline in organic click-through rate across 5.47 million queries and 53 brands when AI Overviews are present. Google's AI Mode has ticked over 2.5 billion monthly users, with their own data showing 93% of searches end without a click to any external website.
Put simply, zero-click searches are reconstructing how customers find info and make decisions. If a customer doesn’t need to visit a website, that website is going to have less traffic, and therefore fewer opportunities to convert customers, have them opt in to emails and so on. For any ecommerce marketing company relying heavily on organic traffic, this demands a rethink.
Zero-Click Searches: Branded vs Non-branded Search
Across the board, the decline in organic traffic is real, but when we separate by branded and non-branded searches, we see there’s more to the story than initially revealed.
Branded queries - where someone already knows and is looking for a specific brand, such as “P&Co jacket” - actually see an 18% increase in click-through rate when AI Overviews appear. But generic, non-branded queries - where someone is still figuring out what they want, such as “Best denim jacket” - see a 34-46% decrease. That gap is significant, and exposes more about customer behaviour than anything related to the technology.
For ecommerce brands, they lose their place in the discovery phase, and that's the moment where affinity, consideration, and loyalty are actually built.
The gap opening up is between brands that shape decisions and those that simply fulfil them. Brands present in the AI synthesis layer get at least some say in shaping preferences. Everyone else becomes fulfilment infrastructure for decisions made elsewhere. This is something every ecommerce digital marketing agency worth its salt should be helping clients prepare for right now.
Opportunities for Brands
The internet is always changing, and the methods you needed to sell products 10 years ago, are different from the methods you’d use today, and they’ll be different 10 years from now.
This is to say that there is an opportunity for businesses to succeed in a zero-click world.
SEO Is Still Important
Even with zero-click searches on the rise and organic traffic on the decline, SEO remains an effective way to reach high-intent customers and should not be abandoned.
In fact, the clicks that do make it through are worth more than ever. When a user sees an AI Overview and still clicks through, it means they want to go deeper; they've already been primed. In fact, AI-referred visitors convert at around four times the rate of non-AI-assisted shoppers. The volume may be lower, but the intent is higher.
However, what “good SEO” looks like is very different. The goal is no longer just "rank in position one." The goal is also to get cited and recommended by AI. Seer interactives’ data adds a further wrinkle: even queries without AI Overviews are seeing sustained CTR declines, suggesting users are simply clicking less everywhere.
So this isn't just an AI overview problem - it's a broader behavioural shift, and optimising for citation and readability across all content is the right response. For brands on Shopify, working with a Shopify agency or Shopify experts who understand both platform structure and AI readability is increasingly a meaningful competitive advantage.
AI-Enabled Discovery
Attribution and getting customers to your site is still key and AI search tools enable another layer of discovery for brands.
There are a number of steps to get cited by AI, and it’s largely a case of building on SEO best practices, rather than tearing them down and rethinking.
- Build authoritative, answer-led content. AI models prioritise sources that directly and confidently answer questions. Buying guides, comparison content, and detailed FAQ pages tend to perform well.
- Make your brand legible to machines. Implement structured data markup across your product pages, reviews, and FAQs. The more clearly your data is labelled, the easier it is for AI to reference it accurately. A good Shopify development agency can ensure your store's technical foundations - schema markup, page structure, and metadata - are set up to be read and cited correctly by AI models.
- Be consistent across channels. If your product descriptions on your website, your Amazon listings, and your Google Shopping feed all say slightly different things, AI models will have less confidence surfacing you. Consistency builds algorithmic trust.
- Experiment actively. This space is moving fast. Run experiments, monitor where you appear in AI answers, and iterate. The brands building that muscle now will be hard to catch later.
Zero-Click Searches: The Takeaways
Zero-click searches are rewriting how customers discover products, and they aren’t a storm to simply hold strong through; they’re a transition your brand must navigate.
The larger question is whether your brand has a presence where preferences are still forming - before AI has made up its mind on the customer's behalf. That requires thinking about the full surface area of your brand: the content, the community, the editorial voice, and the owned channels that keep you in the conversation.
Brands should hold strong in their SEO strategies but also pivot quickly to set the foundation for AI readability, positioning for both search engine results, AI overviews, and LLM engines, too.
Want to know more about Zero-click searches? Contact our ecommerce agency team.
As a UK-based ecommerce agency, we offer ecommerce digital marketing and advertising services for brands looking to grow - whether you need a Shopify Plus agency to scale your store or a broader ecommerce services agency to navigate what comes next.
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