Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet."

Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet.

No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results.

For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" Google gives me the answer: STAINLESS STEEL - and I never had to click through to the website that gave the answer: https://bit.ly/2MdovdP

• Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave away movies free)

• Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks

• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longer

Ironically, Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money off the content - in many cases never sending traffic (or significantly reduced traffic) to the publisher of the content.

This is the subtle truth that I've seen a few folks on Twitter talking about for the past year or so: That Google has slowly but steadily reduced both the outbound clicks to other websites, but also the portion of their revenue that's based on ads hosted by other websites, while bringing both the "results" and the ad placements in-house, where they no longer have to pay out a share to site owners.

Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.

My main takeaway from this was where the hell are they getting that data? A little digging… apparently if you install Avast antivirus they're tracking all of this and selling /providing to Jumpshot - wow.

> Baker said Jumpshot’s data comes from 100 million devices worldwide, whose users have downloaded free security software from partner Avast. The devices include smartphones, laptops and tablets.

https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-...

So a common trope in the startup world is the difference between a feature and a company, the idea being that lots of features are masquerading as companies. This inevitably leads to them being shocked--SHOCKED--when some bigger player adds that feature, eating their lunch.

I feel the same way about a lot of outbound sites on Google. There are a bunch of things I just don't want to go to another site for. Off the top of my head:

- Exchange rates. Although this one I find infuriating because Google doesn't know how to correctly round off exchange rates (as in, there's a standard). This manifests as, say, showing 2 decimal places for AUD/USD when they should be showing 4.

- Calculator

- Mortgage calculator

- Song lyrics

That sort of thing. If you go to any sites that provide these sorts of things they're typically "scummy". Lots of ads, lots of Javascript, lots of dark patterns to make you load more page views (eg a mortgage calculator that'll mysteriously take 3 steps/page loads to calculate).

I'm glad these are in search results, typically in significantly better versions. And I don't think anyone who runs a site built around a basic formula for interest calculations has any right to complain about it.

Of course this will be painted as "where does it end?" but not every surface is a slippery slope.

Just look at the likes of Yelp who complains about Google "stealing" their content. Well, Yelp is about one of the scummiest businesses out there. So I won't feel sorry for them, not now, not ever.

The one weird case here is AMP. Like I get Google's motivations here. Many companies develop terrible mobile sites that run badly or not at all and AMP IS much faster, generally speaking. Yet still it seems so heavyhanded with seemingly no opt out (on the consumer or publisher side). I don't really understand why Google wants to die on this particular hill.

The presumption here, as I understand is, is that a zero-click search happened because Google used one of their inline apps to answer a question. (For example, if I search "population of new york city", I get a big and bold answer along with a graph that shows NYC's population over time, as well as LA and Chicago.)

But I'm not convinced that's necessarily true. I frequently search for things to get a general idea of what is out there, and I only skim the results. This is also something I do when I'm refining my search terms. It may take me several iterations to refine my terms until I find something I want to click through to. In this process, I may have three or four no-click searches before I land on a good query, and then I start clicking.

I'm trying to really understand the problem here.

I do understand that people want clicks to their site so that they can get ad views, and that those ad view payments are what pay the hosting bill and reimburse for the effort of generating the info.

Yet from a UX PoV, I simply want to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow. I don't want to click to learn it. That additional friction doesn't improve my user experience, it improves someone else's. Mandating that would turn Google into a splash screen or landing page, and we've gotten rid of those anti patterns for good reasons.

I chose my toy example (unladen swallow) because it's an example where nuance is required (African or European?) and if google's answer box were to obscure that it would be wrong. But if answers that with a "two answers: African x European y, and click here to know more" that is a user-friendly model.

Really objecting to google doing this is like objecting to an ad blocker IMHO. Ad blockers upset sites, but make users happy.

(anti disclaimer and disclaimer: I am not a fan of google, use DDG, and my company has ditched all google services. OTOH my gf works there, though not on anything related to search.)

Article should be: Avast antivirus users click less than half of google searches. Their data isn’t representative of the market broadly. For one thing Microsoft claims bing has 9% market share, while avast pegs it as 1.4% market share. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...

I have a particular page on my blog that mostly appear as the answer to a question "Can you do X with Y tool". Before Google started displaying it as a snippet, the post was getting decent traffic, and the comments were more somewhat moderate.

Then the snippet appeared, and a bunch of negative comments started to appear. To clarify, my answer was not a solid yes or no, but more of my experience with the tool. But Google snippets conveniently answers with a section that says: "It is pointless."

User's read the snippet, are enraged, click, don't bother to read the article, jump to the comment and say "YOU ARE WRONG."

Now, the controversy brings a decent amount of traffic. But unfortunately, the traffic is not from people reading in the first place.

Article: "Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside web browsers because of how they gather, process, and scale their estimates."

Me: How do they get this data. This is some pretty thorough data on a site they don't own.

Article: "Jumpshot is the data arm of Avast, a well-regarded maker of numerous Internet security products. This suite of products, in order to function, must collect and analyze every URL visited by every browser of every machine on which its installed. [...]

Article: "Because Avast has to see and process all these URLs anyway (in order to serve their function of providing web security), they anonymize, aggregate, and remove any personally-identifiable information from the browser URL visits and then provide them to Jumpshot, who then makes estimates about broad web usage behavior."

...I hate this world. Everyone's tracking you. Everyone's selling you to advertisers.

For those who skipped the article, this data is exclusively from users who installed Avast "security" products, which apparently are sufficiently invasive that they get this sort of data and sell it to third parties.

The article thinks this dataset is close enough to representative to present their conclusions as more or less facts. I'm not sure I'd make the same conclusion.

Does anyone else use search at least a dozen times a day just for spellchecking a word or confirming a phrase? I find myself pasting phrases into the search bar when autocorrect or spellcheck just doesn't do the trick. I'd love to know what percentage of "searches" were never actually looking for a target.

The problem seems apparent to me. Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves.

There are plenty of other channels, but none with remotely the reach or trust of the US's overwhelmingly dominant search engine.

By dint of this fact, they can steal the content of those who actually produced it. What are you going to do, deindex your site? That's death, because Google is a monopoly.

In the short term it seems good for the end user. But in the long term, Google having a monopoly on distributing the world's information seems like an obvious threat.

I don't think I understand this concept.

If I search for something using Google, and don't click on a link, doesn't that mean my search was fruitless? What else do we mean by 'zero-click searches'?

Edit: Unless it's the simple '6 x 10' or 'What is the time in London', in which case, are we surprised these queries are handled by $SearchEngine? DDG does the same thing (albeit, uses a third party website and gives credit)

As another poster mentioned, it seems logical that some reduction in click-thru-rate happens because of Google's "Featured Snippets"[0]. The Google search results page shows an extract of a web page that likely answers the web surfer's query. We don't know what % of zero clicks was caused by the snippets info box.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+"featured+snip...

To be fair a lot of the time I can get the info I need directly from the search.

- I use Google as a calculator and a unit of measure converter including currency

- I don't hesitate to "define WORD" when I don't know a word which gets displayed at the top

- What is the capital/population/square miles of

- Who is/cast of/CHARACTERNAME actor

- What muscles are used with movement/machine

- synonym/antonym WORD

- SONG lyrics/"turn off your mind relax and float down stream" song/'Tomorrow Never Knows' band

Actually, every single time I open a Google tab I query "define define" first so that I have the search bar at the top and not in the center of the page. Don't judge me, you do weird stuff too.

And with AMP, Google is trying ti do the same with entire sites.

In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google?

Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is starting to look like a black hole.

And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.

I've actually lost traffic on https://wtfismyip.com/ since Google started doing this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip

When I read the title I thought it was going to be an article praising Google, but the author seems to actually think less clicks is bad?

I remember back in the early 2000s when I had to click through 1st to 10th result trying to find what I was looking for, sometimes even having to go to 2nd page of results.

Now I use search for everything : name of a built-in function, quick calculation, checking the spelling or wording of a sentence, short biography of someone... For none of that I will need to click on the result because the answer is given to me without needing to click anything.

It feels to me like the SEO optimizing folks have gotten out ahead of Google's algorithm. I've been getting back into an old hobby and looking for where to buy supplies or advice on which supplies to buy and it's just all spam, fake sites and low quality products.

And it occurs to me that I've been experiencing a lesser version of this for years. Google search just isn't working for me anymore.

As bad as this sounds, I got to say I'm not even mad. The instant answers Google provides seem to come from websites that are mostly unusable, bloated with tracking and other BS that increase load times, and even worse SEO-content (that stuff that repeats words just to have more "relevant" keywords). I don't feel too bad about those pages losing traffic.

Longform content, interactive content, blogs, videos, forums and social networks (generally pages you might want to spend more time on) seem to be mostly unaffected.

> Maybe I need to stop being disappointed in Google and just start expecting them to lie, mislead, and refuse direct questions

Why exactly is it in Google's best interests to reveal internal competitive trade secrets just because someone asked? Or any company, for that matter. If a company discloses information it's because they think they'll gain more from disclosing it than from not disclosing it. So why should you demand that all companies answer all your questions?

I'd be interested in examples of lies, though.

There was a time you could build a meaningful business largely on SEO. (See: Yelp, Zillow). No longer.

Somewhere along the line Google stopped being about finding a website and instead is about answering a question with the answer sometimes being a website.

One could argue they have always been an answer engine and they are just getting more direct and precise.

I think another decreasing search type, going by my own example, is the programming syntax/method name search.

If I can't remember exactly the syntax I can often construct a query precise enough that the first result shows enough of the syntax in stackoverflow's accepted answer that I can just proceed from there without clicking through.

First thing's first:

--==[ USE AN AD-BLOCKER ]==--

and never see those Google top and ads, and widgets, and what-not, again. I use EFF Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin but to each their own.

----

Now ... the charts are very interesting, but are a misrepresentation in several ways (although not necessarily intentionally).

1. What @cyrusshepard says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688712

2. Preference for more established / larger / more popular websites in the "organic"/non-ad results. This is something I can't prove, but my and my acquaintances' experience suggests that, gradually (mostly before the last 5 years, i.e. not a new thing by now), Google has shifted toward tending to direct you more to those kinds of sights. Perhaps others have studied this.

So I maybe failing to grok this but

~45% of google traffic is "organic" - I search, I find a link I leave google

~5% is as clicks (!)

~50% is zero click - it's common enough a query that google just answers it right there, flights, trains timetables, cinema, exchange rates

This is kind of a huge shift and also kind of not important at all

Millions of us want, say, cinema listings, and off the back of those listings might easily buy a ticket. I can see this as a huge business for Google and certainly disruptive but I am not sure we are losing much by Google vetting it's dollar instead of the same dollar going to the ticketing company behind a multiplex

Is this the old fear about microsoft - that all any ISV was doing was market research for microsoft?

If you are a distribution channel selling a barely differentiated product to millions of people - well the writing has been on the wall for a while.

This will likely backfire in the long term. People writing content will shy away from writing articles on subjects or which answer questions that google will simply steal and display. Eventually the existing sources will become out of date and google will begin to serve inaccurate information.

For me, the issue is not that search queries can now answer simple calculations or inane celebrity trivia without requiring clickthroughs to ad-ridden sites.

It's what comes afterwards, when Google inevitably starts answering queries on complex issues around medicine, politics, society or the economy with a pithy snippet grabbed from what it's machine learning thought was representative.

We've already seen that vast swathes of the population can have their vote influenced by Facebook/Twitter posts with a big "Sponsored" tag on them. No nuance, all invective.

How do you think that will play out when people will take the snippet at its word and not bother to at least click and get some idea of the author's possible biases, methodological limitations, etc.?

Not surprised, but the watch out for Google investors is that all the tricks for Google revenue growth to outpace general internet growth are all played out.

You can't "add more ads" above the fold when everything above the fold (for lucrative searches) is already an ad.

And dropping below 50% of searches don't result in a click is hard. Either for practical or anti-trust reasons.

So, get used to growth that's tied to internet growth. Which "ain't so bad", but also "ain't what it used to be".

This cow is milked, so if you want to go back to growth that exceeds expectations, you need a new cow. Search monetization has peaked for the near future.

A less techie theory: Witness the rise of the Google Skeptical Search user. In essence, Google search users maybe developing an attitude of skepticism towards the quality and usefulness of the results they receive. It started with news searches and its spreading to everything else search related. The sensing being that Google's search results are not an honest reflection of the information that is available.

Google, the content thief.

It's amazing how they can get away with this, while at the same time not allowing others to scrape their sites. The actual content creators probably see significantly less traffic because of this - without ever knowing what the actual traffic could have been... there should be some kind of pay it forward/revenue sharing that Google should do. But that would be not being evil.

> This suite of products, in order to function, must collect and analyze every URL visited by every browser of every machine on which its installed. ...

That's why these products are privacy nightmares.

Bitdefender has admitted that it compromised a user.[0] That was a major case. I'm sure that many other users have been hosed, in less newsworthy ways.

> Because Avast has to see and process all these URLs anyway (in order to serve their function of providing web security), they anonymize, aggregate, and remove any personally-identifiable information from the browser URL visits and then provide them to Jumpshot, who then makes estimates about broad web usage behavior.

There's no reason why URLs need ever be uploaded.

0) https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-...

100% of my searches produced no visible(to google) clicks for over 10 years.

   var resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r');
   for (var i = 0; i < resultLinks.length; i++) {
    var link = resultLinks[i].childNodes[0];
    var oldLink = link.href;
    if (/^(https?:\/\/(www\.|encrypted\.)?google\.[^\/]*)?\/?url/.test(oldLink)) {
      var matches = /[\?&](url|q)=(.+?)&/.exec(oldLink);
      if (matches != null) {
        link.href = unescape(matches[2]);
      }
    }
    // Clear attached event listeners so google can't mangle urls on mouse click
    if (link.getAttribute('onmousedown')) {
      link.removeAttribute('onmousedown');
    }
    if (link.ping) link.ping = null;

With AMP, signed HTTP exchanges, and "portals" it's getting even worse. Users never leave their servers, and they control the publishing format and require you to include their JavaScript. (It's only briefly mentioned in the article.)

There are plenty of types searches where I'm now viscerally afraid to click on the results lest it result in a clusterbomb of pages I can't close without multiple dialog boxes shooting out all over. Ublock helps but muscle memory is long.

Funny, the article says a CTR of 4.42% is average. Yet my 5% CTR for my own domain name, Google Adwords charges me upwards of $0.50/click, and says I'm penalized (higher cost) because of low engagement.

This is for keywords with no competition, which makes me a bit bitter because I have a substantial negative ROI. I can understand that Google wants to prevent arbitrage spam, but I just last week decided to cut my adwords spend to almost nothing because it's not getting better over time.

Do queries to voice assistants count as zero click searches?

Just remove your microdata and other site-specific metadata. HTML was fine to begin with, its not our problem if facebook or google can't read a <meta description> tag properly. Everyone forgives the transgressions that google does because "it's Google", but when Elsevier does the same thing (appropriating and locking other people's IP for huge profits), they 're starting riots.

And with AMP, Google is trying to do the same with entire sites.

In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google?

Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is becoming a big black hole.

And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.

The dream of AI is to build a StarTrek like computer that can read and understand all human knowledge and answer questions about it, synthesizing answers.

Web Search for factual answers is a stop gap on that road, but distributed knowledge databases are inexorably going to be centralized, melded, and transformed.

The 90s “content is king” business models just aren’t sustainable if what you’re publishing is static mostly factual content.

Any DDG users notice how it does the same thing with the top StackOverflow answer? From the user's perspective it's fantastic, but I assume it's legally at least a grey area. Considering how aggressively SO is monetising now they'll probably come after them before long. (Of course, DDG's userbase is pretty small, but probably a not insignificant share of developers.)

I’ve mostly stopped using Google search due to the amount of sponsored/summarized content on the first page, which either renders my search useless (too many references to generic pieces or reviews rather than actual product pages) or abridged snippets from web sites (that often carry just enough information to be misleading).

I use DuckDuckGo, obviously, especially if I need technical information.

Google many years ago made an explicit decision that their mission is to inform people, not just drive them away to terrible 3rd party sites.

I admit to using google as a spell checker. That is to say that my browser spell checks but doesn't give me suggestions on how to fix it. I would say at least 2/3 of my "searches" are really just spell checking (or small calculations). I guess that's why I get such weird ads :-D

In some cases could this be because fewer than half of searches are returning relevant results? For my part I've been having a really difficult time finding things in Google lately. Even with search personalization on, results are just.. completely off the mark.

As a reminder, DuckDuckGo (while being an alternative itself) supports bang operators (https://duckduckgo.com/bang), which helps to prevent Google assimilation.

What does "Zero-Click Searches" mean exactly? I know that when I search for "1 pound in eur" Google will tell me the answer right away, but these kind of searches can't possible account for 50%. What else am I missing?

I do this all the time. What year did this album come out? Search the name of the album and the year comes up in the sidebar. How old is this celebrity? Search the name of that celebrity and their age comes up in the snippet on the side.

Google benefits by crawling the content everyone else creates and by being the aggregator for consumers. So it’s unfair to use other people’s content for rich snippets and not reciprocate by referring traffic.

I want to take the opportunity to blame SEO for this. The top results are games so hard that not-rarely the first page is nothing but spammy seo sites now. Depends a lot on what you are searching for though.

This is Brian from the website celebritynetworth.com. I submitted the following statement to the House subcommittee on Antitrust detailing the history of Google scraping our information. The TL:DR is that Google approached us about getting an API to our data. We said no. Google scraped the whole site anyways. Google frequently displays our information directly in its results without any attribution in a large snippet that takes up the entire screen. The answer box is so large and dominating of the SERP that users have no ABILITY to click through. Let alone need. Google's actions have absolutely decimated our business. Here's our statement with image examples dating back to 2012: https://medium.com/@brianwarner/celebritynetworths-statement...

Is this data from browsers infected with Malware like my Mother-and-Father-in-Law's computer where all they do is search "the Google" for recipes or whether a celebrity is dead?

Stop writing naive content in meta-description and cards. Use this content as a teaser. Be cynical. Sell your content. Survive.

I read this as 50% of web developers failed to open, so they'll never close.

Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad SEO optimized not what I need SEO optimized not what I need SEO optimized not what I need Kinda maybe what I need? <next page>

My M.O. when I do a Google Search:

1. Type some search terms.

2. Look at the first page of results.

3. Fail to find any results that look promising.

4. Repeat.

Surely, this accounts for a large chunk of non-click searches?

When Rand last posted about this it inspired me to look into other channels such as email and social. Basically clicks are disappearing for ALL channels, this isn't just a Google thing, it's a digital marketing thing as a whole. My thoughts here: https://kolemcrae.com/no-more-clicks-makes-me-sad/

since the 2008 recession Google has tried to avoid sending people to sites, preferring ads and Google sites instead. Each year /update they have tightened the screws. No doubt Google execs are saying, look we still send about 50% of people to other sites, there's a lot more growth opportunity.

Sidebar: this suggests that ads may be a bit more useful than one would think, in the CPC model.

I like how the HN title corrects the grammar mistake in the original title (less -> fewer).

Maybe a meta tag in html that tells bots to avoid scraping content would help with this?

Google Maps is vastly underutilized for search was the most valuable takeaway for me.

Also, fewer than half of all HN article link headlines result in a click.

It would be great to see a taxonomy of the zero-click searches.

Aren’t google searches just ads anyway?

It was me using it as a calculator.

Maybe compare this with only reading the headline on Hacker News?

We often prefer non-clickbait headlines for good reason. The answer to a question may be simple enough to fit into the headline, but the site will withhold it to get a click.

Paywalls also encourage people to skip reading the article. I find I'm a bit annoyed at first, but it fades quickly and I realize the news probably isn't that important anyway.

The title "Less than half..." is pretty meaningless. 0% is less than half, so is 49%.

This is bad news.

WAAAY more than half of my google searches show the answer at the top.

Spelling

Definitions

Translations

Exchange Rates

Movie/TV/Video Game aggregate ratings

Zip Code for an address

and more

I didn't see it defined on the page, so I'm wondering, do zero click searches count frustrated users giving up because the first two pages are entirely full of SEO optimized commercial websites when searches are made for informational content?

Try searching anything related to researching foundation repair. You get pages upon pages of foundation repair services and biased one pager summaries about certain procedures.

Long gone are the days when search queries retrieved educational content - when was the last time you saw results for engineering toolbox, or hyperphysics, or anything other than ads, commercial services, and stack overflow for software related questions?

SEO killed search and Google is complicit. I think this has massive ramifications for society - the sources of information are shallower, and people are increasingly unable to notice differentiate objective knowledge sources from commercial websites. The people who are interested in generating and curating true knowledge repositories are probably not interested in paying for SEO, so their efforts are effectively hidden from what amounts to the gateway to the internet.

Google doesn't search for what you ask anymore. It tells you what to search for based on a prompt. Alphabet is the most oppressive entity in the history of the known universe.

I guess this isn’t related, but am I the only one who feels like Google search results are going down hill. Maybe 5 years ago I could find a lot of information from small and big sites. Nowadays, it feels like half the Google is just literally ignoring some of my search terms. And the other half they are explicitly ignoring them by crossing out words because they assume I search the same things as everyone else?

I dunno, maybe my queries are getting more complex? But I’m getting a strong feeling that Google is becoming less and less useful as an indexer if the web.

This sounds a lot like "click fraud" only this time "search fraud".

They're obviously wrong, right there in the headline. Fewer than half of Google searches now result in a click.

Ok so Google is a monopoly in this sector that's pretty clear, but what's the real problem here? Their competitors offer inferior products so we don't really have a case. Until they can develop better technology or offer superior products than Google's and still are unable to gain market shares then that's when we will have a real case.

Besides, for any business to continue leading long-term in modern days it's inevitable it must seek to become a monopoly, or at least part of a duopoly.