SEO Statistics (2026)

A data analysis of how much traffic organic search still sends, how far AI Overviews and zero-click results have cut clicks, what still moves rankings, and what SEO tooling costs in 2026.

68.01% of US Google searches ended without a single click in the first four months of 2026, per SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb data, up from 60.45% in 2024. That is the core SEO statistic of 2026: search demand is at a record high, but fewer searches turn into visits. AI Overviews explain much of the drop. Yet Google still sends more referral traffic than any other source, and the pages that rank also feed the AI answers. Compare the tools that track both in our SEO tools category.

Key takeaways

• 68.01% of US Google searches end with zero clicks (January to April 2026), up from 60.45% in 2024, per SparkToro; Pew Research Center found about two-thirds of searches ended without a result click in its 2025 panel
• AI Overviews cut the top-ranking page’s click-through rate by 58% on December 2025 data, per Ahrefs; Seer Interactive measured a 61% drop on its client queries
• Only 232 of every 1,000 US Google searches send a click to the open web, down from 360 in 2024 (SparkToro, via Search Engine Journal)
• Google Search & other revenue reached $63.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 17%, per Alphabet’s earnings release. Fewer clicks have not meant less search
• Google holds 89.94% of worldwide search engine share in September 2026, per StatCounter
• Google organic traffic to 2,500+ sites tracked by Chartbeat fell 33% globally and 38% in the US between November 2024 and November 2025 (Chartbeat data, via the Reuters Institute)
• Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google’s top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017, per Ahrefs
• Brand web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, backlinks at 0.218, in Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands
• SEO outsourcing averages $2,917 a month, per an Ahrefs survey of 439 providers, while Ahrefs Lite costs $129 and Semrush’s SEO plan $139 a month

How many Google searches end without a click?

68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, per SparkToro’s study of Similarweb clickstream data. Pew Research Center points the same way: about two-thirds of searches in its March 2025 panel ended without a click on a result.

1. Zero-click searches rose 7.5 percentage points in two years, from 60.45% in 2024 to 68.01% in early 2026, per SparkToro. Rand Fishkin calls it the fastest acceleration of the trend in a decade.
2. Only 232 of every 1,000 US Google searches now send a click to the open web, per SparkToro’s 2026 data as reported by Search Engine Journal. In the 2024 SparkToro study, that figure was 360.
3. 39% of searches end with no further action, 29% lead to a new Google search, and 32% produce a click, per the same Search Engine Journal breakdown. SparkToro notes the share of searches followed by another search rose 7.2 points since 2024.
4. Of the clicks that do happen, 66% reach the open web, 27% go to Alphabet-owned properties, and 6% go to paid ads (Search Engine Journal). YouTube, Maps, and AI Mode all sit in that 27%.
5. The share of searches producing any click fell 9.51 points, a 22.9% decline, between the 2024 and 2026 panels, per SparkToro. It was the largest change among the metrics tracked.
6. European searchers clicked out slightly more in 2024: 374 open-web clicks per 1,000 Google searches, versus 360 in the US, per SparkToro. Fishkin linked the gap to Google sending less traffic to its own properties in the EU.

Source: SparkToro 2026, SparkToro 2024, and Search Engine Journal. SparkToro notes the panels differ, so treat the trend as directional.

What it means: a ranking is no longer a reliable proxy for a visit. Searchers still see your brand, but fewer of them arrive on your page, so traffic alone undercounts what SEO is doing.

How much do AI Overviews cut click-through rates?

When an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page earns a 58% lower click-through rate, per Ahrefs’ analysis of 300,000 keywords on December 2025 data. Seer Interactive measured a 61% drop on its client queries, and Pew found clicks nearly halve.

7. The AI Overview penalty for position one grew from 34.5% to 58% between March and December 2025. Ahrefs’ first study used March 2025 data; the re-run used December 2025. In Ahrefs’ words, Google now “keeps” 58 of every 100 clicks a top page used to earn.
8. Lower positions lose less, but still lose: position two drops 50.8% and position ten drops 19.4% when an AI Overview shows, per Ahrefs.
9. Organic CTR on Seer’s AI Overview queries fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025, a 61% decline, per Seer Interactive. That is less than one click per 100 impressions.
10. Being cited inside the AI Overview earns 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than not being cited, per Seer Interactive. Seer cautions that stronger brands may simply get cited more.
11. Seer’s 2026 update shows a partial rebound: organic CTR on AI Overview queries climbed from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, an 85% increase, per Seer Interactive. This larger dataset covers 53 brands and 2.43 billion impressions, so the two Seer studies are not directly comparable.
12. Users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without one, per Pew Research Center’s March 2025 browsing panel of 900 US adults.
13. Users clicked a link inside the AI summary in just 1% of visits, and ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary versus 16% without, per Pew.

Source: Ahrefs, “Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%” (2026), December 2025 desktop data, informational keywords.

The three studies use different methods (keyword CTR, client data, and a browsing panel), yet all land in the same place: an AI Overview removes roughly half or more of the clicks on the queries where it appears. For the wider buyer-journey picture, see our 25 statistics on how AI search changed software buying.

How often do AI Overviews and AI Mode appear?

18% of Google searches produced an AI summary in Pew Research Center’s March 2025 browsing data, and 58% of its 900 panelists saw at least one, per Pew. Long, question-style queries trigger them most. Google’s separate AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users by May 2026.

14. 60% of searches starting with “who,” “what,” “when,” or “why” produced an AI summary, per Pew.
15. 53% of searches with 10 or more words triggered an AI summary, versus 8% of one- or two-word searches (Pew).
16. The median AI summary ran 67 words, and 88% cited three or more sources (Pew). Many citations per answer means each cited page gets a thinner slice of clicks.
17. AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, and its queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch, per Google’s I/O 2026 announcements.
18. Yet only 0.34% of US Google searches reached AI Mode from January to April 2026, per SparkToro. SparkToro attributes the recent zero-click jump to AI Overviews, not AI Mode.

AI Mode is small in the clickstream today, but Google is merging it with AI Overviews into one experience. That is where the next shift in clicks will come from.

Is organic search still the biggest traffic channel?

Yes. Google sent 39.35% of all referral traffic across 81,947 sites in Ahrefs’ 2025 study, 210 times more than ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini combined. Google also holds 89.94% of worldwide search share (StatCounter, September 2026), and its Search revenue grew 17% in Q2 2026.

19. AI platforms sent just 0.25% of the average site’s traffic in June 2025, per Ahrefs, even after AI referrals grew roughly tenfold in a year. The gap with Google narrowed from 345x in March 2025 to 210x.
20. Google handles over 5 trillion searches a year, per Google Marketing Live 2025. At I/O 2026, Google said Search queries had reached an all-time high the previous quarter.
21. Google Search & other revenue rose from $54.2 billion to $63.3 billion year over year in Q2 2026, up 17%, per Alphabet. Search is growing as a business even as clicks per search fall.
22. In 2024, Gartner predicted traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 because of AI chatbots, per its press release. Google’s record query volume and revenue growth do not support that forecast so far.
23. A 2019 BrightEdge study found organic search drove 53% of all trackable website traffic, against 15% for paid search and 5% for organic social, per BrightEdge’s Channel Report. Treat it as a 2019 baseline, not a current channel split.

Source: StatCounter worldwide and StatCounter US, September 2026. StatCounter measures search referrals to sites running its tracker.

How much organic traffic have websites lost?

Google organic traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell 33% globally and 38% in the US between November 2024 and November 2025, per Chartbeat data in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends report. Ahrefs found the average site’s search traffic fell about 21% in the year to June 2025.

24. Publishers expect search traffic to fall 43% over the next three years, per the Reuters Institute’s survey of 280 digital news leaders in 51 countries. The Reuters Institute adds that it is not clear how much of the Chartbeat decline is down to AI Overviews.
25. The average site’s search traffic dropped about 21% over the year to June 2025, across 81,947 sites, per Ahrefs. Ahrefs says the decline is likely the work of AI Overviews and AI Mode.
26. Google’s share of traffic to 75,000+ opted-in domains fell 8 percentage points, about 22%, from June 2025 to May 2026, per Ahrefs’ tracker as cited by SparkToro. These are sites with active marketing teams, not neglected blogs.
27. Even queries without an AI Overview lost clicks: organic CTR on them fell 41% to 1.62% by September 2025 on Seer’s informational query set, per Seer Interactive. Seer suspects searchers are finding answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and social platforms first.
28. Seer’s larger 2026 dataset disagrees on that point: queries without an AI Overview rose from 2.8% CTR in January 2025 to 3.8% in February 2026, per Seer Interactive. The range is wide, so test your own Search Console data before planning around either figure.

What it means: the loss is real but uneven. Informational pages that Google can summarize lose the most. Branded, local, and transactional queries hold up better, a point SparkToro also makes.

How hard is it to rank on Google’s first page?

Only 1.74% of newly published pages reached Google’s top 10 within a year in Ahrefs’ 2025 study, down from 5.7% in 2017. Older pages dominate: 72.9% of top-10 results are more than three years old. And per a 2023 Ahrefs study, 96.55% of pages get no Google traffic at all.

29. 96.55% of the roughly 14 billion pages in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer database get zero traffic from Google, and another 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month, per Ahrefs’ 2023 study.
30. 40.82% of the pages that did reach the top 10 got there within one month, per Ahrefs. If a page has not moved after about six months, Ahrefs suggests reworking it.
31. 72.9% of pages in Google’s top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59% in 2017, and only 13.7% are under a year old (Ahrefs).
32. The average number-one page is 5 years old, up from 2 years in 2017 (Ahrefs). That favors updating pages that already rank over publishing new ones.
33. 96.98% of US desktop clicks and 97.56% of mobile clicks happen in the top 10 results, per Ahrefs’ August 2025 Search Console data.
34. 45.7% of Google searches are branded, per Ahrefs’ study of about 150 million US keywords (2025). Branded queries make up 36.9% of unique keywords but carry more volume.

Source: Ahrefs, “How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google?” (May 2025), comparing its 2017 and 2025 studies.

What still drives rankings and AI citations?

Backlinks still gate competitive Google rankings, but brand mentions matter more for AI answers. In Ahrefs’ 2025 study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, versus 0.218 for backlinks. Off-site brand signals took all three top spots.

35. Of about 20 million pages with no referring domains, only 2,997 got more than 1,000 Google visits a month, roughly 1 in 6,671, per Ahrefs (2023). Pages without links rank mostly for low-competition topics.
36. Branded web mentions (0.664), brand anchors (0.527), and brand search volume (0.392) were the top three correlates of AI Overview visibility, all off-site factors, per Ahrefs. Branded ad traffic (0.216) and ad cost (0.215) barely registered.
37. Brands in the top quartile for web mentions earn up to 10 times more AI Overview mentions than the next quartile, and 26% of brands have zero mentions, per Ahrefs.
38. Only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google’s top 10 for the same query, down from about 76% in July 2025, per Ahrefs’ analysis of 863,000 SERPs (March 2026). Ahrefs suspects Google’s “query fan-out,” which pulls sources from related searches, is the cause.
39. YouTube makes up 18.2% of AI Overview citations that do not rank in the top 100, and it is the most-cited domain in AI Overviews, per Ahrefs.
40. 66.5% of links pointing to 2 million sampled websites since 2013 have rotted, per Ahrefs’ link rot study (updated 2024). Counting temporary errors and other issues, 74.5% of links were lost. Link building is a maintenance job, not a one-off.
41. 86.5% of top-20 ranking pages contain some AI-generated content, but only 4.6% are pure AI, per Ahrefs’ analysis of 600,000 pages (2025). Ahrefs found Google neither rewards nor punishes AI content as such.
42. Google said its March 2024 core and spam updates cut low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 45%, beating its 40% target, per Google.

What it means: the 2026 ranking stack has two layers. Links and page age still decide the blue links. Brand mentions across the web, including YouTube and forums, decide whether AI answers name you. A single SEO tool that covers both layers is enough for most teams.

How many websites pass Core Web Vitals?

48% of mobile websites and 56% of desktop websites had good Core Web Vitals in 2025, per the HTTP Archive Web Almanac, up from 32% and 41% in 2021. Page experience has improved every year since 2022, but more than half of mobile sites still miss Google’s thresholds for loading, responsiveness, and visual stability.

43. Mobile Core Web Vitals pass rates climbed from 36% in 2023 to 44% in 2024 and 48% in 2025, per the Web Almanac. Desktop moved from 48% to 55% to 56% over the same years.
44. Only 2.13% of desktop sites and 2.10% of mobile sites have a valid llms.txt file, per the Web Almanac SEO chapter (2025). Google has said it does not use the file.
45. GPTBot is named in 4.5% of desktop robots.txt files and ClaudeBot in 3.6%, per the Web Almanac. Robots.txt now controls AI crawler access as well as search crawling.

Speed is table stakes, not a growth lever. Fix it if you fail, then spend the time on content and links. If your pages also need to convert the traffic you earn, our landing page statistics cover the next step.

How much do SEO tools and services cost?

Ahrefs’ paid plans run from $29 a month (Starter) to $1,499 (Enterprise), with Lite at $129, per Ahrefs’ pricing page; Semrush runs $139 to $549 a month billed monthly. Outsourcing costs more: an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers puts the average at $2,917 a month.

46. Ahrefs Lite costs $129 a month, Standard $249, Advanced $449, and Enterprise $1,499, per Ahrefs. Extra users cost $40 to $100 a month each depending on plan. See our Ahrefs review.
47. Semrush’s SEO plan costs $139 a month; its SEO + AI Search tiers cost $199 (Starter), $299 (Pro+), and $549 (Advanced), per Semrush. Both vendors advertise annual savings of up to 17%. See our Semrush review.
48. SEO agencies charge $3,209 a month on average, versus $1,348 for freelancers, and the average hourly rate is $111, per Ahrefs’ survey (updated 2024). 78.2% of providers charge a monthly retainer.
49. $501 to $1,000 a month is the most common SEO retainer, charged by 20.4% of providers, per Ahrefs. That retainer range is several times the cost of one Ahrefs or Semrush seat.
50. Semrush’s 2025 revenue reached $443.6 million, up 18%, with ARR of $471.4 million, per its fourth-quarter results. Its AI products grew from $4 million to over $38 million in ARR in one year.
51. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, at $12.00 per share in cash, per Semrush’s SEC filing. Semrush’s NYSE listing ended the same day.

Source: Ahrefs pricing and Semrush pricing, retrieved October 2026, monthly billing; Ahrefs SEO pricing survey, 439 providers, updated 2024.

Most small teams need one suite, not two. Pick Ahrefs or Semrush based on whether you lead with links or content, and skip overlapping rank trackers. Budget-conscious solo operators can compare Ubersuggest in the same category.

Does SEO still pay off?

Yes, if you measure value per visit instead of raw clicks. Semrush’s 2025 study found the average AI search visitor worth 4.4 times a traditional organic visitor on conversion rate, and Ahrefs saw 0.5% of its traffic from AI search drive 12.1% of signups. Both channels start with pages that rank.

52. For Ahrefs, AI search visitors convert at a 23 times higher rate than traditional organic visitors, per Ahrefs’ 2025 data.
53. Semrush projects that AI search could send digital-marketing sites more visitors than traditional search by early 2028, per its 2025 study. That is a projection for one topic area, not a measured result.
54. Transactional queries with an AI Overview and a brand citation more than doubled organic CTR, from 0.7% in January 2025 to 1.7% in December 2025, per Seer Interactive. Commercial queries still reward the cited brand.
55. Google’s share as a source of local business reviews fell from 83% in 2025 to 71% in 2026, per BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey. Consumers now use an average of six review sites.
56. Customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable with a complete Business Profile, and 70% more likely to visit, per Google’s Business Profile help center (undated, retrieved October 2026).

What it means: SEO traffic is shrinking in volume and rising in intent. Measure leads, signups, and revenue from organic and AI referrals, not sessions alone. For how content teams are adapting, see our content marketing statistics and AI in marketing statistics.

What to do with this data

• Replace traffic with outcomes as your main SEO metric. With 68.01% of searches ending without a click, track signups, leads, and branded search instead of sessions.
• Defend your citation, not just your ranking. Cited brands earn 35% more organic clicks on AI Overview queries (Seer). Pick a tool that reports AI Overview citations alongside rankings.
• Update pages that already rank before publishing new ones. Only 1.74% of new pages reach the top 10 in a year, while the average number-one page is 5 years old (Ahrefs).
• Invest in brand mentions, including YouTube. Web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 versus 0.218 for backlinks in Ahrefs’ data.
• Buy one SEO suite, not three. A single Ahrefs or Semrush seat costs $129 to $139 a month, a small fraction of the $3,209 average agency retainer. Compare picks in our SEO tools category, see the marketer’s stack, and read how tools8020 scores tools.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of Google searches are zero-click?

68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, per SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb data. That is up from 60.45% in 2024. Only 232 of every 1,000 searches send a click to a non-Google website, down from 360 in 2024.

How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

AI Overviews cut the top-ranking page’s click-through rate by 58% on December 2025 data, per Ahrefs. Seer Interactive measured a 61% CTR decline on AI Overview queries, and Pew found result clicks fall from 15% to 8% of visits. The penalty shrinks further down the page but never disappears.

Is SEO dead in 2026?

No. Google Search & other revenue grew 17% to $63.3 billion in Q2 2026, per Alphabet, and Google still sent 39.35% of all referral traffic in Ahrefs’ 2025 study. SEO earns fewer clicks per ranking, but those clicks remain the largest traffic source.

What is Google’s search engine market share?

Google holds 89.94% of worldwide search engine share in September 2026, per StatCounter. Bing is second at 5.29%. In the US, Google’s share is lower at 85.19%, and Bing reaches 9.89%, per StatCounter’s US data. Worldwide, Yahoo! (1.36%), Yandex (1.3%), and DuckDuckGo (0.74%) trail far behind.

How long does it take to rank on Google?

Most pages never do. Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year, per Ahrefs’ 2025 study. Of those that make it, 40.82% get there within one month, and the average number-one page is five years old.

How much does SEO cost per month?

SEO services average $2,917 a month, per an Ahrefs survey of 439 providers: $3,209 for agencies and $1,348 for freelancers. Doing it yourself costs less. Ahrefs Lite is $129 a month and Semrush’s SEO plan is $139 a month, billed monthly.

Do backlinks still matter for SEO?

Yes, for Google rankings. Of about 20 million pages with no referring domains, only 2,997 earned over 1,000 monthly visits, per Ahrefs. For AI Overviews, brand web mentions correlate more strongly (0.664) than backlinks (0.218), per Ahrefs’ 75,000-brand study. Earning both links and mentions covers rankings and AI answers.

How we compiled these statistics

We drew on 37 pages from 14 publishers, including Pew Research Center, SparkToro, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Alphabet and Semrush SEC filings, StatCounter, HTTP Archive, and the Reuters Institute. Every figure was retrieved from the publisher’s page in October 2026; three pages (two SparkToro studies and a Gartner release) blocked automated access and were read from their Internet Archive copies. Statistics we could not trace to a primary source were omitted, and where sources disagree, as on AI Overview click loss and non-AI-Overview CTR, we show both figures.

Sources

• SparkToro: In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click (2026)
• SparkToro: 2024 Zero-Click Search Study (2024)
• Search Engine Journal: Google Search Traffic To Open Web Drops To 23%, Data Shows (2026)
• Pew Research Center: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (2025)
• Ahrefs: Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (2026)
• Ahrefs: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5% (2025)
• Seer Interactive: AIO Impact on Google CTR, September 2025 Update (2025)
• Seer Interactive: AIO Impact on Google CTR, 2026 Update (2026)
• Google: 100 things we announced at Google I/O 2026 (2026)
• Google: Google Marketing Live 2025 news and updates (2025)
• Google: New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search (2024)
• Google: Business Profile help, complete your Business Profile (retrieved 2026)
• Alphabet: Second Quarter 2026 Results, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 (2026)
• StatCounter: Search Engine Market Share Worldwide (2026)
• StatCounter: Search Engine Market Share United States (2026)
• Ahrefs: AI Traffic Has Increased 9.7x in the Past Year (2025)
• BrightEdge: Channel Report (2019)
• Gartner: Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026 (2024)
• Reuters Institute: Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 (2026)
• Ahrefs: 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google (2023)
• Ahrefs: How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages? (2025)
• Ahrefs: 96.98% of Clicks Happen in the Top 10 Search Results (2025)
• Ahrefs: Almost Half of Google Searches Are Branded (2025)
• Ahrefs: An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors, 75K Brands Studied (2025)
• Ahrefs: Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10 (2026)
• Ahrefs: Link Rot Study (2024)
• Ahrefs: AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (2025)
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2025, Performance (2025)
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2025, SEO (2025)
• Ahrefs: Plans and Pricing (2026)
• Semrush: Prices (2026)
• Ahrefs: SEO Pricing, 439 People Polled (2024)
• Semrush: Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1 (2026)
• Semrush: Form 8-K, completion of acquisition by Adobe (2026)
• Semrush: We Studied the Impact of AI Search on SEO Traffic (2025)
• Ahrefs: Does AI Search Traffic Convert Better Than Traditional Search? (2025)
• BrightLocal: Local Consumer Review Survey (2026)