'Zero Click': Google and AI's lethal attack on digital media

The battle between the media—both traditional and digital—and Google has taken a dramatic and devastating turn in favor of the tech giant. What was once a struggle to get the Seattle-based company to pay for the content it redirected has now become a desperate effort to reach consumers at all, overcoming Google’s “Zero Click” barrier.

The phenomenon was dubbed Google Zero by journalist Nilay Patel in 2024. According to Patel, it’s “that time when Google search simply stops sending traffic away from its search engine to third-party websites.” In a Digiday article, Google Zero is defined as “the time when Google stops functioning as a gateway to the web and admits to being an answer engine.”

Shattering data for the media

For now, the data are devastating for digital media, which rely on SEO positioning as one of their main ways to showcase content. To compete, they try to adapt their content to Google’s constantly changing algorithms in hopes of securing privileged positions in search results without paying for them.

Since the launch of Google SGE (Search Generative Experience) in 2023, about 60% of searches do not go beyond the summary provided by the tech giant’s artificial intelligence. According to a 2024 study by SparkToro/Data, roughly 58.5% of searches in the U.S. and 59.7% in the EU ended without a click—so-called “zero-click searches.” In other words, only about 360–374 out of every 1,000 searches, or roughly one in three, lead to pages outside the Google ecosystem.

26% of users who receive the Google summary log out

Data from a 2025 Pew Research study corroborates this trend. According to the survey, 26% of people who receive a Google AI-generated summary log off immediately, compared with 16% of those who do not get the information directly from the tech giant.

In addition, only 8% of users who receive a generative summary click on any of the links provided by the search engine, compared with 15% of users who do not receive such content from Google.

The first position in the search engine is no longer synonymous with a shower of clicks

If that wasn’t enough, research by SeerInteractive showed that the top-ranked link on Google—the “gold medal” for media—saw its share of clicks drop from about 33% in 2023 to just 11% in 2025 when an AI-generated summary appears. In other words, Google’s summary now leaves barely any crumbs for other sites.

As Eduardo Garbayo notes in his weblog, the situation has taken a radical turn in less than two years: "In early 2025, Google introduced AI Mode at Search Labs: a chat-style experience (similar to ChatGPT) that no longer displays the traditional 10 links, but a narrative response with internal quotes. This means that the search engine responds 'everything' to the user, further eliminating the need to visit external sites. In short, SGE/AI Overviews have caused many users to get complete answers without leaving Google, directly driving the 'zero-click' trend."

AI gathers information from multiple sources to provide answers that fully satisfy the user’s query

Google’s method for achieving this is what the company calls “AI-created overview and more.” The AI combines information from multiple sources to provide answers that fully satisfy the user’s query, sometimes including supporting links at the end.

According to the Pew study, "the most commonly cited sources in both Google's AI overviews and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. These three sites are the most commonly linked sources in both AI summaries and standard search results. Together, they accounted for 15% of the sources listed in the AI summaries we examined. They made up a similar proportion (17 %) of the sources that appeared in standard search results."

Publishers decry Google's "dead end"

Publishers have not stood idly by as their businesses face jeopardy. The sector has seen numerous layoffs due to declining clicks and advertising revenue, and publishers have raised their voices against what they call Google’s “dead end.”

Brussels already has an antitrust complaint on the table, alleging that AI Overviews further strengthen Google’s near-absolute dominance at the expense of independent publishers.