And nobody wants THIS trophy
Every so often a piece of data lands that confirms something I’ve been discussing with colleagues and clients alike. This is, yet again, one of those weeks.
SparkToro and Similarweb have followed up their US zero-click study with the same analysis across five more countries, and the United Kingdom has come out on top! Yes!
But not in a good way. Oh!
We now have the highest zero-click rate of any country in the study: just under seven in ten Google searches here end without a single click on a result. Germany, by contrast, sits at the bottom of the table, with its searchers clicking at a rate more than 20% higher than ours.
I’d celebrate, but I’m not sure “your country leads the world in people not visiting websites” is the headline most of my clients want framed on their office wall.
The data
Sorted from the highest zero-click rate to the lowest:
| Country | Zero-click searches | At least one click | Open-web clicks per 1,000 searches |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 69.5% | 30.5% | 232 |
| United States | 68.0% | 32.0% | 231 |
| France | 65.3% | 34.7% | 271 |
| Canada | 63.8% | 36.2% | 268 |
| Italy | 63.4% | 36.6% | 280 |
| Germany | 62.1% | 37.9% | 287 |
Source: SparkToro and Similarweb, June 2026, based on Similarweb’s desktop and mobile browser panel for January to April 2026.
The single most quietly alarming line in the whole study is the last one in the table above: not one of these six countries now sends 300 or more clicks to the open web per thousand searches. The web has tipped. Most searches simply resolve on the results page and the searcher gets on with their day, having never troubled an actual website.
The bit that trips everyone up
Here’s where people email me looking confused, so let me get ahead of it.
If the UK has the highest zero-click rate, why does it send roughly the same open-web traffic as the US? The UK sits at 232 clicks to the open web per 1,000 searches, the US at 231. Practically identical, despite a 1.5 point gap in zero-click rate.
The answer is that those two figures measure different slices of the pie:
- Zero-click rate is the share of searches that end with no click on anything. For the UK that’s 69.5%, which leaves 30.5% of searches producing at least one click. Call it 305 clicking sessions per 1,000.
- Open-web clicks per 1,000 counts only the clicks that reach a non-Google site. Not every click does. Some land on YouTube, Maps, or Google’s own answers. In the UK, around 76% of clicks go to organic and paid results on the open web.
Run the maths and 305 clicking sessions multiplied by roughly 76% gives you about 232. There’s your number. The US starts with slightly more clicking sessions (320 per 1,000) but a smaller share of those reach the open web (around 72%), so it lands at 231. The two effects cancel each other out almost exactly.
The lesson buried in that arithmetic is the one I keep coming back to: the zero-click headline rate on its own tells you very little about how much traffic you can actually win. What matters is the destination mix of the clicks that survive. A scary top-line percentage and a perfectly workable opportunity can, and do, live side by side.
What I’d actually do about it
I’ve been banging the GEO, AEO and entity SEO drum since before most agencies had worked out which acronym to put on the pitch deck, so forgive me if this sounds rehearsed. The strategy that this data points to is the one I’ve been recommending for a while:
- Stop treating clicks as the only scoreboard. If two-thirds of queries never produce a click, then judging a campaign purely on sessions is like judging a pub on how many people walk straight past it. Impressions, visibility in search features and share of model all belong in the report now.
- Optimise to be the answer, not just to rank. When the results page is the destination, your job is to be the thing Google and the AI assistants lift, summarise and cite. That means clear, extractable answers, sensible structure and proper schema markup. Being quotable is the new being clickable.
- Establish the entity. Search engines and large language models reward sources they understand and trust. The harder you make it for them to grasp who you are, what you do and why you’re credible, the easier you are to leave out. Knowledge Graph presence, consistent structured data and genuine authority signals are doing real work here.
- Defend the clicks worth having. Branded, local and high-intent queries are where a click still tends to mean money. That’s where I’d point the sharpest effort, not at the long tail of informational queries that Google now answers for you, free of charge and with your content.
One caveat that should keep you up at night
This data is drawn from searches made in the browser. It does not include the Google mobile app, where zero-click features are even more aggressive. So the real figure is, in all likelihood, worse than the 69.5% we’re looking at. We’re at the top of the world table using the conservative number.
None of this is a counsel of despair. It’s a reason to measure differently and to do the work that the modern results page actually rewards. The click was always a means to an end. The job now is to make sure that when the click doesn’t come, your business is still the answer on the screen.
And if you’d like to know where your own numbers sit against that 69.5%, well, that’s rather what I do for a living. Do get in touch.