A client called me this week convinced her website was broken. Traffic was down, enquiries had slowed, and she wanted to know what her SEO agency had done wrong. Nothing was broken. Her rankings hadn't moved. Google had simply stopped sending her the click.
That's not a guess. A new study from SparkToro and Similarweb, released this month, found that 68 percent of Google searches in the US now end without a click through to any website. For every 1,000 searches, only 276 clicks reach the open web. Two years ago that number was 374. It is the fastest two-year drop SparkToro has recorded since it started tracking the metric.
The reason is no mystery. Google's AI Overviews, the summarised answers that now sit above the traditional blue links, appear on more than a fifth of all searches and cut click-through rates by roughly 60 percent when they show up. The search box still works. It just increasingly answers the question itself, on the page, without sending anyone anywhere.
Every week another business owner tells me their SEO agency has failed them. Most of the time, the agency did the job. The job just changed underneath everyone.
I want to be clear about what this isn't. It isn't a Google glitch that will correct itself. It isn't a sign your website needs a redesign. And it isn't a reason to panic and throw money at whichever agency promises to "beat the algorithm." This is the new floor, and every indication from Google's own reporting on AI Mode adoption suggests it will keep dropping, not recover.
Why this matters more than the number itself
Here's the strategic problem hiding inside that statistic. Most small and medium businesses still measure marketing success by website traffic and keyword rankings. Both of those metrics are becoming less meaningful by the month, because the thing they were always meant to represent, being found by someone who wants what you sell, no longer requires a click to happen.
A person can now ask a question, get an answer that names a business, and decide who to call without ever visiting a website. That business is either mentioned in the answer or it isn't. There is no ranking position ten, no page two. You are either the answer, or you are invisible.
This is why I've been telling clients for the past year to stop asking "how do we rank higher" and start asking "would an AI system have any reason to mention us at all." Those are different questions with different answers. Ranking is about keywords, backlinks and page speed. Being mentioned is about whether your business has a clear, specific, well-documented point of difference that shows up consistently across your website, reviews, directory listings and industry coverage. Vague positioning doesn't get summarised. Specific claims do.
What to actually do about it
I'm not here to tell business owners they're wrong to have built their marketing around search traffic. For fifteen years that was the correct strategy. What I am here to say is this: the return on a click is falling, so the value of everything that doesn't depend on a click just went up.
That means three things get more important, starting now.
- Your owned channels, meaning your email list, your past client relationships and your referral network, stop being "nice to have" and become the primary growth engine, because they don't rely on a search engine deciding to send someone your way.
- Your content needs to earn a mention, not a ranking. That means clear, quotable, specific claims about what you do and who it's for, stated plainly enough that an AI summary can lift them without losing the meaning.
- Your brand needs to be recognisable enough that people search for you by name, not just by category. A branded search is worth more than it used to be, because it skips the summary altogether and goes straight to intent.
None of this is complicated. None of it requires a new agency or a new platform. It requires a business owner to accept that the marketing plan built for a world where Google sent traffic needs updating for a world where Google increasingly keeps it.
So here's the practical exercise I'd give any business reading this. Pull up your analytics and look at where your last ten enquiries actually came from. If more than half came from search traffic, you have a concentration problem, not a marketing win. Fix that before you worry about your ranking for one more keyword.