November 2, 2022
According to a new SEMRush study, zero-click Google searches are not quite the genius that they’ve been made out to be in SEO circles in recent years.
SEMRush conducted the survey in May using an anonymous sample of 20,000 desktop and mobile users in the United States. Semrush analyzed 609,809 search queries in total (308,978 on desktop and 146,390 on mobile).
“For these users, we extracted search requests made on Google and the next two steps (clicks) made after these searches. We assumed that the first action was always a general search and not one for Images, News or anything else—just a classic Google search—and we filtered out the actions that had more than two minutes between them. This seemed to be a realistic amount of time to allow users to complete their search journeys. The total number of unique search queries analyzed was 308,978 for desktop and 146,390 for mobile, which came to a total of 609,809 unique search actions,” SEMrush noted.
Organic clicks: 45.1%, zero clicks: 25.6%, keyword change (zero-click, query refinement): 17.9%, Clicks to other Google properties (e.g., images, news, shopping): 9.7%, Paid clicks: 1.8% are the results of Where clicks went for desktop Google searches.
Organic clicks make up 43.1%, while keyword changes (zero-click, query refinement) account for 29.3%, zero clicks account for 17.3% and clicks to other Google properties account for 17.3%. (e.g., images, news, shopping) 10.3%, 0.02% paid clicks
Another result is that searchers did not spend much time analyzing the search results, with the majority of searchers deciding in less than 15 seconds what to click on.
The sources for this piece include an article in CNET.
