Zero-click search just hit a new high, and paid search overall did not pick up the slack. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that 68.01 percent of U.S. Google searches between January and April 2026 ended with no click at all, up from 60.45 percent in 2024, a jump of more than 7 percentage points in two years. For roughly two years, the working assumption among advertisers was that paid clicks would quietly absorb whatever organic traffic AI Overviews and other zero-click layouts took away. Tinuiti’s Q2 2026 Digital Ads Benchmark Report, as summarized by Search Engine Journal, complicates that assumption. Google paid search spending rose 14 percent year over year in the quarter, slightly slower than the 15 percent gain in Q2 2025, and nearly all of that growth came from more clicks rather than higher prices. Average search cost per click moved just 1 percent.
The spending totals hide where the clicks actually landed. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 queries across 42 client organizations from June 2024 through September 2025, covering 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions, and compared performance on queries where a brand was cited inside an AI Overview against queries where it was not. In Q3 2025, paid click-through rate on cited queries averaged 7.89 percent, against 4.14 percent when the same brand wasn’t cited, a 91 percent gap. The organic split was smaller: 0.70 percent versus 0.52 percent, a 35 percent gap. Seer’s research team was careful about causation, writing that AI Overview presence, paid CTR, and organic CTR “may all reflect underlying brand authority and E-E-A-T signals rather than having direct causal relationships,” rather than citation itself producing the lift.
Either reading points to the same practical split. Paid search in 2026 behaves like two different markets depending on one variable: whether a brand turns up inside the AI Overview box for a given query. Show up there, and a brand pulls nearly double the paid click-through of a competitor bidding on the identical term who didn’t make the citation. Don’t show up, and that budget is going toward placement on a results page where roughly two in three queries produce no click for anyone, organic or paid. The absorption thesis treated AI Overviews as a tax that paid search would pay on organic’s behalf across the board. The Tinuiti and Seer data together describe something narrower: paid search is covering the loss mainly for brands AI Overviews already favor, and growth is cooling everywhere else.
That has a direct consequence for where ad budget is already moving. Google Shopping spend grew 18 percent year over year in Q2 2026, outpacing text search, even as Shopping cost per click fell 1 percent, according to the same Tinuiti figures. Shopping listings sit outside the AI Overview box entirely, which may be exactly why buyers are leaning into the format rather than waiting to see whether citation-driven paid CTR gains spread to brands that Google’s AI doesn’t currently favor.
Sources referenced in reporting: