A rather stirring controversy began last week on Twitter, when Rand Fishkin shared data showing that Google’s zero-click searches had reached the 65% threshold.
You can read more about this story from our coverage in this post.
Rand’s updates on the platform show the following with additional data provided by Similarweb:
This makes sense, as Google’s U.S. version often has more instant answers, featured snippets, knowledge boxes, etc. than other regions. The U.S. also has more Google advertisers and ad spending than most other countries, and around 15% more paid search clicks than the rest of the world, with paid making up nearly 6% of all clicks.
For the final visual I looked at search data over time, from January 2018 (the earliest data from SimilarWeb for this project) to December of 2020.
Additional Insights Into Zero-Click Data
The additional data reveals the following insights:
- There is growth in overall search volume. The pandemic likely accounts for the reversal of that data drop towards the end of 2019.
- The number of advertisers who used paid search to gain visibility on Google has grown significantly over the past few years. This is the case on both desktop and mobile.
- Organic clicks grew in 2020 after a long plateau and a slight decrease. This seems to be due to greater desktop usage in 2020 after Covid-19 lockdowns resulted in more of us at home searching on our computers. This traffic might end up transferring to mobile as vaccinations become more widespread and Americans return to Google searching on the go.
- In late 2020 zero-click searches reached a record high. It is possible that Google’s experimentation with featured snippets in Q1 could correlate with some interesting data changes. I’ll ask SimilarWeb to check this out.
Final Conclusions of Rand’s Latest Data
Rand also revealed the conclusions he drew from the new data.
He believes:
The bad news: in the last three years, Google’s been the overwhelming beneficiary of increasing worldwide search volume, and as the pandemic takes more people off their laptops and desktops and puts them back on their mobile devices, the zero-click search problem is likely to rise even more.
Rand Fishkin’s Zero-Click Tweets
These are the tweets where Rand provided his updated data and insights:
What’s Next in the Controversy?
We believe it is clear that Google will need to respond to Rand’s latest data insights. Again, it remains to be seen what their response will be.
We will continue our coverage of the zero-click controversy right here on iloveseo.
You won’t want to miss a minute of it!