← Glossary
Zero-click search
A search where the user gets what they needed on the results page and never visits a website.
Zero-click predates AI. Featured snippets, weather boxes and knowledge panels have absorbed clicks for years. Generated answers accelerated it by handling questions too complex for a snippet.
The term describes the user behaviour; search decoupling describes what it does to your reporting. They are the same phenomenon seen from two ends.
Related
Search decouplingThe pattern where search impressions hold steady while clicks decline, because AI answers resolve the question without the user visiting a site.AI OverviewsGoogle's generated summary that appears above the traditional results for many queries, citing a small set of sources.Answer engineA system that responds to a question with a written answer rather than a list of links, naming sources inside or beneath it.