Definition

Zero-click search

A zero-click search is one where the user gets what they needed from the results page itself and never clicks through to a website.

AI answers raise the zero-click rate structurally, which decouples impressions from sessions and breaks reporting that assumes clicks track visibility.

The practical adjustment is to measure presence inside the answer as an outcome in its own right, rather than only as a route to a session.

Related terms

Answer box AI Overviews Citation share

Nostimates measures zero-click search across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data