Welcome to Zero-Click SEARCH

The shift to AI search is worrying online businesses—and creating a new cottage industry for AEO.

- Marty Swant

In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, still students at Stanford, introduced a prototype for the Google search engine in a now-famous paper. Back then, search engines rarely yielded great results, and people often relied on human-curated lists to find information online. Since then, Google has become an internet gateway for billions of users worldwide—that is, until AI.

Thanks to AI-driven search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity as well as Google’s own AI-powered summaries, U.S. search referrals dropped from 2.3 billion to fewer than 1.7 billion in a year, according to a 2025 Similarweb report. (Those numbers will likely drop further now that the ChatGPT Atlas browser has launched.)

Dubbed zero-click search or Google Zero, the idea is that web searches will no longer result in a click to a website. This has businesses of all kinds—such as e-commerce sites with lots of optimized landing pages and online publishers that face losing ad revenue—worrying about declining visibility.