What's a zero-click search? And why should I care?

Facebook, Amazon, and Apple always get a bad rap for being part of big “bad” tech, and many treat Google as the good guy - but let me let you in on a little secret…Google is slowly killing your website traffic with a fancy new thing the digital marketing industry has now dubbed “zero-click search”.

SO WHAT ARE ZERO-CLICK SEARCHES?

This past year, more searches ended on Google - aka, without a click to a website - than with one. This has a negative effect on your website because as much as people don’t want to click to page 2 of search results, now they don’t have to even scroll down to RESULT 2. This is such a big deal that according to Search Engine Journal (SEJ), “Google is no longer ‘everyone’s search engine’ … they’re now ‘everyone’s competitor.’”

CAN YOU GIVE US AN EXAMPLE?

I sure can! Let’s say you woke up not feeling very well this morning after a night out with friends, and you want some fast relief. What do you do? You ask your trusty friend, Google, the following:

How can I get over a hangover fast?

Google answers within .7 seconds with this Featured Snippet they took off thespruceeats.com, a site dedicated to sharing more than 25,000 in-depth articles and recipes from classic French dishes to your favorite comfort foods:

This zero-click search is detrimental for thespruceeats.com, but Google isn’t concerned about their feelings on the matter.

As Search Engine Journal shared, zero-click searches may seem to be all about money, and in a way they are, but they’re also about Google making it clear that we as searchers are their customers, not us as marketers and businesses.

"And if that means scraping lots of websites and putting the answer right on the search engine results page—they'll do that," wrote SEJ's Andreas Dzumla.

In other words, you (as a searcher) might be grateful when you Google "how to spell seperate" and Google immediately informs you that it’s actually "separate" without judging you too hard. But a software company like Grammarly (the first search result with the hopeful SEO title tag of  "Separate Vs. Seperate - Which should I use?") is getting robbed of a click.

SHOULD I REALLY CARE THAT MUCH ABOUT THIS?

YES!

Google stealing half your traffic is definitely not something to sleep on. The repercussions for your website traffic include revenue opportunities, ad retargeting, brand equity, and lost list building!