60%
Of searches are now zero-click, up from 50% in 2019
How AI and zero-click are reshaping digital marketing strategy
MAY 19, 2025
Key Takeaways
- Zero-click searches have risen from 50% to nearly 60% since 2019
- AI overview appearances on Google more than doubled between January and March 2025
- When an AI overview appears, click-through rates for top organic results drop by 34.5%
- Strong existing SEO foundations are the starting point for AI visibility, with 60% of Perplexity citations overlapping with Google’s top 10
- Measurement must evolve to include AI overview coverage and LLM citation monitoring
Being ranked first no longer guarantees the traffic it once did. As zero-click searches and generative AI reshape how people find information, the brands that will thrive are those who update their digital marketing strategy now, not later.
Search as we know it is undergoing a fundamental transformation. For years, the goal of any digital marketing strategy was straightforward: rank high, get clicks, drive traffic. But that model is rapidly eroding. The combination of zero-click search behavior and the rise of generative AI is changing what it means to be visible online and brands that fail to adapt risk losing their audiences entirely.
Zero-click searches: the new normal
Between 2019 and 2025, the share of zero-click searches, those where a user gets their answer directly on the search results page without ever visiting a website, rose from 50% to nearly 60%. Today, over 37% of people complete a search and take no further action at all. They read the answer in a featured snippet or AI overview, and they are done.
2x
AI overview appearances on Google doubled between January and March 2025
-34.5%
Drop in click-through rate for top organic results when an AI overview appears
This shift is accelerating. In January 2025, just 6.5% of Google searches produced an AI-generated overview. By March 2025, that figure had more than doubled to over 13%. Research from Ahrefs shows that when an AI overview appears on the page, the click-through rate for the top organic results drops by 34.5%. The message is clear: a top ranking in traditional search engine optimization is no longer the guarantee of traffic it once was.
From searching to asking
The deeper disruption is not just happening on Google. Increasingly, people are not searching at all, they are asking. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other large language models allow users to type a question in natural language and receive a direct, conversational answer. There are no blue links to scroll through, no website to visit. The platform answers the question, invites a follow-up, and keeps the user entirely within its own environment.
Gartner has predicted a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026. For health and wellness brands, where 80% of internet users seek health information online and 7% of all Google searches are health-related, this is not a distant concern. It is an urgent one, and it demands a response at the level of digital marketing strategy, not just tactical SEO optimization.
Awareness may now come from your brand being mentioned in an AI-generated response, instead of a user visiting your site, but. The deeper stages of consideration could unfold entirely within an LLM.
Rethinking your website's role
This shift demands a fundamental rethink of how brands view their own websites. Traditionally, a website was a destination, the place customers arrived after clicking a search result. In the AI era, it is better understood as a content repository: a structured, well-organized source of credible information that feeds the questions being asked across search engines and AI platforms alike.
That changes how you think about the marketing funnel too. The deeper stages of consideration may unfold entirely within an LLM, through a back-and-forth conversation the user has with the platform. Your website becomes most valuable at the bottom of the funnel, when someone is ready to make a decision and seeks you out directly. This is a significant structural shift, one that the best digital marketing strategy needs to account for from the outset, rather than retrofitting around it.
What to do about it
The good news is that optimizing for AI-driven search does not require starting from scratch. It requires updating the existing playbook with some important additions. Around 60% of Perplexity’s citations overlap with the top 10 Google organic results, and over 87% of SearchGPT citations come from Bing’s top 20. If you already rank well through sound search engine optimization, you are already closer to AI visibility than you might think.
Step 1: Start with your existing strengths
Focus first on pages ranking in positions one through three that are not yet appearing in AI overviews; these represent the fastest wins. Your existing SEO services investment is the foundation, not the ceiling.
Step 2: Prioritize long-tail questions
Keyword research still matters, but the emphasis shifts toward the specific, conversational questions people are actually asking, the kind that mirror how someone would phrase a query to an AI. A social listening tool is a valuable complement here, surfacing naturally conversational language that reflects real audience concerns in a way that traditional keyword data cannot.
Step 3: Optimize your content structure
Use clear headings that directly answer common questions. Incorporate varied content formats, e.g. video, bullet lists, FAQs, which both improve user engagement and support AI crawlability. Reference credible sources and invest in thorough structured data implementation across your site. This is search engine optimization content strategy and generative AI optimization working in tandem, not in competition.
Step 4: Address the technical foundations
Core web vitals, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and internal linking all matter for both traditional and AI search visibility. A technical SEO audit with generative AI in mind can uncover critical gaps that standard reviews miss. In particular, most LLMs cannot handle JavaScript rendering the way Google's crawlers can, making this a common and consequential blind spot. A thorough technical SEO checklist for the AI era should include crawl access for AI bots, schema markup, and indexation signals, alongside the fundamentals.
Measuring what matters now
Success metrics need to evolve alongside the digital marketing strategy. Traditional rankings and organic traffic remain important, but they no longer tell the full story. Alongside these, brands should track visibility in SERP features, e.g. featured snippets, people-also-ask panels, knowledge panels, and monitor how many keywords in their target universe are generating AI overviews. Benchmarking your own AI overview appearances against competitors gives a clearer picture of relative GEO SEO performance and where to focus effort.
For LLM visibility, measurement is currently more manual: regularly querying platforms, e.g. SEMRush, AccuLLM, with relevant industry questions to see whether your brand is mentioned, how it is described, and whether any misinformation is circulating. Referral traffic from AI platforms, while modest, can serve as a useful directional trend. The signal is less important than the direction of travel and for most brands that have invested in strong AI and SEO foundations, that direction is beginning to turn positive.
On measurement
The shift from click-based to visibility-based measurement is one of the most significant operational changes the AI era brings. Brands that build the capability to track AI overview appearances, LLM citations, and SERP feature frequency now will have a meaningful data advantage within twelve months.
Results in practice
Case study: Pharmaceutical client
A pharmaceutical client that followed this approach saw dramatic improvements in search visibility in just two months, simply by improving page speed and overhauling their schema markup across the site. The results demonstrate that the gap between traditional SEO foundations and AI search visibility is often smaller than brands assume.
3.3x
SERP feature appearances in two months (68 → 223)
6.2x
AI overview keyword visibility over same period (5 → 31)
The time to act is now
Zero-click and generative AI search are not future trends to plan for someday. They are the present reality and they are moving faster than most digital marketing strategy cycles can comfortably absorb. The brands that will thrive in the next phase of search are those who recognize that the rules have changed and act accordingly: investing in the technical SEO audit work, content optimization, and measurement infrastructure that the AI era demands.
The window for early-mover advantage is still open. Healthcare and life sciences brands that build strong GEO SEO foundations now, grounded in the same rigorous audience insight and healthcare SEO services thinking that drives their broader marketing strategy, will be significantly ahead when the rest of the market catches up.
AI in digital marketing is not a channel to add to the mix. It is a structural change to how people find, evaluate, and trust information and the organizations that treat it as such will be the ones worth finding.
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References:
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