Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet."<p>Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet.<p>No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results.<p>For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" Google gives me the answer: STAINLESS STEEL - and I never had to click through to the website that gave the answer: <a href="https://bit.ly/2MdovdP" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/2MdovdP</a><p>• Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave away movies free)<p>• Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks<p>• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longer<p>Ironically, Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money off the content - in many cases never sending traffic (or significantly reduced traffic) to the publisher of the content.