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."Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet.No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results.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: https://bit.ly/2MdovdP• Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave away movies free)• Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longerIronically, 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.