Zero-click search, where people get what they need on Google's results page and never visit a website, now has South African numbers. Algorithm's study of 1.43 billion Google appearances across 110 South African websites finds the typical business now earns about three clicks for every 100 times it appears, down from almost five a year ago.
Marketers around the world have spent the year talking about the shift to a zero-click world, where someone searches, reads the answer on Google's results page, and never clicks through to anyone's website. Until now there has been no South African data on how far that shift has gone here.
There is now. South African businesses are appearing in Google more often than they were a year ago and getting fewer clicks for it, according to the first large-scale study of zero-click search built on South African data.
The study, published by performance marketing agency Algorithm, analysed 16 months of Google Search Console data from 110 South African websites run by 71 businesses across eight sectors. It covers 1.43 billion appearances in Google by South African searchers and the 67.3 million clicks those appearances produced, across 9 million distinct search terms.
Its central finding is that being seen in Google and being clicked have come apart. Comparing the same six weeks a year apart, 19 May to 30 June 2026 against 2025, the typical business appeared 22% more often on mobile and received 8% fewer clicks. Clicks per appearance on mobile fell 21%. Across all devices, the typical business went from 4.8 to 3.0 clicks per 100 appearances, a fall of 29%.
About 4 in 5 appearances in the study are on mobile.
“Almost every number written about zero-click search comes from the United States or Europe, built on panels of browser data,” said Graeme Stiles, CEO of Algorithm. “South African marketers have had to take those figures second hand and guess how much applied here. We look after Search Console for more than 100 South African websites, so we could stop guessing and measure it.”
AI Overviews explain part of the change, not all of it
The study checked 11,811 of the businesses' main non-branded search terms against South African Google results pages. Of the 5,850 terms with a results page captured from June 2026 onwards, 70% showed an AI Overview, Google's AI-generated summary at the top of the results page.
Search terms that show an AI Overview today lost 22% of their clicks per appearance over the year, against 9% for terms without one. Average positions barely moved in either group, so the fall is not explained by businesses ranking worse.
The gap is sharpest at the top of the page. At position one, searches with an AI Overview bring between about a quarter and two thirds fewer clicks than searches without one, depending how the comparison is drawn. Below position one, the study found no consistent gap.
AI Overviews also show on buying and comparison searches about as often as on questions: 75% of transactional searches, 77% of commercial ones, and 75% of informational ones. Only navigational searches, where someone is looking for a particular website, show one less often, at 35%.
“The assumption has been that AI summaries hit question-led content and leave the commercial end alone,” said Stiles. “That is not what the data shows. Comparison searches, where people weigh up brands and prices, had the single biggest fall in clicks per appearance of anything we measured, down 34%.”
Branded searches are falling too
The study found that branded searches, where someone types a business's own name, still convert appearances into clicks far better than anything else, at 15.6 clicks per 100 appearances. They account for 13% of appearances and about 75% of clicks for the typical business.
Those are falling as well. Branded clicks per appearance fell 16% over the same six weeks, with branded appearances holding level and branded clicks down 14%.
Clicks per appearance fell in all seven sectors the study can report on, by between 15% and 50% for the typical business. Financial services, the sector that relies most on branded search, fell 37%.
What it means for marketers
The study's conclusion is that traditional search optimisation can no longer be planned or measured on its own. “Organic search still delivered 67.3 million clicks to these websites over 16 months, so this is not the death of search,” said Stiles. “What has changed is how many appearances it takes to earn one click. If your monthly report shows clicks and nothing else, it will read as a decline when what is actually happening is that your visibility is growing and converting differently. Traditional SEO, answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation now have to sit in one plan, with one owner, and be reported together.”
The full report is free to read, with no registration, at algorithm.agency/research/zero-click-search-south-africa.
A one-page brief for marketing teams is available as a printable page and a PDF.
