Zero-click rate
The zero-click rate is the share of searches or AI answers that end without a click to any website.
The zero-click rate is the share of searches that end without the person clicking through to any website. If 100 people search and 60 of them leave without clicking anything, the zero-click rate is 60%.
It's the number behind a worry many marketers share: AI answers satisfy more people on the spot, so fewer of them visit. Knowing roughly how high the rate runs for your kind of question helps you decide how much to judge AI search by traffic.
How it's measured
You can't measure it for the whole web from your own site, because you only see the people who do arrive. The figures you'll read about come from research firms that study panels of people's browsing, or from search engines' own data. Each uses its own method, so figures from different studies rarely match.
For your own site, the nearest thing is comparing how often you appear with how many visits you get. Search Console shows impressions and clicks for ordinary results. Google and Bing don't share their AI reports with other tools yet, and nothing breaks out the clicks from AI answers for you.
Why it varies
Some questions are naturally zero-click. "What time does the café open?" or "How many grams of coffee for a cafetière?" are answered in a line. Others need a visit: comparing prices across shops, reading a long review, buying something.
For example, Fernhill Coffee finds that its brewing guides get very few visits from AI assistants, even though the answers use them often. Its pages for buying a subscription get far more. The questions behind the guides end in the answer. The ones behind the subscriptions end on a shop.
In AnswerOrbit
We can't see what people did after reading an answer, so we don't show a zero-click rate. What you can do is put two numbers side by side: how often you're named and cited, from What the numbers mean, and the visits AI assistants send you, in the AI traffic tab of Website and AI traffic.