Google Search Statistics (2026): Market Share, CTR and Zero-Click

Most "Google statistics" round-ups are a game of telephone. A number gets published once, gets quoted by a hundred blogs, and keeps circulating years after the original study has been superseded, or turns out never to have existed at all.

This page is different. Every statistic below links directly to the study or dataset it came from, with the publisher and year named inline. Where studies disagree (and on click-through rates they disagree a lot), we show you the range and tell you why. There is also a short section on famous "stats" you should stop citing, because they cannot be traced to any real research.

If you are quoting numbers about Google search in a report, a pitch or an article, these are the ones that hold up.

Key statistics at a glance

1. Google handled more than 5 trillion searches in 2024, roughly 14 billion per day (SparkToro/Datos, 2025).
2. Google holds 91.27% of global search engine market share (Statcounter, June 2026).
3. In Australia, Google's share is 88.04%, with Bing at 9% (Statcounter, June 2026).
4. The #1 organic result earns an average CTR between 27.6% (Backlinko, 2025) and 39.8% (First Page Sage, 2026), depending on the study.
5. Only 0.63% of searchers click anything on page two of Google (Backlinko, 2025).
6. 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 (SparkToro/Similarweb, 2026).
7. Paid ads capture only about 1% of all Google clicks (SparkToro/Datos, 2024).
8. The #1 organic result gets roughly 19x more clicks than the top paid ad (First Page Sage, 2026).
9. AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, peaked near 25% by July, then settled back to 15.69% in November 2025 (Semrush data via Search Engine Land, 2025).
10. Organic CTR on informational queries with an AI Overview fell 61% between mid-2024 and late 2025 (Seer Interactive, 2025).

How big Google search actually is

For years the internet repeated "8.5 billion searches per day", a figure extrapolated from decade-old disclosures. The best current measurement comes from SparkToro's research with Datos (a Semrush company), which used a large clickstream panel to estimate real volume.

• Google handled more than 5 trillion searches in 2024, which works out to roughly 14 billion searches every day (SparkToro/Datos, 2025).
• Search volume was not shrinking in the AI era. Google searches grew 21.64% between 2023 and 2024 (SparkToro/Datos, 2025).
• In the same study, Google received roughly 373 times more searches than ChatGPT, whose search-like prompts were estimated at about 37.5 million per day, similar in scale to Pinterest (SparkToro/Datos, 2025).
• Google itself has repeatedly confirmed that 15% of the searches it sees each day are brand new, never entered before, a figure it has restated since 2013 (Google, via Search Engine Land).

The takeaway for businesses: the pool of demand is not drying up. What is changing is how many of those searches turn into clicks, which we cover below.

Google's market share: worldwide and in Australia

Statcounter measures search referrals across millions of websites, making it the standard public source for engine market share.

Worldwide (Statcounter, June 2026):

• Google: 91.27%
• Bing: 4.68%
• Yahoo: 1.28%
• Yandex: 0.79%
• DuckDuckGo: 0.67%

Australia (Statcounter, June 2026):

• Google: 88.04%
• Bing: 9%
• Yahoo: 1.55%
• DuckDuckGo: 0.94%
• Ecosia: 0.22%

Two things stand out for Australian businesses. First, Google's dominance here is slightly lower than the global figure, mostly because Bing's 9% Australian share is nearly double its worldwide share, driven largely by Windows defaults on work computers. Second, even so, nearly nine out of ten Australian searches still start on Google. If your SEO strategy covers Google well, you have covered the vast majority of the market.

Click-through rates by position: what the studies actually say

CTR studies are where sloppy citation does the most damage. Different studies use different datasets (Search Console exports vs clickstream panels), different query mixes (branded vs unbranded) and different years, so their numbers vary widely. Quote the study, not just the number.

Backlinko (analysis of 4 million search results, last updated 2025) (source):

• Position 1: 27.6% average CTR
• The top 3 results capture 54.4% of all clicks
• The #1 result is 10x more likely to be clicked than position 10
• Moving from #2 to #1 delivers 74.5% more clicks on average
• Only 0.63% of searchers click a page-two result

First Page Sage (2026 report, drawn from client Search Console data) (source):

• Position 1: 39.8%
• Position 2: 18.7%
• Position 3: 10.2%
• Position 5: 5.1%
• Position 10: 1.6%
• A featured snippet in position 1 rises to 42.9%

Why the gap between 27.6% and 39.8% for position 1? Backlinko's dataset skews toward a broad mix of queries, while First Page Sage's client data includes branded and high-intent commercial queries that click through at much higher rates. The honest answer is that position 1 typically earns somewhere between a quarter and two fifths of clicks, and both studies agree on the shape of the curve: clicks collapse fast below position 3, and page two is a ghost town.

Advanced Web Ranking maintains monthly CTR curves from millions of keywords and confirms the same pattern, with separate curves for mobile and desktop and a large measured difference between branded and unbranded queries.

Zero-click search: where the clicks went

"Zero-click" means a search that ends without the user clicking through to any website. It is the single most important trend in search behaviour this decade, and the numbers have moved fast.

• Semrush's own 2022 study of 609,809 US queries found 25.6% of desktop searches and 17.3% of mobile searches ended with zero clicks, and noted many of these were users refining their query rather than being fully satisfied (Semrush, 2022, via Search Engine Land).
• By 2024, SparkToro's study with Datos clickstream data found 58.5% of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web (SparkToro/Datos, 2024).
• The same study found that of the clicks that do happen, nearly 30% go to Google-owned properties such as YouTube, Maps and Google Flights. For every 1,000 US searches, only 360 clicks reach the open web (SparkToro/Datos, 2024).
• SparkToro's 2026 follow-up, using Similarweb panel data covering January to April 2026, found the zero-click share had climbed to 68.01%, meaning fewer than one in three Google searches now sends a click to the open web (SparkToro/Similarweb, 2026).

Note the two Semrush-adjacent numbers are not contradictory: the 2022 Semrush study counted query refinements separately, while the SparkToro studies count any search that does not produce an open-web click. Methodology matters, which is exactly why each figure above names its study.

For businesses, the lesson is not "SEO is dead". It is that ranking now needs to do two jobs: win the clicks that still happen, and get your brand into the answers Google shows directly. That second job is why answer engine optimisation now sits alongside classic SEO.

AI Overviews and SERP features

Google's AI Overviews reshaped the results page through 2025, and the best longitudinal data comes from Semrush's tracking of over 10 million keywords.

• AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of tracked queries in January 2025, surged to a peak of around 25% in July 2025, then pulled back to 15.69% by November 2025 as Google recalibrated (Semrush data via Search Engine Land, 2025).
• AI Overviews are no longer just for informational questions. Informational queries fell from 91.3% of AI Overview triggers in January 2025 to 57.1% by October 2025, meaning commercial and transactional searches increasingly trigger them too (Semrush, 2025).
• Google Ads appeared on 25.56% of AI Overview SERPs by October 2025, up from 5.17% in March, a 394% increase in eight months (Semrush, 2025).
• The CTR impact is measurable. Across 3,119 informational queries and 25.1 million organic impressions, organic CTR on queries showing an AI Overview fell 61% (from 1.76% to 0.61%) between June 2024 and September 2025, and even queries without an AI Overview saw organic CTR fall 41% (Seer Interactive, 2025).
• The upside: brands actually cited inside AI Overviews earned 35% more organic clicks than brands that were not cited (Seer Interactive, 2025).

That last statistic is the strategic headline. Visibility inside AI answers is not a consolation prize, it drives clicks. Our guide on how to rank in Google AI Overviews covers the practical side.

Paid vs organic: where the clicks really go

Advertising dominates Google's revenue, but not its clicks.

• Paid ads account for approximately 1% of all Google clicks in US clickstream data (SparkToro/Datos, 2024).
• In Semrush's 2022 breakdown, 45.1% of desktop search actions ended in an organic click versus 1.8% in a paid click (Semrush, 2022, via Search Engine Land).
• First Page Sage measures the top paid ad at a 2.1% CTR, against 39.8% for the top organic result, which is where the widely quoted "organic #1 earns 19x more clicks than the top ad" figure comes from (First Page Sage, 2026).

None of this means ads are pointless. It means organic visibility is structurally undervalued relative to where users actually click, which is the core economic argument for SEO. If you are weighing up the investment, our breakdown of what SEO costs in Australia puts numbers on it.

Mobile vs desktop

• Worldwide, mobile devices generate 51.51% of web traffic, against 47.12% for desktop and 1.36% for tablets (Statcounter, June 2026).
• Australia bucks the global trend: desktop still leads at 53.27%, with mobile at 44.25% (Statcounter, June 2026), reflecting high office and home computer usage.
• Device changes behaviour, not just screen size. Advanced Web Ranking publishes separate CTR curves for mobile and desktop because results display differently and users click differently on each (Advanced Web Ranking, updated monthly).

For local service businesses, mobile remains where urgent, high-intent queries happen. Our near me search optimisation guide covers how to capture them.

Stats to stop citing

These "statistics" appear in thousands of articles and cannot be traced to any verifiable current study. Delete them from your slide decks.

• "By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches." A prediction, not a measurement, widely misattributed to comScore. It referred to a broader claim about voice and image search and the milestone never arrived. No study has ever verified it.
• "Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day." An extrapolation from figures Google disclosed over a decade ago. The best current panel measurement puts the real number around 14 billion per day (SparkToro/Datos, 2025).
• "46% of Google searches are local." Traces back to a conference remark, not a published Google dataset. Google has never released a verifiable figure for this.
• "75% of users never scroll past the first page." Circulated for years with a citation chain that dead-ends. The directionally similar but actually measured stat is Backlinko's finding that only 0.63% of searchers click a page-two result (Backlinko, 2025). Cite that instead.

Methodology and sources

Every statistic on this page was checked against its original source in June 2026. We only include figures that meet three tests: the publisher is named, the year is stated, and the number appears in the primary study or an authoritative report of it (not a round-up quoting a round-up). Where a primary page has moved, we link the most authoritative available record.

Primary sources used: Statcounter Global Stats (market share and device share, live monthly data), SparkToro with Datos and Similarweb (search volume and zero-click behaviour, 2024 to 2026), Backlinko (CTR, 4 million results), First Page Sage (CTR, 2026), Advanced Web Ranking (CTR curves, updated monthly), Semrush (AI Overviews and SERP features, 10 million keywords), Seer Interactive (AI Overview CTR impact), and Search Engine Land (reporting Google's own statements and Semrush's 2022 study).

CTR figures in particular vary by dataset, query mix and year. Where studies disagree, we present both and name them. Statcounter figures are point-in-time and will drift month to month; check the live pages for current values.

FAQ

What percentage of searches does Google control in Australia?

88.04% as at June 2026, according to Statcounter. Bing is a distant second at 9%, higher than its global share thanks to Windows and Edge defaults on Australian work machines.

What is the average CTR for position 1 on Google?

Between roughly 28% and 40%, depending on the study. Backlinko measured 27.6% across a broad 4-million-result dataset, while First Page Sage measured 39.8% in 2026 from client data that includes more branded and commercial queries. Both agree clicks fall off a cliff after position 3.

What percentage of Google searches are zero-click?

The most recent measurement found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web in early 2026 (SparkToro/Similarweb, 2026), up from 58.5% in 2024. Definitions matter: earlier Semrush research counted query refinements separately and reported lower figures.

Do AI Overviews reduce website traffic?

On affected queries, yes. Seer Interactive's 2025 analysis found organic CTR fell 61% on informational queries showing an AI Overview. But brands cited inside those overviews earned 35% more organic clicks than uncited brands, so the answer is to earn citations, not to abandon search. See our AI Overviews ranking guide.

Is SEO still worth it if most searches are zero-click?

Yes, and the same datasets show why: organic results still capture the overwhelming majority of clicks that do happen (paid captures about 1%), Google search volume grew over 21% in a single year, and visibility inside AI answers depends on the same authority signals SEO builds. The work has shifted, not disappeared. More on how we approach it on our SEO services page.

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Citing these statistics? You are welcome to use any figure on this page. Please credit the original study linked beside each statistic, and if this compilation saved you time, a link to Orkkid (orkkid.com/blog/google-search-statistics) is appreciated. For more research-backed guides, browse our SEO articles.