What Is Going On with Web Search? I Do Not Know
August 14, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
My information system yielded this write up this morning (August 5, 2026): “Zero Click Searches At An All-Time High.” I assumed that zero click meant that humanoids (not bots, of course) were navigating to Bing, Google, Yandex, and a small flotilla of metasearch engines and entering a 2.5 to 10 word series of nouns or maybe plugging in a question like “What’s going on with college graduates who cannot read?”
Hey, Midjourney, you added a little R2D2 to your illustration. Too bad you ignored the catalog, the microfilm reader, and the OPAC terminal. But good enough, right?
I read the first paragraph of the article and encountered the source of this datum or factoid. A company doing business as Datos, apparently a subsidiary of a firm doing business as SEMRush conducted a study. Since there was a link, I clicked it because I asked myself, “Why not read the original report?” In the back of my mind was a suspicion that I would not understand the article because “zero click searches” did not register in my dinobaby mind.
Instead of the report, I was asked to provide my name, my email address, and click submit. I could not do the submit action because my Proton mail address was not accepted. My back up Yahoo address was unacceptable as well. I closed the door on SEMRush and Datos and decided to write this dinobaby post.
Let’s look at the data from Datos through the lens of an online publication called Search Engine Journal. My impression of Search Engine Journal is that it is in the business of helping people with zero traffic (maybe related to the notion of zero click?) get traffic. In order to resolve this seeming contradiction, I worked through the write up about “Datos x SparkToro Search Report.” I do not know what an “x SparkToro” is. I have been fooling around with online search and retrieval for decades, and I have encountered a number of information retrieval outfits. Plus I have done consulting projects for a few. Mostly losers hired me because I was known to be totally unfamiliar with the crazy jargon used by IBM STAIRS III, SDC Orbit, DataStar, and some companies with which you might be familiar. I won’t mention them because the wizards running the firms have pivoted to other work; e.g., ski instructor in Norway, government employee in the UK, and search consultant in Singapore.
I persevered. Here are a few highlights from the SEMRush, Datos, and x SparkToro conglomeration.
First, here’s a notable statement:
AI Mode usage has plateaued, maybe even dropped in the U.S.
Okay, I have a question. The report to which I was denied access was the “latest”. Don’t people who do studies on a regular basis keep a copy of previous reports. Why not look at AI mode usage data longitudinally and provide some numbers? I know this sounds like a grouchy CE lecturer pointing out those in lectures are supposed to know. Well, guess what? An out of context statement as yip yap about an AI crash is causing contrarians like Ed Zitron to move into center stage.
Here’s another passage that caused me to raise my eyebrows:
Paid clicks are decreasing. Given the extraordinarily good state of Google’s revenues, I’m surprised to see such a significant reduction in paid clicks between March and June 2026. In the U.S., they dropped from 2.3% to 1.3% and in the EU/UK, 2.4% to 1.4%.
I know that Google has floated some bonds and allegedly was about $5 billion in the hole for the last quarter in terms of free cash flow, but the drop in “paid clicks” surprised me. Google is essentially a pay-to-play model. Give them money; get traffic. Now the marketing folks doll up my blunt statement, but if I read the number correctly this means that of Google’s total number of clicks (real, accidental, gratuitous, etc.) the 2.3 went down by an estimated 164 million searches per day. At this point I feel the need to see the data to which I was denied access. I don’t know what a “search” is. I don’t know what a “paid click” is. I don’t know much about whose data were monitored to create justify this “paid clicks are decreasing.” Oh, well. Dinobabies are truly annoying.
Am I finished? Not on your life, buster.
Consider this finding:
Wikipedia is on the rise. In Europe, Wikipedia went from being the seventh most visited domain from search in Q2 2025 to the third most visited in Q2 2026.
In the good old days, Wikipedia turned up in a search results list or what the search engine marketers call a “SERP” at or near the top for many general queries. Toss in some Google personalization magic, and a college student might get Wikipedia as number one with a bullet. (Why did college students access Wikipedia? Gee, maybe to double check their old fashioned work in the university’s library? Ho ho ho.)
What’s happened to Wikipedia traffic in the US? I know from the volume of “please contribute” emails I get, the outfit needs some money. The next-gen encyclopedia continues to fight border skirmishes with the Wikipedia staff, editors, volunteer experts, and contributors. But the traffic? I think that is what some folks might call steerable. I can hear the gasps now. Do you mean that search engines can direct traffic to certain Web sites? Remember, please, I am the person Richard Cheney wrote and suggested that his vice president Web site appear as a link whenever any person or bot landed on the White House home page. Is traffic steerable? Sure, you can’t be that naive, can you?
I am getting tired of suggesting that these data might be easier to understand if there were information about the sample, survey method, longitudinal data, and the other craziness that Statistics 101 instructors demand. Here’s my final snippet:
Navigational searches fell, but informational search rose. Navigational searches fell hardest on smaller engines – Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, et al. – all saw more significant drops in navigational searches than Google’s 22.9% – 16.4% in the U.S. market. But informational searches rose significantly. In the U.S. market, informational searches accounted for 59.69% in Q2 2025 compared to 65.12% in Q2 2026. The EU/UK saw a comparable rise over that same time period – 55.39% to 61.31%.
In the good old days when I was bumbling around in search and trying to explain why Lycos bought one of our Web search and retrieval services, many people went to a search engine like AllTheWeb or then Yahoo and typed a query like this: “BlueCross.” The user we learned from our data analyses and actual focus groups with users was that people asked a search engine for the name of a destination instead of typing it in the navigation bar. Did you know that you have to navigate to Google, enter “Good News”, and click that link to get to the once semi-useful digital headline service? Why? That how big dogs chase clicks.
Now consider this “informational search.” The term is not defined, and I assume this is the type of query a freshman in high school will enter when his or her history teacher assigns a 300 word report about Henry Clay, the great compromiser. It find it interesting that as students math and reading skills drop, informational searches are increasing. (Is there a correlation between this online retrieval and academic performance? Of course not.) The reason one uses an index is to find information; therefore, every query via humanoid or bot is an informational query. The numbers are essentially context free and, therefore, sort of floating out in dataspace emitting a dull red wavelength. I like those bright blue white hard data items.
Net net: SEO, SEM, x Spark whatever. Good luck getting your clients traffic that produces sales. Brilliant offers a pretty good statistics course. Check it out.
Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2026
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