Over 60% of Google searches end without a click, RP3 Agency's Altunisik writes
Ayse Altunisik, a media supervisor at RP3 Agency, writes in MediaPost on August 5, 2026 that more than 60% of Google searches now end without a single click, as AI overviews and large language models answer queries directly. Instagram keeps shoppers inside its app and TikTok surfaces answers in comments, she notes, pulling engagement toward destinations that clicks were never built to measure. Altunisik traces the shift to Goodhart's Law: once clicks became the target advertisers chased, they stopped functioning as an honest measure of the customer journey.
Campaigns built for direct response, email and retargeting keep a reliable signal in the click, since those lower-funnel channels still show where a customer sits in the journey. Upper-funnel awareness work needs a different scorecard, because click activity there says little about whether the message actually shifted opinion. Altunisik recommends layered measurement over any single number, and she flags a caution for anyone hearing a vendor argue clicks no longer matter: that vendor usually sells a different metric that benefits its own platform.