What we measure, and what we can't.

Zero Clicks Given follows the same 300 websites over time. It is observational. It shows what happened to each site. It does not prove why.

The sites

The top 100 websites by estimated organic search traffic in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, taken from the AhrefsTop country lists for October 2026. That is 300 entries and 226 distinct sites, because some sites rank in more than one country. The list is frozen. A site that drops out of the top 100 stays in the study.

Search traffic

Estimated monthly organic search traffic from Ahrefs Site Explorer, read for the first of Oct 2024, Oct 2025 and Oct 2026, for the country in question, including subdomains. Ahrefs models traffic from keyword rankings and search volumes. These are estimates. They are never measured clicks, and they will differ from a site's own analytics. 900 of 900 readings are in. Missing readings stay blank. The months in between are being collected next.

Rankings held

We count the keywords where each site ranks in Google's top three positions, from the same Ahrefs readings. A site “held its rankings” when that count fell by less than 10%. A site “lost traffic” when estimated traffic fell by 10% or more. Both thresholds are ours and are applied the same way to every site.

Google's results page

Ten informational searches per market, chosen from the top Google keywords of the biggest publisher, reference and health sites in the cohort. For each search we read the Ahrefs snapshot of Google's results page nearest each date. The timeline of Google changes comes from Google's own announcements and the trade press, with a source on every line.

AI citations

Citation counts come from the Ahrefs index of AI responses for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, captured 28 October 2026. Where Ahrefs reports more cited pages than citations, the count fails our check and is withheld. 749 of 900 counts pass.

Separately, each site gets five questions written from its own top Google keywords. They are a fixed sample. They tell us whether a site is named in answers to its own searches. They are not a measure of how often people ask those questions.

Answers came from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini through Ahrefs custom prompts, collected between 28 October and 4 November 2026. “Named” means the site's name or domain appears in the answer. “Linked” means the answer links to the site or a subdomain. Both are automatic checks. Where a site's name is also an everyday word, such as Target, Indeed or Booking, it counts only when the answer writes it as a name: capitalised mid-sentence, as a list label or in a table. A few names are too generic for that, such as news.com.au and business.gov.au, so only the domain or a known name like Service NSW counts. Treat single sites as directional. Hand review is still to come.

Visits and AI traffic

Monthly modelled visits by channel come from Semrush Traffic Analytics, for the country in question, from November 2022. It is a separate source from Ahrefs and the two are never combined. It covers all 300 entries. Months where Semrush has no reading stay blank. Semrush restates this data on 9 November 2026.

Industries and publishers

Each site carries one of sixteen industry tags. A site is a publisher when its core business is content people read for information: news, reference, health, recipes and reviews. The full list is on the industries page.

What this cannot show

• Why a site lost traffic. AI Overviews, core updates, site changes and seasonality all overlap.
• Real clicks. Only a site's own analytics can show those.
• Clicks from AI Overviews, which arrive as Google traffic.
• AI assistant visits to all 300 sites yet. A first sample is live and the rest are being added.

Who made this

Zero Clicks Given is a research project by AI Search Leaders, the peer community for search leaders run by Jeremy Cabral and Tom Critchlow. No vendor paid for it. Corrections are welcome through the dataset form and are logged on this page.

Snapshot assembled 2026-11-07.