The impact of zero-click on Brazilian e-commerce

What zero-click is — and what it is not

A zero-click search ends without a click on any result. The user may have gotten the answer, refined the query, or ended the session. The concept includes instant answers, maps, panels, featured snippets, and AI Overviews.

This does not mean “zero value”: if the answer mentions the brand or shows the product, it can influence a purchase made later through direct access, a marketplace, or a physical store — influence that typically escapes last-click attribution. It is also incorrect to attribute all zero-click to AI: the phenomenon predates AI Overviews.

What the data shows

The starting point: about six in every ten searches

A clickstream study by SparkToro and Datos found 58.5% zero-click searches in the US and 59.7% in the EU in 2024. In a new analysis using a Similarweb panel, SparkToro estimated 68.01% zero-click in the US between January and April 2026. Historical comparison calls for caution (panels and criteria differ), but the direction is consistent: a growing share of search delivers no external visit.

AI Overviews reduce the propensity to click

The Pew Research Center analyzed 68,879 searches from 900 US adults. With an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits; without the summary, 15%. Links inside the summary were clicked only 1% of the time. There was more session ending after summaries (26% vs. 16%), and longer queries triggered the experience more often (53% of searches with 10+ words vs. 8% of those with one or two).

In 2025, Ahrefs estimated a ~34.5% drop in first-position CTR when an AI Overview was present; in a 2026 update, it reported an impact close to 58%. These are observational studies — not e-commerce experiments — but they point to meaningful pressure on informational clicks.

What we know — and don't know — about Brazil

As of July 2026 there is no public clickstream panel that isolates the zero-click rate for Brazil alone, let alone for Brazilian e-commerce alone. Applying the US or EU percentages directly would create false precision. Even so, the local scale makes the topic material: the US ITA, citing ABCOMM, estimated 94 million online shoppers in Brazil in 2025 and revenue of US$ 36.3 billion.

What can be stated with confidence:

• →direct-answer and AI features are available to Brazilian users;
• →Brazilian PDPs, PLPs, and content compete for visibility in these environments;
• →international studies show a drop in clicks when AI answers appear;
• →the magnitude by sector, device, and intent in Brazil needs to be measured with your own data.

The redistribution does not affect all searches equally

Top of funnel: highest risk of losing the session

“What is 925 silver?”, “how do I choose a ring size?” can be resolved directly. Generic content is easily replaceable; content with testing, a proprietary table, Brazilian context, or a tool offers an additional reason to click and a more citable foundation.

Mid funnel: influence without linear navigation

The shopper discovers the brand in an answer, checks reputation in reviews, searches the name, and finishes on another channel. This tends to increase branded searches, direct visits, and conversions attributed to other channels — and organic may lose credit even though it started the consideration.

Bottom of funnel: the click is still decisive

Current price, variant choice, shipping, delivery time, Pix, installments, and checkout still require interaction. The impact is not “SEO stopped selling” — the priority shifts toward category/product queries with clear intent, complete commercial pages, price/stock/shipping consistency, correct feeds, and a brand recognizable enough to be searched for later.

The new Search Console paradox

Your store may see impressions rising and clicks flat or falling — the “great decoupling.” Reading this only as a ranking loss leads to wrong diagnoses. The analysis must separate position and coverage, SERP format change, intent, device, brand/product presence in the answer, and the downstream effect on branded search, direct access, and revenue.

How to adapt your content strategy

Write to be the answer — and to earn the click

The first paragraph answers clearly; then the page offers depth the summary can't hold: proprietary data, complete comparisons, a demonstration, a calculator, photos, video, and selection criteria. This avoids hiding the answer to force navigation and avoids generic text with no differentiator.

Connect informational content to the offer

Top-of-funnel content doesn't live in isolation: a page about sizing links to products with compatible measurements; a materials guide points to categories. Internal links help crawlers and people move through the topic to the product.

Distribute evidence beyond your domain

If discovery happens across several platforms, the brand needs consistent signals beyond the site: official profiles, videos, reviews, press, creators, and communities. This is not a license to spam — it's verifiable presence where your audience looks.

Preserve your transactional pages

The mistake would be abandoning commercial SEO to publish only “content for AI.” PDPs and PLPs concentrate intent: they need to answer questions, load well, have structured data, show availability, and reduce friction all the way to checkout.

A measurement dashboard for e-commerce

Add two practices: post-purchase surveys (“Where did you first hear about or research the brand?”, with an option for AI assistants) and group experiments (improve sets of comparable pages and track the difference in impressions, clicks, branded search, and revenue).

Conclusion

Under zero-click, search keeps distributing demand but retains more navigation. For Brazilian stores, the answer is not to choose between SEO and GEO: it's to run a single discovery infrastructure with three goals — be understood, be mentioned correctly, and capture the click when it's needed for the purchase. The central KPI is no longer “how much did organic traffic grow?” but “how much category demand can we influence and convert, with or without an attributable session?”.