Fewer clicks, same calls: what still gets a local business chosen

Every few weeks a business owner forwards me the same sales pitch: SEO is dead, nobody clicks on websites anymore, buy this instead. The numbers behind that pitch are real. The conclusion is wrong, at least for a business that makes its money from phone calls in a 20-mile radius.

Here’s what the numbers say, where the decision actually moved, and what I’d check on your own profile this week.

What the zero-click numbers actually say

SparkToro, working from Similarweb clickstream data, found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website between January and April 2026. In 2024 the same kind of measurement put it at 60.45%.

That number has limits worth knowing before anyone uses it on you:

• It comes from desktop and mobile web panels in the US. Searches inside Google’s own mobile app aren’t in it, and SparkToro says zero-click behavior there may be higher, not lower.
• Panels and methods change between studies, so a straight line from older figures to this one is rough at best.
• A “zero-click search” means nobody left Google. It doesn’t mean nobody did anything.

Google’s answer came in July. Nick Fox, Google’s head of Search, posted on LinkedIn: “We’re now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search alone.” No baseline came with it, no comparison to last year, and no share of total searches. Billions sounds like a lot until you remember how many searches Google handles.

Both things can be true at once. Google still sends a lot of traffic, and a growing share of searches finish on Google’s own pages. The question for a local business is what happens on those pages.

Zero clicks isn’t zero customers

Try this on your phone. Search for your trade and your city: “fence repair Hayward”, “roof leak Fremont”, whatever you’d type if your own roof was dripping. Before you reach a single website, look at what’s on the screen. Usually it’s some ads, a map with three businesses, their star ratings and review counts, their hours, and a Call button under each one.

A homeowner can look at those three, tap Call on one, and book the job without ever opening a website. In SparkToro’s data, that’s a zero-click search. In your books, it’s a Tuesday estimate.

Google counts these. Your Business Profile has a Performance report that shows calls (taps on the call button), direction requests, website clicks and the search terms people used to find you. None of those calls show up in your website analytics, which is why an owner looking only at site traffic can see a decline while the phone rings about the same.

So the decision didn’t vanish. It moved off your website and onto four places: your Business Profile, the map pack, your reviews and, more and more, the AI answer at the top of the page.

How homeowners still pick who to call

Search was never the whole story. Roofing Contractor and Owens Corning asked homeowners how they find a roofer in their 2026 homeowner survey (completed October 2025):

• 74% follow a recommendation from a neighbor, friend or family member.
• About 62% go back to a roofer they’ve used before.
• 50% use search engines.
• About 25% use social media, and about 25% use home services websites.

About 62% called online reviews very or extremely important. Just 8% said not very important and 1% said not important at all.

That’s one trade, but in my experience the pattern fits most work that’s expensive and happens at someone’s house. Referrals start the search. Then people look you up. A referral who searches your name and finds a thin profile with six reviews from 2021 is a referral you can still lose to the next name on the list.

Where the work goes now

Google is unusually plain about how the local results work. Its own help page says local ranking comes down to relevance, distance and prominence, and that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” The same page says positive reviews and helpful replies can help a business stand out.

Put that together with the click data and the work shifts like this:

• The profile is your first impression. Right categories, every service listed, real hours, a phone number someone answers, photos of actual jobs.
• Reviews are the tiebreaker. When three companies show up with similar stars, a homeowner looks at how many there are and how recent they are. If you want more of them without getting in trouble, the FTC’s review rule is worth ten minutes.
• The website becomes the proof page. Fewer people click through, but the ones who do are further along. They want your license number, photos of work you did, the areas you cover and a way to call from the top of the screen.
• The phone matters as much as the ranking. Ranking first and sending calls to voicemail is an expensive way to help your competitor.

There’s a trade-off here, and I’ll say it plainly. If your business lived on informational blog traffic (“how to stain a deck”), you’ll feel this more, because that’s exactly the kind of search AI answers swallow. For most contractors, that traffic wasn’t booking jobs anyway.

What I’d stop measuring

Stop treating website traffic as the scoreboard. Traffic is a useful number if your website sells ads. For a contractor, the numbers that matter are calls, form fills and booked jobs, and the first of those now happens partly off your site.

If someone tells you SEO is dead, ask them which of those three numbers they’re going to move, and how they’ll show you.

What to do about it this week

1. Open your Business Profile Performance report. Compare calls and direction requests for the last three months against the same months last year. That’s a better health check than site traffic.
2. Run the phone test. Search your main service and your city on your phone. Note whether you’re in the map pack, and how your stars and review count look next to the other two.
3. Search your own business name. Check that the hours, phone number, services and photos are right and current. Fix anything that isn’t today.
4. Count your reviews from the last 90 days. If it’s a handful or fewer, set up a simple asking routine (the review rule post has one you can copy).
5. Open your website on your phone. Can someone call you in one tap from the top of the page? Is your license number there? Are the photos yours? If not, those are the first fixes.

If you’d rather someone else ran these checks every month, that’s part of our SEO and content marketing work.

Sources

1. TechWyse (reporting SparkToro research) · Jun 11, 202668% of U.S. Google Searches Ended Without a Click in Early 2026, SparkToro Data Shows
2. Search Engine Roundtable · Jul 20, 2026Google: We Send Billions Of Clicks To Websites Weekly Through AI Search
3. Roofing Contractor, with Owens Corning · May 1, 20262026 homeowner survey
4. Google Business Profile Help · Oct 27, 2026How to improve your local ranking on Google
5. Google Business Profile Help · Oct 27, 2026Business Profile performance