Similarweb's clickstream data puts the figure at 69.5% for January to April 2026, the highest of six countries in a SparkToro comparison that also covered the US (68.0%), France (65.3%), Canada (63.8%), Italy (63.4%) and Germany, the lowest, at 62.1%.
That changes where digital budget should go next.
AI Overviews and chat-based search are the main reasons. Google increasingly answers a question directly on the results page rather than sending the click onward, and a growing share of searches now happen inside a chat tool instead of a search box.
Those searches are still happening. They're resolving on the results page or inside a chat tool, instead of through a click to a website.
Ranking well and earning the click worked when a search engine behaved like a directory. It's becoming a research assistant instead, and being cited inside its answer now matters as much as ranking above it.
A brand can be named in an AI answer without anyone clicking through to prove it happened. That still builds awareness. It belongs in the measurement plan alongside rankings and traffic.
Search Engine Land's 2026 guidance for teams navigating this splits budget four ways: roughly 40% on the technical foundations that decide whether AI systems and search engines can read a site at all, 25% on the trust signals, expert authorship, clear sourcing, that AI systems use to decide what's credible enough to cite, 20% on the data and content infrastructure needed to keep all of that current, and the rest on building the skills in-house to run it.
The technical foundations, crawlability, structured data, fast pages, work the same way they always have. They now serve two audiences: Google's ranking system, and an AI system deciding what to read, extract and cite.
Ownership needs to change too. A named owner and a measurement plan that tracks citations and AI referral traffic alongside rankings, reviewed regularly, catches the next shift before it turns up as a surprise in a board meeting.
None of this needs a full replatform or a twelve-month roadmap to start. A short audit of what's already being cited and where the technical gaps are, paired with a named owner for AI-search visibility, is a real move a team can make this quarter without a big budget ask.
Mando Group is an Optimizely Platinum Partner, recognised by Optimizely as an Agentic specialist partner and onboarding specialist, based in the UK. We help digital teams work out what a shift like this means for their own site and their own budget, not generic advice built for someone else's business.
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