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The story
Nikkei Cross Trend reports that a survey by Valuates found the “zero-click” rate — users getting their answer from an AI search without ever clicking through to the source — has climbed to 68%. On 5ch’s Business News+ board, reactions split between those who see this as the death knell for the SEO industry and those who argue AI search is fundamentally different from old keyword-driven search, calling it something that should “think alongside you rather than just search.” Complaints about excessive ads and pages that hide their content behind clicks piled up, with criticism landing more on how existing sites are built than on AI search itself.
Nikkei Cross Trend
October 18, 2026, 2:00 AM
According to a survey by Valuates (Minato, Tokyo), a consulting firm that analyzes web behavior log data from a consumer panel of roughly 2.5 million people,
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
The keyword here: "Don't make it search — make it think alongside you"
It's blatantly violating no-scraping terms of service left and right
We're at the stage where a law change is overdue
What are you even talking about — that "work" was just a business book some ghostwriter was paid to churn out
That kind of copy-everything writing was always a privilege reserved for people with money; the internet and digital tools just made it the norm for everyone
This goes back to Natsume Soseki's era, when writers ripped off Western formats
Nagai Kafu did the same thing
They just got there first because they were in a position to cash in on it
After the war it was because they were near the big-city media hubs of Tokyo and Osaka
That's literally it
— Masayoshi Son
(Excerpt from the shareholders' meeting)
It's already hit a plateau
Go ahead and wipe them out
That itself is marketing spin
Yeah, the top search results are basically all ad agencies/content farms anyway
Lately there are way too many ads showing up before the actual article.
They used to just sit off to the side
They've been slipping ads inside it since the year before last
It's not just a summary though
It pulls out the best parts from multiple sites and compares them
That's exactly where it's useful
Doing that yourself takes a lot of effort
Even double-checking it is easier once you've got some baseline knowledge
People who look down on AI probably aren't doing anything impressive themselves either
You can have it compare high-trust sources from all over the world
on top of that
I'll tell it: "add your own evaluation to each explanation
write it in separate columns so it's clear what's the source's content and what's your commentary"
that kind of prompt
and once it comes back, I'll go "fix this part" or
"add this in" and iterate
What it hands you on the first pass is pretty much never the best possible answer
They need to build sites that actually draw people in — good content, real appeal
If you want to see more, you'll still go to the actual site
Because AI is just the middleman here
But if that site's wall-to-wall ads, nobody's going
AI is playing the role of curator
And if you don't get curated, of course you decline
That hasn't changed since the early Google days
Same principle as PageRank
Things that multiply suddenly disappear just as suddenly — right now it's basically a locust swarm in full bloom
Still way better than how degraded you are
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
“Zero-click” refers to the behavior of being satisfied with a search result’s summary and never clicking through to the source — a phenomenon that was already being flagged around Google’s featured snippets well before AI search took off. This latest survey shows that rate climbing even further as AI search spreads. Within the thread, opinions clashed between those who see AI search’s unauthorized use of copyrighted material for training and summarization as a violation of anti-scraping terms, and those who countered that aggregating and presenting information has always existed in some form — neither side reached a verdict on who’s “right.” In practice, the SEO industry has already been shifting toward “AEO” (Answer Engine Optimization) tactics aimed at getting picked up by AI-generated answers, so the “end of an era” discussed in the thread looks more like a shift in method than the industry’s outright disappearance. The excessive ad load cited as a factor in declining click-through rates also reads less as a problem unique to AI search and more as a design issue on the part of existing websites.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Business News+) thread “AI Search Adoption Pushes Zero-Click Rate to 68% — Site Traffic Shaken.”
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