68 percent of all Google searches ended this spring without a single click. Two years ago that was 60 percent.
The figure comes from SparkToro, which, together with Similarweb, tracked the click behaviour of American searchers between January and April 2026. Rand Fishkin, co-founder, drew one conclusion from it: SEO alone will no longer bring your lost traffic back.
For you as an employer, there is an uncomfortable truth in that. The candidate who used to click on your vacancy doesn't reach your page anymore. The answer is already above the blue links. And in that answer you are either there, or you aren't.
Where the clicks go
Look where that traffic disappears to.
AI Overviews, the summary block that Google places above the search results, now appears in more than 20 percent of searches. Wherever that block is located, the number of click-throughs drops by almost 60 percent. In addition, Google AI Mode, the full chat variant, passed 1 billion users per month, with the number of queries doubling every quarter.
The search engine has become an answer machine. It reads, weighs and summarises, and the user gets an answer without ever clicking through.
Kim doesn't notice any of that. She asks her question and gets an answer. That the answer is compressed from ten sources, and that one of those sources could have been your werkenbij site, she doesn't see.
What this means for an employer
Translate the 68 percent into a candidate's behaviour.
What she used to look up, she now asks. What she used to compare across ten tabs, she now has summarised in a single answer. And what she used to figure out for herself, she now has weighed up for her.
The click was your chance to tell your own story. That chance is becoming scarce. The model now tells your story, drawing on more than just your own site: reviews, trade media, a profile on an external job board, an old interview with your director.
Where Glassdoor returns a list of opinions, a model gives a single answer. That single answer determines whether Kim clicks through to you or asks about the next employer.
Also look at what a candidate is truly asking. A candidate no longer types “software engineer vacancies Amsterdam”. She asks: “which tech employer is suited for someone looking for peace and quiet and autonomy.” The model then reads what it can find about you, weighs it, and mentions two or three names. If your story isn't clear and verifiable, your name simply won't come up.
For the employer branding team that poured money into videos and campaigns for years, that is an odd mirror. The budget has been spent, the story told, and the model only takes into account what is verifiable on the web.
Ask yourself one question. Do you still feature in that answer?
Two types of employers
For a language model, employers come in two types.
One has consistent, verifiable information in places the model trusts. That employer is mentioned. The other has outdated texts, scattered stories, a brand that says something slightly different everywhere. That employer doesn't get a look-in.
That is rarely down to the quality of the company. It is down to what the model can cite.
What is missing will be filled in. What is unclear will be simplified. And what is nowhere stated does not exist.
What you are working on today
Zero-click shifts where the impression lands: from your own page to a model's answer. You can influence that answer, just not with a campaign.
The work is more concrete than it sounds.
- The same core message on your site, in trade media and in interviews. Figures regarding locations, roles and culture that never contradict one another anywhere.
- Job openings and careers pages that are server-side rendered, so that a crawler actually reads them and doesn't encounter an empty JavaScript page.
- Facts that a model can pick up and attribute to you. “Salaries between X and Y.” “Office ten minutes from Utrecht Central station.” Concrete, verifiable, the same everywhere.
A page full of “we offer a challenging work environment” gives a model nothing to grasp. A page with facts does.
The cost of waiting
Fishkin said it for marketers, and it holds just as true for employers: build your brand in the places where your audience actually hangs out, because the blue link doesn't bring back what it once did.
For recruitment, that changes the front end of your profession. Soon, you will be competing for one thing: being mentioned in a sentence. If your name isn't there, there is no second place to drop back to. You simply do not exist.
What is still a summary above your job advert today will be the first impression in six months' time. What is still the first impression today will be the shortlist in a year's time. And what can still be your advantage today will be the absolute minimum everyone has in eighteen months' time.
The model will soon name two or three employers per question. There is space. For now.
My name is Bryan Peereboom, founder of AI Rebels. We make employers visible in language models.