New data from SparkToro and Similarweb makes a sobering read. In the first four months of 2026, 68% of Google searches ended without a single click to the open web.

A decade ago the figure sat around 45%. The acceleration has been driven by AI Overviews, instant answers, and a search experience increasingly designed to keep people inside Google rather than send them out to your website.

For a consumer brand selling impulse purchases, this is awkward. For a MedTech company trying to reach health professionals and procurement leads, it is a structural problem you cannot ignore.

Why this hits MedTech harder than most

Your buyers do not make snap decisions. A clinician evaluating a new device, or a procurement team comparing suppliers, runs a long sequence of research queries before anyone speaks to your sales team. Historically, those queries were how prospects found you, read your evidence, and built confidence in your technology.

Now a growing share of that research never leaves the results page. The AI answer summarises, the searcher moves on, and your carefully built website earns the influence without earning the visit.

So the question is no longer only whether you rank on Google. It is whether, when an LLM answers a clinical or commercial question about your category, you are the source it cites, and whether it is citing you accurately.

Traffic is the wrong thing to be measuring

The instinct is to fight harder for clicks. The data says that battle is already lost, and chasing it wastes budget.

The brands holding their ground are doing something different. They treat Google search and AI-generated answers as one integrated visibility problem, and they build the foundations that make their content retrievable, citable and trusted by both.

That means structured, AI-readable content, strong authority signals, and a presence on the platforms that feed LLM answers in the first place.

What good looks like

Mediplus is a UK MedTech manufacturer competing against global multinationals. They engaged SparkLife to raise their digital visibility and show up at the moments clinicians and procurement teams were actively researching.

Rather than separating SEO from AI, SparkLife ran them as a single workstream: targeted content built around real clinical and procurement questions, product and category page optimisation, and the technical foundations that make a site readable by AI.

In three months:

•       Organic search clicks grew 36% to 6,630

•       Monthly impressions grew 72% to 542,000

•       UK search visibility rose by 32 percentage points

•       Mediplus gained 25 keywords ranking in the top three on Google, against just 3 for one global competitor

Almost all of that growth came from non-branded, educational searches, the exact queries prospects run early in their journey. Over a six month window, LLM citations of Mediplus content rose 39% and cited pages rose 23%, laying the groundwork for brand mentions in AI answers to follow.

A smaller manufacturer out-cited a global competitor, because visibility was built deliberately rather than left to chance.

Find out where your brand stands

The zero-click shift rewards the companies that act early and punishes the ones still measuring success by clicks alone. The first step is knowing how visible your brand really is across both Google and the AI tools your buyers now use.

Download our LLM Visibility Toolkit to see how MedTech brands are being found, cited and trusted in AI-generated answers, and what to do if yours is not. You can download it here.

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