Zero-Click Search and the Invisible Tax on Small Business: Who Benefits When Nobody Clicks?

Zero-click searches now account for 58-65% of all Google queries globally. This paper examines zero-click search not as a theft of traffic, but as a filter that exposes which businesses were genuinely useful versus which were gaming search algorithms. Using 16 months of Google Search Console data (December 2024 to April 2026) from four Indonesian business domains across different verticals (industrial equipment, engineering services, knowledge content, and handmade goods), the paper documents how click-through rates diverge dramatically by query intent type even as overall impressions grow. The data shows informational queries suffering CTR collapse to 0.03-0.12%, while brand queries maintain 20-36% CTR and local-intent queries hold at 8-22%. The paper proposes a taxonomy of zero-click vulnerability based on query intent, introduces the concept of "invisible tax" as the economic cost borne by businesses whose value is extracted by search platforms without reciprocal traffic, and estimates this cost at approximately Rp 4 million per month for a typical Indonesian small business relying on outdated SEO strategies. A secondary finding documents the compounding effect of SEO injection attacks (slot gacor gambling spam), which exploited one study domain, inflating impressions by 1,500% while generating zero legitimate conversions.