South Africa, Oct. 30 -- Marketers around the world have spent the year talking about the shift to a zero-click world, where someone searches, reads the answer on Google's results page, and never clicks through to anyone's website. Until now there has been no South African data on how far that shift has gone here.

There is now. South African businesses are appearing in Google more often than they were a year ago and getting fewer clicks for it, according to the first large-scale study of zero-click search built on South African data.

The study, published by performance marketing agency Algorithm, analysed 16 months of Google Search Console data from 110 South African websites run by 71 businesses across eight sectors. It covers 1.43 bil...