In odd-one-out tasks in visual search, participants signal the detection of a target popping-out among distractors. Here, benefits for the popping-out dimension, like color or orientation arise, thought to be caused by dimension weighting. Responses in such tasks are done by pressing a certain key for present targets, whereas the absence of a target is signaled with another key. Yet, only trials with succeeding present targets are analyzed, whereas all other are typically excluded from analysis (as no target with feature dimension is present). According to action control theories, responding to stimuli leads to binding of response and stimulus’ features into an event file and upon repetition of any of its component to its retrieval. Accordingly, responses to the presence and absence of stimuli in visual search detection tasks can be seen as discriminatory responding that can repeat or change. We hypothesized that (often-ignored) absent trials should still affect task performance in accordance with binding mechanisms. In the present study, participants signaled the presence or absence of a target popping-out among distractors. Targets stood out either by shape or orientation dimension. Importantly, from one display to the next, all presented stimuli could repeat or change their color. We observed dimension weighting in present-present trials. Crucially, we also observed a strong binding effect between present/absent responses and color across all trials. Our results suggest that binding effects are ubiquitous in experimental designs not intended to investigate such. Further, our results offer new perspectives for visual search by incorporating action control theories.