Author: Ben Jacobson, chief content officer at InboundJunction.
Digital marketing was once all about driving as much traffic to your website as possible, but that norm has modified.
Years ago, serps began shifting the establishment by surfacing ‘answer boxes,’ which deliver desired information with none need for people to click through to an external web page. The rise of AI search – each on dedicated platforms and in the shape of Google’s recent AI Mode and AI Overviews – has catalysed the shift in user behaviour, in order that now, search-referred website visitors have turn out to be more rare.
Many have even begun to wonder if AI has killed search engine optimisation.
If nobody will visit your website anyway, then is there any reason to speculate in ensuring your content surfaces?
Today, the vast majority of Google searches end with the user learning what they were searching for right there, on top of the search results, which is why search engine optimisation professionals call the phenomenon ‘zero-click search.’ While contending with zero-click search actually calls for a mindset shift, it doesn’t necessarily mean less exposure for your brand and doesn’t need to mean fewer sales conversions referred by search.
But before we will get into what it means to make peace with zero-click search, we’d like to first understand how and why we came.
Zero clicks in historical context
Today, the kind of answer box that receives essentially the most attention is the AI Overview (AIO), where AI-generated answers and expandable summaries appear above any of the standard ‘blue links’ on the search engine results page (SERP). However, there are plenty more varieties of answer boxes, lots of which have existed for years. These include featured snippets, knowledge panels, people also ask (PAA) boxes, and Google Business Profiles.
It’s a shift that’s been brewing for a very long time. Marketers with long memories might recall the uproar a decade ago, when Google began presenting song lyrics directly within the SERP, aggregating text sourced from song lyric reference web sites and essentially killing the potential for ad revenues in that publishing area of interest.
What obligation does Google have towards the search engine optimisation community, and even publishers? The ability to stop the flow of traffic to web sites isn’t to be taken evenly, and the digital marketing ecosystem is on edge.
Over the past ten years, the trend has only continued, with Google surfacing more information in its search results and data studies showing fewer and fewer clickthroughs to web sites over time. It was six years ago that SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin announced findings indicating that over half of Google searches resulted in no clicks, and last winter, Bain estimated that 80% of individuals click on links of their Google search results only 60% of the time.
Over the last two or so years, the rise of AI search has accelerated this trend further, and Google’s rollout of the AI Overview (AIO) at the highest of normal search results has been a potent clickthrough killer. A study by Kevin Indig showed a transparent increase in zero-click searches after AIOs were officially rolled out in May 2024.
Botify and DemandSphere also investigated the matter and located that as of late 2024, AI Overviews appear in 47% of Google searches, rising to 58.7% for informational queries. AIOs take up nearly half the screen space on desktop devices and nearly 80% on mobile, pushing regular SERP results to ‘below the fold’ and driving zero-click searches to 60% of the full.
Beyond the rise of AI and other answer boxes in Google search, persons are also increasingly using LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity for search purposes, which suggests they aren’t even seeing SERPs in any respect. The Bain study cited above reported that 68% of LLM users accomplish that to research and summarize information, with 42% asking LLMs for purchase recommendations.
What does this all mean for marketing? Is search engine optimisation dead within the water?
search engine optimisation isn’t dead, but it surely is different
Since the dawn of democratised web publishing within the early 2000s, content marketing theory has been all about using your website as a media hub that builds an audience, without necessarily being conversion-focused.
Back then, you knew that not every visitor was going to turn out to be a customer, but that was okay, because acquiring traffic from search, social, and other channels was simply the way you fed the highest of your funnel. You expected some results in drop out, but you knew that as people interacted with you on your blog, they’d begin to trust you, subscribe to your email list, and move through your funnel until they were ready to contemplate and convert, at which point you were top-of-mind.
Today, the conversion process you’re used to, whereby people click on blue links and then you definitely nurture them through your website, has moved down the funnel. Commercial intent searches at the underside of the funnel are less more likely to trigger AIOs and answer boxes, making clickthroughs more common. What’s more, people do sometimes click on source citations in AI search results – possibly greater than you think that.
A recent TrustRadius survey of tech buyers found that 72% encounter AI Overviews when researching vendors, while 7% have began using other AI services like ChatGPT as a part of their information collection journeys. Thankfully, there’s still some healthy scepticism resulting from AI’s tendency to ‘hallucinate,’ with 90% of buyers indicating that they click through to resources featured in AIOs to confirm details. Trust in AI, nevertheless, does appear to be growing.
This means you’ll be able to (and will) still take a look at search channels, AI-powered and otherwise, to boost brand awareness and grow conversions and revenue, but don’t expect those top-of-funnel audiences to find yourself on your website.
People are actually performing their research on channels which might be beyond your own domain. They’re consulting review platforms and community forums, watching TikTok videos, listening to podcasts, and yes, having prolonged conversations with LLMs. They’re learning about what varieties of solutions are on the market that may alleviate their pain points, they usually’re comparing vendors.
Then, once they’ve a sense that they wish to do business with you, they’ll seek for your brand name and click on through to your homepage – fully pre-nurtured and able to close. That’s why today’s marketers take a look at brand name searches and homepage referrals as essentially the most effective proxy metric for brand visibility in AI search, which is why search engine optimisation still matters.
But it also implies that the lines between search engine optimisation and PR are blurring. Acquiring brand mentions in trusted publications and platforms is now arguably more necessary than acquiring keyword-optimised backlinks, since it’s these mentions that send signals to AI search that you simply’re worthy of surfacing in AI answers. Hence the rise of latest buzz terms like GEO (generative engine optimisation), AEO (answer engine optimisation), and LEO (language engine optimisation), all of that are just ways of claiming ‘search engine optimisation for AI search.’
In the age of zero-click search, appearing in SERPs and AI answers is becoming more about widening your footprint in domains, in an effort to boost brand awareness and brand authority. Today it’s not about acquiring low-intent traffic – it’s about being mentioned and really helpful.
The funnel has modified shape
We’ve been saying ‘the client journey shouldn’t be linear’ for some time, but it surely bears repeating. For years, thought leaders have been telling us that the brand new customer journey is self-service. People won’t opt in on squeeze pages or offer you their email addresses for nurture until they’re close to creating a choice.
Now, with zero-click search, it’s growing much more extreme. Prospects are more likely to only visit your website later in the method, so you’ll be able to’t pixel and retarget them, and you’ll be able to’t nurture them via on-page chat or email.
This isn’t a short lived blip – it’s a deep-seated shift within the marketing processes. The customer journey begins before you’re aware of it and doesn’t proceed in a predictable manner, so you’ll be able to’t chart it and strategize top-of-funnel blog posts accordingly.
But reports of the death of search engine optimisation have been greatly exaggerated. You can’t map automated multi-channel nurture messaging to a linear journey anymore, but you’ll be able to still use the funnel model as a way of understanding any given buyer’s personal journey, since it tells you their mindset at different stages.
Armed with this angle, you’ll be able to map these stages to intent and construct messaging and distribution strategies around that journey, with content that addresses people’s questions appearing within the varieties of media properties that AI search sees as authoritative.
Your recent goal is for prospective customers to learn enough about you – via content discovery on social media, mentions on third party publications, discussions in community platforms, and conversations with AI answers – that they begin asking follow-up questions on your brand. If you’ll be able to send the correct signals to the AI engines in order that they know how you can answer accurately and favorably, then your ideal customers will still find their solution to you.
search engine optimisation needs a brand new yardstick
People don’t click on links in search results like they used to, but an efficient earned media approach – essentially a brand new hybrid of PR, content promotion, and off-page search engine optimisation – remains to be value your time. Done accurately, it may well provide significant lift to brand awareness, authority, and popularity, resulting in shorter sales cycles, higher leads, and more revenue.
In this recent reality, you’ll be able to’t easily measure results by tracking clickthroughs and even your rankings for keywords related to your product category and functionalities. As mentioned above, if you happen to’re strictly seeking to measure the extent to which persons are in a position to self-nurture using AI search, then you need to take a look at what number of seek for your brand name and arrive on your homepage.
As far as the remaining of the funnel goes, it’s time for a distinct standard of measurement, where you optimise for influence fairly than direct conversions. For example, if Google Search Console shows that certainly one of your web pages is surfacing nicely in search results (labelled as ‘impressions’ in GSC) but is seeing few clicks, that was once an issue, whereas now it needs to be considered a win.
It’s difficult to isolate a direct metric for AI search visibility, so that you’ll have to keep watch over numerous proxy metrics. For example, an increase in appearances in AIOs, LLM summaries, and other AI search results reflects growing discoverability on AI search, which shows that AI models consider your brand to be authoritative.
There’s also a rapidly maturing ecosystem of tools that measure brand rankings and share of voice in AI search, and the perfect marketers know how you can use these signals to find out what tactics are effective at landing those AI answer source citations and what aren’t.
Zero-click search opens recent horizons for audience acquisition
Despite any doom-mongering you may see, search engine optimisation remains to be live and kicking. It’s just modified its stripes. And possibly its name. It’s time for marketers to recalibrate their strategies and adjust how they measure success. By changing the best way that you simply view and work with earned media, you’ll be able to win even without those once-coveted low-intent clicks.
For actionable advice on how you can adjust your marketing strategy for today’s zero-click reality, please try this guide on the InboundJunction blog.
Author: Ben Jacobson, chief content officer at InboundJunction.
(Image source: Unsplash)
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