Zero-click searches now dominate the digital landscape by delivering information directly on SERPs
People don’t always need to click anymore. Search engines, especially Google, have changed how users interact with information. When someone searches for basic facts, comparisons, or even product research, they’re getting their answers right on the search results page. No click required. This is called a zero-click search.
These types of searches have been expanding for a decade, but AI has kicked it into overdrive. Answer boxes like Featured Snippets and “People Also Ask” were the early steps. Now we have AI Overviews, summaries, explanations, even product guidance, generated and displayed right at the top of the page. On mobile, these AI results can take up to 80% of the screen. Users simply don’t scroll further. When nearly half the page is AI-generated, your link could be “below the fold,” even if you rank first.
Botify and DemandSphere’s 2024 data confirms that AI Overviews now appear in 47% of all Google searches and nearly 59% of informational queries. These AI-rich results now drive around 60% of searches into what’s called the “zero-click” zone. That’s not small. And six years ago, Rand Fishkin, founder at SparkToro, already flagged that over half of Google searches ended that way. Since then, AI has taken this trend further and faster.
For most companies, particularly those trying to grow digital presence, this matters. Your website might be well-ranked, but your traffic could still be dropping. It’s not about how high you rank anymore, it’s about whether or not users even need to click. This is the shift. It’s not temporary noise. It’s structural.
Executives need to understand this shift clearly: your visibility within search is now a matter of presence in the answer itself, not just traditional rankings. If your business isn’t showing up in AI Overviews or other on-page results, it might not exist to the user at all. Legacy thinking around SEO metrics like “top-ranking keywords” or “organic pageviews” doesn’t fully apply here anymore. Your strategy needs to get ahead of this.
SEO has evolved to prioritize brand visibility and influence across non-owned digital spaces
Some people are asking if SEO is dead. The simple answer is no. But it’s different now. It’s moved out of the comfort zone of clicks and into a broader, more distributed environment. You’re no longer optimizing strictly for a destination (your website). You’re optimizing for influence, especially in places you don’t own.
In the past, SEO was about getting found through high-intent keywords, leading traffic back to your product or landing page. That flow made sense when searchers clicked. But now, people are finding answers, making comparisons, and even deciding on vendors without ever leaving Google, ChatGPT, or third-party platforms like TrustRadius or Reddit.
TrustRadius recently reported that 72% of tech buyers see AI Overviews when researching vendors. And while 90% of users still click sources within AI summaries to validate information, a notable 42% use tools like ChatGPT to assist their buying decisions. That means they may never see your homepage, until they’re ready to take the final action. They get familiar with your brand somewhere else.
The modern SEO strategy needs to recognize this. Right now, building presence in AI results, reputable third-party content, and credible social discussions is more impactful than obsessing over driving every query to your homepage. These aren’t simply “mentions.” They’re trust signals used by AI systems to decide whose voice gets included in an answer. These are the places users are consuming your value proposition, without being aware of your funnel or your ad strategy.
This is also where new terms come into play: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and LEO (Language Engine Optimization). They all point to a central truth for C-suite leaders, you are no longer designing SERP strategies. You’re competing for share of voice across an ecosystem of knowledge models. Brand exposure is now a network effect, not just a clickstream.
If your digital strategy is still only tuning headlines and meta tags to chase traffic that may never show up, then you’re optimizing for a smaller world. In the new reality, being referenced by AI, mentioned on authoritative channels, or cited in trusted reviews is what shapes discoverability. SEO hasn’t vanished. It’s multiplied.
The traditional marketing funnel has been reshaped by zero-click searches
The old funnel doesn’t match what’s happening anymore. People aren’t starting their buyer journey on your blog, checking your features page, subscribing to your newsletter, and slowly converting. That controlled, nurture-driven process is being bypassed. They’re jumping into the middle or bottom of a decision path, fully informed, before you even realize they’re looking.
What’s changed? Search users, especially high-value prospects, are doing their research across multiple platforms before engaging directly. They’re using TrustRadius, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn discussions, YouTube explainers, ChatGPT prompts, and even private Slack communities to evaluate options. If your brand shows up in those ecosystems with credible, relevant content, you get a shot at attention. If not, you’re out of step with how purchase decisions are made today.
Zero-click search accelerates this shift by eliminating the need to visit your site for discovery. Prospects no longer arrive early in the funnel where you can tag them, nurture via email, or push them toward conversions. Instead, they arrive pre-educated. They show up already knowing what you offer, what your competitors offer, and what others have said about both.
This means the job of marketing has expanded beyond optimizing your owned website. It now includes feeding consistent, accurate messaging into neutral or AI-powered sources where customers look first. That requires clear positioning, high-authority content distribution, and a measurable presence in digital channels that your team doesn’t control directly.
For leadership, this requires realigning how success is viewed. The value of reaching users early in their journey hasn’t diminished, but how you reach them has. Instead of forcing attention through ads or gated content, the focus needs to be on organic discovery through platforms and AI models that filter for authority and relevance, not just traffic.
The marketing funnel hasn’t disappeared, it’s just no longer sequential or predictable. The goal is the same: win the deal. But the path the customer takes is increasingly self-directed and fragmented. If your content isn’t visible during those early touchpoints, outside your owned properties, they may never make it to your doorstep.
SEO success now requires new proxy metrics specifically tailored to AI-dominated search environments
Most metrics used to track SEO performance are losing relevance fast. Clickthrough rates, traditional keyword rankings, and even page session data can’t fully reflect how users are encountering and interacting with your brand in AI-generated results. That presents a problem for teams stuck measuring the wrong things, and an opportunity for those ready to change course.
In AI search experiences, users aren’t necessarily clicking through pages. They’re reading synthesized answers, summaries, and suggested follow-ups compiled by language models. Your content may be referenced, even quoted, without that traffic ever appearing in Google Analytics. So, the question is: how do you know if your brand is gaining traction?
That’s where proxy metrics become essential. One clear signal is impressions. Google Search Console data, for example, may show your URL is being displayed more often, even if clicks are flat or falling. In the zero-click environment, this is a visibility win. It reflects discoverability and placement, both of which feed into brand awareness and authority.
Other useful signals include brand name search volume, increasing homepage direct hits, and inclusion in AI-generated answers across platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Google’s AI Overviews. If these indicators rise, your brand is likely being seen and evaluated, even without a click trail to follow.
The tooling is catching up here. Emerging platforms are tracking share-of-voice and brand visibility within AI summaries and conversational search interfaces. These tools give a directional view into how often your brand surfaces as a trusted answer, and how often your competitors are beating you to that position.
For C-suite leaders, this shift in measurement requires a clear directive: optimize for influence and visibility, not just traffic and clicks. Conversion still matters, but conversions are now supported by deeper trust and familiarity built well before someone lands on your site.
Make decisions based on how people are finding, discussing, and referencing your brand, regardless of whether that process involves your homepage at all. The brands that win in this new environment will be the ones showing up first in AI-curated decisions, not just search engine indexes.
Earned media and PR tactics are converging with SEO to increase brand authority in AI-powered search contexts
Authority in search is no longer built solely through backlinks or keyword targeting. AI systems evaluate broader trust signals, who’s talking about you, on which platforms, and in what context. That’s moved SEO out of its traditional silo and into the domain of earned media and public relations.
The core driver of visibility in today’s AI-influenced search experience is credibility. AI Overviews and LLMs source their answers from high-authority domains. If you want your brand to show up in those responses, you need to be cited from sources AI systems trust. This includes respected publications, analyst reviews, curated databases, and user-generated platforms with domain authority.
That’s why your PR strategy now plays directly into your SEO outcomes. Media mentions, third-party reviews, expert list inclusions, and consistent brand citations are key to showing up in answer engines, not just search engines. This is also why you’re seeing terms like GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and LEO (Language Engine Optimization) gain traction. They speak to the operational integration of search, earned media, and content ownership.
For executives, this means earned media is no longer a brand-building activity detached from performance. It directly influences where and how AI-powered search platforms perceive your brand. If your competitors are getting cited in trusted sources and you’re not, they will out-rank and out-influence you, even in environments with no direct traffic.
Investment in media placements, thought leadership, and third-party content can no longer be treated as optional or secondary to ad spend. These are now active inputs in AI’s decision-making models. They shape how your brand is presented across synthesized search results and conversational discovery tools.
The task here isn’t just appearing more often, it’s appearing in the right context: favored by algorithms and associated with quality. That’s what will determine which brand surfaces when a customer asks AI a purchase-driven question.
Marketers must recalibrate their engagement strategies to account for a nonlinear, self-directed customer journey
Linear conversion paths don’t hold up in today’s environment. Rising zero-click behavior and increased use of AI and third-party platforms mean buyers are researching discretely, often without your knowledge. By the time they land on your site, if they do at all, they’re usually late in the decision process. That changes the role of engagement.
Previously, marketers could guide prospects through progressive stages, awareness, consideration, conversion, with lead forms, pixel tracking, and nurturing campaigns. But modern buyers don’t follow those queues. They operate independently, collecting insights across fragmented channels well before entering your CRM or giving you measurable signals.
This necessitates a shift in engagement design. You can’t rely on in-platform nurture tactics alone. You need to create visibility long before a user enters your funnel. That means your content must appear in the places where strategic buyers are actually learning: review platforms, peer communities, social feeds, and AI-generated results.
It also means crafting messaging that maps to buyer intent at any point, not just “top of funnel” content. If someone sees your product referenced in multiple trustworthy answers and aligned reviews, they’re collecting signals that move them toward a confident decision, without visiting your site or requesting a demo.
From a leadership perspective, this is not a temporary challenge. It’s a systemic shift. Monitoring traditional user flows or retargeting paths only gives part of the picture. The more influential touchpoints are now unmeasured, happening across AI summaries and influencer-like environments far outside your systems.
Your strategic response should prioritize distributed content visibility, accurate brand narrative in public forums, and signal readiness to LLMs. These are the new pre-engagement territories, and how well you show up there will impact everything downstream, including deal velocity, trust, and close rates.
Attention is still a valuable asset. It just requires a new understanding of where and how it builds.
AI search presents innovative opportunities for audience acquisition and revenue growth
You don’t need clicks to drive revenue. What you need is qualified attention and trusted visibility at the right moment in a decision cycle. AI-powered search platforms, like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, can deliver both, even when no one clicks through to your site. Brands that understand how to position themselves in this space are already winning.
Zero-click search hasn’t eliminated demand. It’s redistributed how and where that demand reveals itself. Buyers are still looking for clarity, credibility, and differentiation. They’re just finding those things earlier in the process, often through AI-curated answers or authoritative third-party content. If your business is showing up consistently in these locations, you’re influencing buying decisions from the start, even if there’s no click signal.
The decline in web traffic from search doesn’t mean the top of the funnel is gone. It means the funnel is largely invisible. Users are interacting with your brand outside of your owned properties, reading references in community forums, watching product evaluations on video platforms, or seeing your name included in AI-generated comparisons.
Data backs this up. Bain’s study confirms that search behavior is increasingly shifting to AI platforms, with 42% of users already relying on LLMs like ChatGPT for purchase research. At the same time, Botify and DemandSphere report that AI Overviews appear in nearly half of searches overall, and almost 60% of informational queries. This presents a significant opportunity for brands that know how to earn placement in these environments.
From a leadership standpoint, this is not the time to pull back from organic visibility, it’s time to recalibrate how you measure it. If you’re optimizing only for website sessions, you’re measuring less than half of your actual influence. The higher return comes from being cited, endorsed, and trusted by the sources AI depends on most when forming a response.
That means AI search requires strategy, not just experimentation. Targeting the right upstream ecosystem, quality publications, review platforms, structured data partners, directly impacts whether your offerings get surfaced by AI engines. A presence there elevates your brand in a landscape where decisions form before you’re even aware of the prospect.
Success now comes from earned discovery. No ads. No lead forms. Just relevance shaped over time through high-authority visibility. That attention, when executed correctly, builds qualified, lower-friction conversions, even in a zero-click world.
Concluding thoughts
If you’re still measuring success by clicks, you’re misreading the landscape. Search behavior has changed. AI now intermediates much of the customer journey, delivering answers before users reach your site. That doesn’t mean less potential, it means a different path to growth.
Zero-click doesn’t mean zero opportunity. Visibility, trust, and presence still drive conversions, but now they begin far outside your direct channels. Your brand needs to show up where decisions are forming: in AI summaries, third-party reviews, expert content, and high-authority mentions.
The fundamentals are the same. Buyers want credible, clear answers. What’s changed is the delivery system. If your name is showing up in smart, trusted places, algorithmically and socially, you’re gaining ground. If it’s not, someone else is.
The shift isn’t temporary. It’s structural. Executives who act early, prioritizing earned media, presence in AI-generated content, and visibility beyond click metrics, will outperform competitors tied to outdated models. The brands that adapt their strategies now are the ones that will build influence, shorten sales cycles, and grow share in a quieter, deeper way.
The tools you’ve used before won’t disappear, but the way you use them must evolve. Distribution needs to diversify. Measurement needs to broaden. And marketing needs to do more than acquire traffic. It needs to earn authority.
