How to compete in a zero-click search world
The SEO landscape is changing. People are searching. They’re engaging. But they’re not clicking. Traffic is down globally, and companies who invested almost solely in SEO are going to have to adjust their content strategies.
Welcome to the era of zero-click search, where your content might get discovered, interpreted, and even quoted—without delivering a website visit. As generative AI tools summarize and reshape the internet, traditional web traffic is no longer the signal of success. Visibility is.
This article isn’t about salvaging your CTR. It’s about rethinking how content earns attention, trust, and authority in a world where showing up is everything, and the click is optional.
What zero-click search really means
Zero-click search describes a user behavior where the searcher finds what they need without clicking through to a website. The answer is delivered in-place: via a featured snippet, knowledge panel, People Also Ask result, or AI-generated summary.
Increasingly, search engines and social media platforms’ goal is to keep users in one place. Tech giants like Google and Meta are building systems that deliver fast, contextual results with minimal friction.
However, even if your content is driving clicks, it can still be influential. If it’s being quoted in an AI summary, featured in a search snippet, or surfaced in a chatbot response, it’s still doing its job: answering questions, reinforcing authority, and introducing your brand to the right audience.
Platforms don’t want users to click
According to SparkToro’s 2024 research, less than 50% of Google searches now result in a click. The rest are resolved right on the results page via featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, knowledge panels, maps, and increasingly, AI-generated summaries.
Platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do: answer user questions quickly, without sending them away. Google, Bing, and even social search engines like TikTok are optimizing for containment. The more time users spend in-platform, the more valuable they are.
This means even when your content is helpful, it may never lead to a session. It might surface in the preview text. It might inform a chatbot response. It might be rephrased in a search summary that gives your audience what they need without a click.
People’s search habits are also changing
Platform changes are only half the story. The other half? People have changed how they look for information an define credibility.
Millennials and Gen Z are omnichannel natives. They’re skeptical of corporate messaging, favor peer validation, and prefer visual, short-form content that meets them where they are.
- Social search is mainstream. More than 40% of younger users turn to social media first when looking for information.
- Trust is social and visual. For these users, trust comes from seeing people (not just brands) share useful, relevant, human-centered insights. That’s why influencer content and peer reviews often outweigh website claims.
- They’re allergic to friction. If your answer is buried under gated content or clunky design, they’ll scroll past. Or worse, ask someone else.
- They expect personalization. Relevance isn’t just about topic. It’s about tone, context, and platform. Your content has to look like it belongs in the environment it’s surfaced in.
These behavioral norms aren’t fringe, they’re fast becoming the default.
Generative AI is accelerating the shift
The rise of generative AI has redefined how search works—and who controls the narrative.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Google’s evolving AI features are engineered to pull in content, reframe it, and deliver it as a synthetic answer. They don’t reward catchy titles or clever CTAs. They extract and compress information based on structure, clarity, and perceived authority.
This shift impacts:
- Attribution: Many AI tools provide responses without citing a source.
- Engagement: The journey often ends in the AI interface, not your website.
- Discovery: Visibility depends on being quotable, structured, and consistent, not just ranking high.
That said, generative search isn’t exclusively zero-click. Tools like Perplexity and Bing Copilot do refer traffic—just less than traditional engines like Google (at least, so far). And while AI isn’t built to prioritize publishers, some models are evolving to include links, context, or deeper source transparency.
So yes, these platforms can drive traffic, but only if your content is clear enough to be quoted and credible enough to be referenced. And that bar is higher than ever.
In short: these tools reshape the funnel. They don’t eliminate traffic. They reroute attention.
What zero-click search means for your strategy
To thrive in this environment, you need a strategy that prioritizes discoverability and credibility before the click.
Design for extraction: Use clear structure and formatting that makes it easy for machines to parse and summarize your content: bullet points, subheadings, and direct answers.
Use structured data: Schema markup gives search engines and AI models explicit signals about your content’s purpose, author, and format, improving how and where it appears.
Lead with expertise: Highlight author credentials, certifications, and case-based insight. This builds both human trust and algorithmic credibility, especially in legal, health, and finance.
Say something new: If your content simply echoes what’s already out there, it fades into the background. Distinct insights and perspectives are more likely to get picked up, quoted, and shared.
Optimize for reuse: Create content that’s designed to be lifted, shared, and repurposed. That means clear excerpts for AI summaries, modular insights that work as social posts, and formats that adapt to different platforms without rewriting from scratch.
AI doesn’t value traffic. It values information it can confidently interpret and share. That means your content needs to be clear, structured, and credible. If your content isn’t easy to understand, categorize, and trust, it won’t get surfaced, no matter how brilliant it is.
RELATED: Schema markup and SEO: A guide for professional service firms
How to stay visible when there’s fewer clicks
Here’s how to earn visibility where clicks don’t come:
- Win featured snippets and PAA boxes
- Use headers, lists, and Q&A formatting.
- Write clear, direct answers high in the content.
- Feed the algorithms
- Use schema markup.
- Optimize metadata for clarity and voice.
- Treat search summaries like a second homepage.
- Design for AI and chatbot consumption
- Avoid jargon; emphasize original insights.
- Keep author bios and expertise signals current and consistent.
- Invest in social search
- Add hashtags and searchable keywords to profiles and posts.
- Build video content that mirrors popular query structures (e.g., “how to…” or “what is…”).
- Track engagement beyond the click
- Save rates, shares, dwell time, and branded search volume all offer clues.
- Train your team to capture anecdotal intel (e.g., “I saw your post on LinkedIn…”).
SEO still matters
SEO isn’t dead. It’s just no longer the star of a single channel. It’s the connective tissue between them all.
The core goal of SEO has always been about making your content discoverable and credible. That goal hasn’t changed. What has changed is where and how discovery happens. Today, that might be in a traditional SERP. But it could just as easily be inside an AI-generated response, a knowledge panel, or a social search result.
Hybrid and search-first LLMs like Perplexity and Bing Copilot are already using traditional SEO signals—schema, clarity, and backlinks—to decide what gets quoted and cited. If your site is optimized for traditional search, you’re more likely to be featured in generative responses as well.
Strong SEO, meaning technical hygiene, structured content, and a clear signal of authority, still influences what gets surfaced. Whether it’s by Google or by Perplexity. Whether in a chatbot or on a SERP.
If your site is well-optimized, you’re more likely to:
- Rank in traditional search.
- Be quoted or cited by AI tools.
- Appear in structured results like featured snippets and PAA boxes.
SEO isn’t just a traffic play anymore. It’s your ticket to being part of the answer, wherever that answer is delivered.
LaFleur: Ready to shift from traffic to visibility?
If you’re unsure how your content shows up (or if it’s even showing up at all), we can help you assess where you’re visible, where you’re silent, and where you’re just repeating the noise.
Let’s start small:
- Identifying content that’s already earning visibility (even if it’s not getting clicks).
- Finding the gaps where your expertise isn’t getting credit.
- Recommending small, high-leverage adjustments to boost clarity, structure, or credibility.
We’ll help you think beyond traffic. Because showing up well might be better than showing up first.
References
2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360. (2024, July 1). SparkToro. Retrieved from https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/#:~:text=In%202024%2C%2059.7%25%20of%20European,22%25%20of%20the%20time).
Haan, K. and Aditham, K. (2024, May 31). Is Social Media The New Google? Gen Z Turn To Google 25% Less Than Gen X When Searching. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/social-media-new-google/
