The Zero-Click Internet: What It Means for Your Marketing Strategy

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is Jon Jance. My guest today is Rand Piskin. He's a co-founder and CEO of Spark Toro, an audience research software company and indie game developer at Snack Bar Studio. We probably ought to talk about indie games, huh? Passionate about helping marketers, he shares insights through writing, speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder. Previously co-founded Moz and Inbound.org and co-authored The Art of SEO. Oh, he's going to talk about, we are going to talk today about zero click. Something that I said off air, you were probably getting tired of talking about, but still a lot of people want to hear about.

0:47Welcome to the show, Rand. Great to be here, John. No, I don't think people are tired of talking about zero click. I think there's a lot of people who, A, don't totally know what it is and B, are feeling the effects of it, even if they're not super into the tactical and strategic world of zero click marketing. So having said that, maybe we ought to define that's what we're talking about, right? And maybe even talk about, I mean, you've been following Google for, I don't know, since Google was born, right? So when did it start showing up? Yeah. So the term, I believe, was coined by initially Gabriel Weinberg at DuckDuckGo.

1:27That was the first instance I could find of it. In 2011, Gabriel described Google as having these zero-click searches and zero-click answers. This is the first appearance of a zero-click concept in the marketing world. And a few years later, I did a study with JumpShot, which is a now-defunct clickstream data provider. And JumpShot worked with me to see what percent of all Google searches ended without a click. Essentially, they stayed inside Google's ecosystem either by, you know, going to opening up the Google Maps app or getting their answer right at the top of the results through those instant answers or featured snippets or now AI overview.

2:11Right, right, right. So I guess maybe you're going to say it, the zero click, meaning that somebody goes and they don't go away. They get their answer and they don't leave Google, right? Zero. So that, yeah, and that was the initial idea of like, oh, there's these zero click searches and search marketing might be changing as a result. And maybe we should think about rather than trying to get traffic, simply provide the answer to the searcher, right, to the user. In 2019, Google answered just under half of all searches without a click. So like 49 % or something. Fast forward to last year, I just did this study again with Dados, and that number is now 60%.

2:52So 60 % of searches are answered without a click, which as a user is super convenient, and as a publisher is terrifying. Well, that goes to a point. I mean, there are some that are saying this is an evil plot by Google, but really it's like behavior, right? I mean, it's like, this is what the user wants. I know as somebody who's trying to get a quick, I want to know what time the ball game starts. You know, I don't need to go to ESPN's website, right? And read the history of football before I get the time, right? That's exactly right. If you want to know how old Paul Rudd is or you want to see which, you know, channel you can watch SNL 50 on or you're trying to figure out what are the ingredients in Moroccan spices.

3:36You know what? But Google can just answer those things for you, and it is incredibly convenient. So zero-click searches started with Google, but they did not end there. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Slack, every single platform realized that they could keep more people on their websites and their platforms if they stopped sending traffic out. And so, you know, Twitter was one of the early adoptees of this. Their algorithm, this is probably 2016, 17, their algorithm started biasing against links. If you included a link in a tweet, Twitter would limit the reach of that tweet substantially compared to a tweet that did not contain a link.

4:23That's true on Facebook as well. It's true on LinkedIn as well. You can see it in subreddits where moderators and Reddit themselves started downvoting and stopping the promotion of submissions that contained a link. YouTube started minimizing the description field so that it would hide any URL, external URL link that would take you off of YouTube. So every single platform is doing this over and over. And my colleague, Amanda Natividad, when she joined SparkToro, she sort of came up with this idea that zero click is not just about search. It's about all platforms. The zero click Internet is here.

5:02And as a result, the only thing to do is to create zero click content and do zero click marketing. influence people in the places they're already paying attention rather than demanding that they come to your platform and requiring traffic to be your only KPI. Yeah. And, and, you know, a lot of the people, the sky is falling, you know, looking at the results, there was a pretty sexy headline that HubSpot had lost 72 % of their traffic or something like that. But can we say that a percentage of that, maybe a large percentage was kind of garbage traffic anyway? I mean, it wasn't intent traffic. It was like, oh, they published a listicle and somebody went to that because they wanted the list, but they didn't want anything to do with HubSpot.

5:42Well, John, I don't know if you did what I did as soon as I saw that headline, but I went and looked up HubSpot stock price and their latest earnings report. And guess what? Yeah. The record highs, right? So HubSpot and a whole bunch of other platforms, I did a whole blog post and a video about this. They are indicative of a new trend that zero click marketing is almost certainly at the head of, which is traffic down, revenue up. Yeah. If your traffic goes down, but your revenue goes up, should you be pissed at your marketing team? or should you celebrate the fact that they are finding opportunities in a zero-click internet world for your message and your influence to reach the right audience and attract the right customers?

6:31I think it's the latter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so you started to hint at what to do now. If you're especially SEO folks, you know, or I mean, they'd kind of dialed in the game, right? So now like what's the new game? I mean, for SEO folks, if you were advising a group of SEO folks, you know, talking, doing a keynote, what would you be telling them that they need to be doing, how they need to be changing their model? Yeah, I'm actually, I'm giving a keynote at SMX Munich to a couple thousand people next month. And the topic, John, you'll like this is called, it's the end of traffic as we know it.

7:04And I feel fine. Great. That's awesome. And the basic premise here is that, look, if you're an SEO, some of you will have no choice. Your boss, your team, your client, they're going to say, I don't care what Rand Fishkin says. I don't care what's going on in Google. I don't care about zero click marketing. You get me traffic. That's your job. You know what? Okay. You're going to have to focus on the few keywords that send traffic and sort of the 40 % of searchers that click and the platforms that still do send some traffic, that kind of thing. But for everyone else, I would urge you to break out of this mindset that everything has to be about SEO, right?

7:41That classic SEO is the only thing that you're good at. SEOs, at least when When I was an SEO, you know, seven years ago now, it was not just about ranking in Google, right? There was lots of things that you'd have to do as part of that. Things around accessibility, your website, sure, but also placement of content on third-party websites and pitching and essentially, yeah, a public relations job, right? It is a PR job. You're trying to create content and a message that people want to amplify and get that message amplified in the places they pay attention. I'm not sure exactly what the industry is going to end up calling that.

8:18Maybe they'll call it PR. Maybe they'll call it the new form of influencer marketing. Maybe they'll call it content placement or offsite content marketing. I don't really care. I don't care what that's called. What I do care about is you should do it because it works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you made a point about why everybody's so fixed on SEO. I think for a lot of SEO folks, it was easy, cheap traffic. and in some cases, easy, cheap conversions and business. And so I think we got lazy. And I think that, to me, that was a big part of it. But what about that business that is all about trust and authority?

8:53Content was huge for them to drive folks to their website. They couldn't buy ads. Ads were useless to them. What is that business, like a professional services business? How do they survive in this world? The reality is when your business model gets disrupted, you either decide to embrace the change that's coming or you face the consequences. And I think the consequences are not nothing. It's not all going to die. SEO isn't going to go away. That's not what's happening. It's just going to become a lower growth rate industry or even a shrinking industry over time as CMOs and CEOs and boards of directors wake up to the fact that the opportunity in organic types of marketing might lie elsewhere, i.e.

9:41influencing people in the places where they already play. Yeah. The new sexy term is AIO. How much do we need to pay attention to that? It varies quite a bit. If you're in B2B, especially B2B tech, and you're selling to other B2B techies, the answer is you probably need to pay some attention to it. There was a great report from SEMrush recently where they looked at the clickstream data. I like clickstream data a lot. I think it really tells the story accurately. They looked at 80 million different clickstreams of people who visited and used ChatGPT, and they analyzed what they did with the platform, the prompts that they put in, all that kind of stuff.

10:27What I found quite interesting there is 70 % of those prompts had no corollary at Google. So you could not perform the task that was asked of ChatGPT in Google's ecosystem outside Gemini whatsoever, right? This is an AI type of task. It's like saying, how much market share is Microsoft Excel taking from Google search? What? None. People are doing different things with that. ChatGPT is taking 30 % away from a search engine, right? Or adding it to it, right? Those are people who are using it for that replacement thing. But I think the answer here is every single business, every sector needs to figure out whether its customers and audience are using large language models and AI tools to perform search-like tasks inside their specific ecosystem.

11:23You know, not to promote SparkToro, but I don't know of another place you can do this, But you can inside SparkToro because that's what we do at Clickstream Data, right? You can go and you can search for, you know, my audience is science fiction writers or interior designers or, you know, painters or landscaping professionals or I want to find people who search for backyard gardens. And SparkToro will then tell you in the AI and tools section which platforms they're using and how much more or less than normal. So you could see, for example, I ran a search recently for people who do custom decking, like for their backyards.

11:58They don't use AI tools very much. Right. That's not their goal. But if you look for people who are searching for B2B CRM software, well, yeah, they are using ChackGPT and Gemini and Kagi and all these different AI tools much more than average. You probably need to pay attention to large language model optimization. That's a great, great point. I've seen a real divide between the idea of local businesses versus national or B2B, like you mentioned, like that Decker, you know, that you talked about that's that's fixing people's homes. I mean, he's probably got people in his geography or he or she that's looking for them.

12:37And, you know, Google Maps and some of those tools are still their friend, right? Yeah, absolutely. And this, I mean, I don't know what to tell you, John. Like there's still people who, just as they did in 1720 or 1950 or 2001, their primary resource for which person am I going to use to build my deck is they ask their neighbor. They ask their friend. Right. And that is a source of influence that is influenceable via different means than, you know, a highway billboard or a Google search or an AI tool or a social media platform. And so your job as a marketer is to figure out the sources of your audience influence and be present in those places, hopefully commensurate with how much they use them.

13:29Yeah. Yeah. And dedicated what limited resources you have to the best ones, right? Exactly. Do you ever feel like TV ads are just for the big guys? Well, not anymore. Ad Critter makes it easy and affordable for small business owners to run targeted, connected TV ads that drive real results. Their full funnel approach combines high impact connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting. So you can easily reach your audience across platforms and keep your business top of mind. And the best part? Ad Critter takes care of the tricky stuff. Just upload your customer data and they handle the rest.

14:08and try it out for yourself. Right now, duct tape marketing listeners get a dollar for dollar match on any TV campaign up to$5 ,000. That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. Another sexy headline is Google's dead. So is their dominance, you know, is their dominance going to fade? I mean, obviously the cash cow depends on people going to their homepage and clicking on ads instead of getting answers. Yeah. So it's funny. I was just asked about this by some reporters. I don't like to give opinion based answers here, right?

14:51Oh, Google's getting worse. I ran this search and I got a bunch of junk in my results where 10 years ago when I ran this search, I used to get good stuff. I don't like those types of anecdotal replies and responses. I don't trust them. The thing I trust is data at scale. So what I would look at if I were a reporter trying to answer the question, is Google dying? Is Google getting worse? Is, are there more or less people searching on Google than there were last year at the same time? Are there more or fewer searches per searcher than there were last year at this time? The answer to both of those, according to some research that I hope to publish in the next couple of weeks, actually, is no.

15:33So Google grew about 10 % in terms of searches per searcher last year, and it grew in terms of number of total searchers last year. You don't have to believe me, by the way, or Datos' numbers. If you prefer, you can look at what Sundar Pichai said in the earnings call, the Google earnings call two weeks ago. He said the same thing, and our data bears it out. So I don't always trust Google to tell us the truth. But in this case, all the data sources agree. If Google is getting worse, then the only logical response is, well, if they're getting worse, everything else, all the alternatives must be even worse because people are still using them more and more.

16:18Yeah. And I think people forget, they're more than just that search box as well. I pay Google a couple hundred bucks every month to use Gmail and Sheets and Slides and all those kinds of things too. So they're an ecosystem way beyond their ad network, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I want to be clear, I'm not talking about their earnings report in terms of their dollar of growth. I'm talking about growth in raw searches. Yeah. So another topic that, and this is right up your alley, so I'm inviting you to talk about SparkToro here, is that attribution is just getting harder and harder.

16:59And yet, as I listen to you talk, it's more important maybe than ever. Like, where are your people hanging out and actually reading stuff and how do you find them? So how do you advise businesses to really kind of arm themselves with better attribution? Gosh. Oh, I asked a hard question. I like that. Wow. Here's the problem, Hujan. You've set me up once again to like tee up my own software. That was my entire intent. So I did well. But you know I don't like to be self-promotional. Okay. First off, there are several ways to do this. Some of them good, some of them bad. One of the ones that a lot of people use that I really don't like is they do post-consumer service.

17:49So this is, you know, you just bought this pair of shoes from Nike. Nike sends you an email and they ask you, how did you find us? Or they ask you at the end of the checkout process, you know, how did you learn about these shoes today? What made you buy from us? And people will give answers that are incomplete, often inaccurate. And if you're a marketer, you're only ever going to get answers from channels and sources that you already reach. So you will never know about the ones that didn't send you traffic, right? This is a huge bias problem. I cannot recommend enough against asking people where they heard about you and then using that to determine your marketing budget.

18:31That is just logic. You know, you have failed logic 101 in college and you're going to kick out of the class. Well, and you're also going to pay Facebook a lot more money because everybody says they saw your Facebook ad, right? It depends on the subject. So we tried this. One of my favorite stories, John, is early in the, after SparkToros launch, we tried this with one of our customers. We asked them, this is a consumer brand in the food industry. So they like sell a food product. I don't have permission to mention who they are, but they sell a food product direct to consumers. And we said, hey, can you try something for us?

19:04Would you put these two, I think it was like Martha Stewart and it wasn't Guy Fieri, but it was some other like notable food person in the food world. We asked them to put that in their dropdown list of places where people had heard about them. Yeah. Guess what, John? Those people had never mentioned the brand. They had never talked about them. And 30 % of the customers said, yeah, that's where I heard about you. So just, you know, you're getting terrible data, like absolutely terrible. The second one, the one that I do quite like is to look at, broadly speaking, if you use a competitive intelligence platform and you can see where traffic is going to your competitors, that can make reasonable sense, So similar web is a good resource for that.

19:57Obviously, SparkToro offers that type of data as well from a competitive perspective. I think SEMrush, the folks I mentioned who did that research, I think they might have some of that in their platform, but it might be search-centric. So be careful you're not just getting biased by Google stuff. And then, you know, the absolute best one, the absolute best way to do this is learn lockpicking, get the home addresses of all your customers, break into their houses, steal their phone, get the phone unlock code, and then look at everything that they read, browse, watch, subscribe to, follow. That, of course, super illegal, highly unethical.

20:35Us Alex is already doing it anyway, so. Yeah, you got a lot of competition for that. But the next closest thing is essentially clickstream data, which is a panel of users and the providers look at every URL that's visited. And then you can sort of take a broad group of people and extrapolate what a general population does. That's what we do at SparkToro. And so, you know, if you want to see, you can type in your website or a competitor's website or a search term that people use in Google or a descriptor that people use in their bios. And then you can see what websites, what topics, what social media platforms they use more or less than average.

21:21And that can be a good way to sort of get a sense of, hey, you know, a lot of our customers are using, I don't know, Reddit, and we're not there at all. A lot of our customers are on TikTok or LinkedIn or Pinterest, or they're using ChatGPT or they're using Gemini. and we're not in those places, we should probably be making investments there. Yeah. Well, Rand, we've run out of time. I appreciate you dropping by. We've mentioned sparktoro.com a couple of times. Is there anywhere else that you'd invite people to connect with you and learn more about your work? Sure. Well, you know, at the start of our chat today, you mentioned Snackbar Studio.

21:58So if folks are interested in an indie video game where you get to play an Italian chef in the 1960s, you can you can check that out at snapbarstudio.com and who isn't and who and who isn't it's not live yet but give us about 18 months and there'll be an early access version on steam awesome awesome again i appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road