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

John Jantsch ( 00: 00.972 )

Hello and welcome to the newest episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. Rand Fishkin is my guest today. 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, Passionate about helping marketers, he shares insights through writing speaking and his book Lost and Founder, previously co-founded Moz and inbound. The Art of SEO was co-authored by and authored by .org.

He’s going to talk about, we are going to talk today about zero click. You may be getting bored of talking about something I said off air, but many people still want to learn more. Welcome to

Rand Fishkin ( 00: 43.672 )

John, it’s great to be here. No, I don’t think people are tired of talking about zero click. I believe there are many people who, even if they are not particularly interested in the tactical and strategic world of zero click, still don’t fully understand what it is and are feeling the effects of it.

John Jantsch ( 00: 54.092 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 01: 00.216 )

Having said that, perhaps we should define that’s what we’re talking about, right? And maybe even talk about, mean, you’ve been following Google for, I don’t know, since Google was born, right? So, you may ask, when did it start to appear?

Rand Fishkin ( 01: 13.356 )

Yes. Therefore, I believe the term was first coined by Gabriel Weinberg at DuckDuckGo. That was the first instance I could find of it. Gabriel claimed that Google had these “zero click searches and zero click answers” in 2011. So this is the first sort of appearance of a zero click concept in the marketing world. And a few years later, I did a study, with Jumpshot, which was, which is a now defunct

provider of clickstream data. And JumpShot worked with me to see what percent of all Google searches ended without a click. In essence, they stayed within Google’s ecosystem by opening up the Google Maps app or placing their question directly at the top of the results using those same-day questions, featured snippets, or now AI overviews.

John Jantsch ( 02: 04.896 )

Right, right, right. So I suppose I’m going to assume you’re going to say it. The zero click meaning that somebody goes and they don’t go away. They receive their response, and they continue to use Google, right? Zero.

Rand Fishkin ( 02: 15.918 )

So yeah, and that was the idea behind the initial thought that, oh, there are these zero click searches and search marketing may 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 consumer. In 2019, Google answered just under half of all searches without a click. like 49 % or something. Fast forward to the previous year when I completed this study once more with Datos.

John Jantsch ( 02: 26.253 )

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin ( 02:45.07 )

And that number is now 60 %. So 60 % of searches are answered without a click, which as a user is super convenient. And it’s terrifying as a publisher.

John Jantsch ( 02: 57.026 )

That is a good thing. 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 want to know when the ball game begins as someone who is trying to get a quick. You know, I don’t need to go to ESPN’s website, right? And read the football history before I have the time, right?

Rand Fishkin ( 03: 17.326 )

That’s exactly right. You know what if you want to find out how old Paul Rudd is, or if you want to see which channel SNL 50 can be streamed on, or if you need to know what ingredients are in Moroccan spices. Google can just answer those things for you, and it is incredibly convenient. So Google was the first place zero-click searches began, but they did not stop there. Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, 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. Thus, Twitter was one of the early adopters. algorithm, this is probably 2016, 17, their algorithm started biasing against links. Twitter would restrict the scope of a tweet if you included a link in it.

John Jantsch ( 03: 47.746 )

Tick tock.

John Jantsch ( 04: 00. 716 )

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin ( 04: 15.542 )

In stark contrast to a tweet that didn’t include a link, which is true on both Facebook and Linked In. You can see it in subreddits where moderators and reddit themselves started down voting and and stopping the promotion of Reddit 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

John Jantsch ( 04: 40.961 )

Ehh.

Rand Fishkin ( 04: 43.31 )

So every single platform is doing this over and over. And my coworker, Amanda Natividad, when she joined SparkToro, what was that, in 2022, she sort of came up with the idea that zero click is not just about search; it’s about all platforms. The zero click internet is here. And as a result, the only thing to do is to create zero click content and do zero click marketing. Influence people in the areas that they are already focusing on

John Jantsch ( 05: 11.52 )

Right. Yes.

Rand Fishkin ( 05: 12.876 )

rather than requiring traffic to be your only KPI and demanding that they visit your platform.

John Jantsch ( 05: 18.806 )

Yes. And, you know, lot of the people, the sky is falling, you know, looking at the results. was a pretty, sexy headline that HubSpot had lost 72 % of their traffic or something like that. But can we reasonably assume that a small portion of that, or a sizable portion, was just general garbage traffic? I mean, it wasn’t intent traffic. was like when someone went to a list that they had published but didn’t want anything to do with HubSpot.

Rand Fishkin ( 05: 43.416 )

Well, 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? Record highs, right? I wrote a complete blog post and a video about this on HubSpot and a number of other platforms. They are indicative of a new trend that zero click marketing is.

John Jantsch ( 05: 47.564 )

Potter, heheheh.

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin ( 06: 11.424 )

Traffic is almost certainly at the top of the list, with revenue increasing. 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? I believe it to be the latter.

John Jantsch ( 06: 34.56 )

Yes, yes, yes. Well, so you started to hint at what to do now. If you’re especially SEO folks, know, or I mean, they, they’d kind of dialed in the game, right? So what’s the new game, then? I mean, for SEO folks, if you were advising a group of SEO folks, you know, talking, doing a keynote, you know, what would you be telling them that they need to be doing how they need to be changing their model?

Rand Fishkin ( 06: 55. 82 )

Yeah, I’m actually, I’m giving a 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. And I’m all right. And the basic premise here is that, look, if you’re an SEO, some of you will have no choice. Your boss, your team, and your client.

John Jantsch ( 07: 00.748 )

Right. Yes.

John Jantsch ( 07: 09.474 )

Yes, that’s great. That’s awesome.

Rand Fishkin ( 20.30 ) ( 7 )

They’re going to say, I don’t care what Rand Fishkin says. I don’t care what’s going on in Google. Zero click marketing is not important to me. You get me traffic. Your job is to do that. You know what? Okay. You’ll have to concentrate on the few keywords that generate traffic, as opposed to the 40 % of searchers who click, and, you know, the platforms that still generate some traffic, like that. But for everyone else, I would urge you to break out of this mindset that everything has to be about SEO, right? that you are the only SEO expert you are capable of.

John Jantsch ( 07: 45.484 )

Yes. Yes.

Rand Fishkin ( 07: 49.01 )

SEOs, at least when I first started out, you know, seven years ago, didn’t focus solely on Google ranking, right? There was lots of things that you’d have to do as part of that. Things around accessibility of 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.

John Jantsch ( 08: 06.68 )

Authority, yeah, Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Rand Fishkin ( 08: 19.638 )

I’m not sure what the industry will eventually call that. Maybe they’ll call it PR. Perhaps they’ll refer to it as the “new era of influence marketing.” Maybe they’ll call it content placement or offsite content marketing. I don’t really care. What that’s called is irrelevant to me. What I do care about is you should do it because it works.

John Jantsch ( 08: 37. 94)

Yes, yes, yes. Well, I think, you you made a point about why everybody’s so fixed on SEO. I believe that for many SEO professionals, it was simple, inexpensive traffic. And in some cases, easy, cheap conversions and business. And so, I believe, we became 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? They were incredibly content to drive people, you know, to their website.

couldn’t buy ads, ads were useless to them. What kind of business is that, similar to a provider of professional services? How do they survive in this

Rand Fishkin ( 09: 13.038 )

I look and I think whenever I realize that my video is getting a little fuzzy and that Riverside is making a funny comment about it, but my internet is fast and my device is fast, so I have no idea. I’m just gonna go and hope that the recording catches it correctly. When your business model is hampered, you either accept the change that is about to occur or choose to ignore it.

John Jantsch ( 09: 19.426 )

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin ( 09: 42.41 )

Or you are subject to punishment. And I think the consequences are not nothing. It’s not all going to pass away. SEO is going to go away. That’s not what’s happening. As CMOs, CEOs, and board of directors realize that the potential in organic marketing might lie elsewhere, i .e., influencing people in the places where they already work, it will just gradually become a lower growth rate or even a shrinking industry.

John Jantsch ( 10: 10.998 )

Yes. The new sexy term is AIO. How much do we need to pay attention to that?

Rand Fishkin ( 10: 16 878 )

it, it varies quite a bit. The answer is that you probably need to pay some attention to it if you’re in B2B, especially B2B tech, and you’re selling to other B2B techies. There was a great report from SEM rush, recently where they looked at the clickstream data. like clickstream data a lot. believe it really tells the story with accuracy.

They looked at 80 million different click streams 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. There is a 70 % of those prompts at Google that I found to be quite interesting. So you could not perform the task that was asked of ChatGPT in Google’s ecosystem

John Jantsch ( 11: 05.868 )

Hmm.

Rand Fishkin ( 11: 05. 5 )

outside of Gemini whatsoever, right? This is a task of AI type. It’s like saying how much market share is Microsoft Excel taking from Google search? What? None. Like that’s people are doing different things with that. Chat GPT is essentially removing a search engine, right? Or, or adding it to it, right? Those are, those, those are people who are using it for that replacement thing. However, I believe the solution is to every single business.

John Jantsch ( 11: 15.948 )

Yes.

John Jantsch ( 11: 35.436 )

Right, yeah.

Rand Fishkin ( 11: 43.2 )

Every industry must determine whether its customers and audience are using large language models and AI tools to perform searches in their specific ecosystem. you know, not to promote spark Toro, but I, I don’t know of another place you can do this, but you can inside spark Toro. What do we do with clickstream data, exactly, 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. Then Spartora will then let you know in the AI and tools section what platforms they’re using and how much more or less than usual. So you could see, for example, I ran a search recently for, people who do custom decking, like for their backyards. They don’t really use AI, are they right? That’s not, that’s not their goal, but.

John Jantsch ( 12: 34.583 )

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch ( 12: 37.952 )

Right, right, right.

Rand Fishkin ( 12: 40. 396 )

If you look for people who are searching for B2B CRM software, well, yeah, they are using ChakGPT and Gemini and Kaggy and all these different AI tools, much more than average. You probably need to pay attention to large language model optimization.

John Jantsch ( 12: 58.334 )

That’s a great, great point. I’ve seen a real disconnect between the notion of local businesses versus national or B2B, as you mentioned, like that Decker, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s I mean, he’s probably got people in his geography or he or she that’s looking for them and you know, Google maps and some of those tools are still their friend, right?

Rand Fishkin ( 13: 20.414 )

Yes, absolutely. this, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, John. Like there are, there are still people who, as they did in 1720 or 1950 or 2001, ask their friends or neighbors for advice on how to build my deck. And that, is a source of influence that is influenceable via different means than, you know,

John Jantsch ( 13: 41.59 )

Yep. Yes.

Rand Fishkin ( 13: 50.072 )

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.

John Jantsch ( 14.07.98 )

Yes. Yes. And dedicated what limited resources you have to the best ones, right? Now, so another sexy headline is Google’s dead. So is their dominance, you know, is their dominance going to fade? mean, obviously, the cash cow depends on people going to their homepage and clicking on ads instead of getting answers.

Rand Fishkin ( 14: 14. 219 )

Exactly.

Rand Fishkin ( 14: 20.325 )

you

Rand Fishkin ( 14: 32.512 )

Yes. So, it’s funny. Some reporters just inquired about this. and I don’t like to give opinion based answers here, right? Google’s getting worse. When I conducted this search, I discovered a lot of junk in my results, which were similar to what I found ten years ago. I don’t like those types of anecdotal, replies and responses. I have no faith in them. The thing I trust is data at scale. So

What would I look at if I were a reporter trying to answer the query,” Google is dying?” Is Google getting worse? Are there more or fewer people searching simultaneously on Google than there were last year? 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.

Last year, Google increased by about 10 % in terms of searches per user and by 10 % in terms of total users. You don’t have to believe me, by the way, or Datos ‘ numbers. If you prefer, you can examine Sundar Pichay’s remarks from the Google earnings call two weeks ago. He said the same thing, and our data bears it out. I don’t always trust Google to tell us the truth, but in this case,

All data sources concur that if Google is getting worse, then the only logical response would be that everything else must be worse because people are using them more and more, so if they’re getting worse, everyone else must agree.

John Jantsch ( 16: 10.616 )

Yeah.

Yes. And I think people under or forget, you know, they’re more than just that search box as well. You know, I pay Google a hundred bucks every month to use Gmail and Sheets and Slides and all those kinds of things too. beyond their ad network, they form an ecosystem.

Rand Fishkin ( 16: 31.244 )

Yes, yes, absolutely. But, but I want to be clear, I’m not talking about their earnings report in terms of their dollar, you know, of, of growth. I’m talking about right growth in, in raw searches.

John Jantsch ( 16: 38. 38. 38.)

Yes. Simply put, is that right? Yes.

Yes. Another subject that is just getting harder and harder to attribution is also up your alley, so I’m inviting you to talk about Spark Toro here. And yet, as I listen to your talk, it’s more important maybe than ever. How do you locate your people, for example, who hang out there and actually read books? So how do you advise businesses to really kind of arm themselves with better attribution?

Rand Fishkin ( 17: 12.578 )

Gosh.

John Jantsch ( 17: 14. 168 )

Oh, I asked a hard question. like that Well, that was my entire intent, so I did well.

Rand Fishkin ( 17: 16.416 )

Here’s the issue, John, though. You’ve set me up once again to like tee up my own software and I really, try not to. But you may be aware that I dislike being self-promoted. Okay. First off, there are, there are several ways to do this. Some of them are good, others are bad. One of the ones that a lot of people use that I really don’t like is they do post-consumer surveys.

John Jantsch ( 30. 874 )

hahahahah

Rand Fishkin ( 17: 45.998 )

So this is, you 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,” How did you learn about these shoes today,” at the end of the checkout process? What made you buy from us? And people will respond in ways that are incomplete and frequently incorrect. 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 drive traffic, aren’t you? This is a huge bias problem. I can’t stress this enough: ask people where they heard about you, and use that information to determine your marketing budget. is just logic. You you have failed logic 101 in college and you’re going to get kicked out of the class.

John Jantsch ( 18: 20. 973 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 18: 28.536 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 18: 35. 9 )

Well, and you’re also going to pay Facebook a lot more money because everybody says they saw your Facebook ad, right?

Rand Fishkin ( 18: 41.006 )

It depends on the industry. So we tried this. One of my favorite stories, John, is just beginning the spark after spark Charles launched, so 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. Although I don’t have permission to name them, they sell a food item directly to consumers. And we said, Hey, can you try something for us? Would you put these two in? think it was like Martha Stewart and I wasn’t Guy Fieri, but it was some other like.

notable food person in the food world. We requested that they include that in their list of places where people had heard about them. Yes. What, John? Those people had never mentioned the brand. They had never talked about them. And 30 % of the customers responded,” Yes, that’s how I heard about you.” So just, you you’re getting terrible data, like absolutely terrible data. the second one, the one I actually do.

John Jantsch ( 19: 09.986 )

Food. Foodie. Yes.

John Jantsch ( 19: 23.01 )

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 19: 30.168 )

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes. Yes.

Rand Fishkin ( 19: 38.072 )

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, right? Such a useful resource is similar web. Obviously, Spark Toro offers that type of data as well from a competitive perspective. The people I mentioned who conducted the research, allegedly SEM rush.

John Jantsch ( 19: 51.32 )

Hmm.

John Jantsch ( 19: 55.81 )

Yes.

Rand Fishkin ( 20: 05. 676 )

I think they might have some of that in their platform, but it might be search centric. So be cautious. You’re not just getting biased by Google stuff. and then the, 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 own, get the phone unlock code, and then look at everything that they read, browse, watch, subscribe to follow that of course.

John Jantsch ( 20: 25. 016 )

Yep.

Rand Fishkin ( 20: 33.556 )

Extremely unethical and illegal. have, I, yeah, that’s right. Yes. You have a lot of competition for that. but, but the next closest thing is essentially clickstream data, which is, you know, a panel of users and the providers look at every URL that’s visited. Then you can sort of extrapolate what a large population does from a large group of people.

John Jantsch ( 20: 36.066 )

Plus, Alexa’s already doing it anyway, so.

Rand Fishkin ( 21: 02 / 94 / 10 )

That’s what we do at Spark Toro. so that you can enter a search term used in Google or a descriptor used in your purchases if you want to see it. And then you can see what websites, what topics, what social media platforms they use more or less than average. and that can, that can be a good way to sort of get a sense of, Hey, you know, lot of our customers are using.

We’re not there at all, and I don’t read it. 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 ought to be investing there, probably.

John Jantsch ( 21: 35.702 )

Yes.

John Jantsch ( 21: 49.876 )

Yes. Well, Rand, we’re, we’ve run out of time. I appreciate you stopping by. Uh, we’ve mentioned sparktoro.com a couple of times anywhere else that you’d invite people to connect with you and learn more about your work.

Rand Fishkin ( 22: 00.504 )

You know, at the start of our conversation today, you mentioned Snapbar Studio. So folks are interested in an indie video game where you get to play an Italian chef in the 1960s. You can find out more at snapbarstudio.com. 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.

John Jantsch ( 22: 14.2 )

And who isn’t?

John Jantsch ( 22: 24. 408 )

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.

Rand Fishkin ( 22: 29.838 )

Yeah, I look forward to it, John. Take good care of yourself. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch ( 22: 32.098 )

Bye, now, bye.