Zero-click is nothing new but we’re navigating an entirely new playing field

Opinion

The way a brand is experienced no longer sits within a brand-owned environment, such as your website or app, where you have complete control. Instead, it unfolds across external environments, such as LLMs and social. Omnicom’s MD Performance explains.

When people say “zero-click”, it is often shorthand for “AI is stealing my traffic”. However, the phenomenon itself has been around far longer than LLM-powered search experiences.

Taking a step back to assess how zero-click search has evolved in the pre-AI era can help us understand how best to deal with this trend now.

Pre-AI (or its widespread proliferation), zero-click meant a combination of two search behaviours:

1) Not clicking off a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) because the answer you were looking for was answered on the initial page. This was largely due to answers in snippets and knowledge panels – factual information that could be easilyimple searches, displayed for s such as the length of a film, how many metres in a mile, etc. 

2) Not clicking off a SERP because you were following up with another search. One query led to the next. You’ve worked out how long this film is, now you want to know where it is showing. You’ve found out how many metres are in a mile, and now you want to know how many miles are in a marathon.

It seems that these repeat searches are most impacted by trends in AI search (a 20% drop in Desktop repeat searches). The ability to force nuanced, complex and deeply specific AI-generated answers from a search engine is leading to consumers moving from “keyword” style to “prompt style” search.

For example, Omnicom Media’s Future of Search study found that 49% of people search in full sentences. The expectation that a search will deliver a complex search output creates the ability to use a more complex input, which in turn means you can now load what would have been multiple searches in the pre-AI era into a single prompt.

This trend away from repeat searches within a single “discovery session” has some interesting implications.

For instance, shortening the journey from discovery to purchase may effectively flatten the “messy middle”. A multi-search “discovery” session created multiple pages on which a search engine can sell ad space. Fewer searches per session may mean fewer ad spaces, potentially leading to higher costs per ad.

However, from a zero-click perspective, surely this means brands have little to worry about?

If AI eliminates the need for multiple searches, overall traffic exiting a search result page should remain relatively stable. And, in fact, this is what Google is reporting. Last year, it reported that “overall traffic to sites is relatively stable” since the launch of AIOs.

So, what on earth is going on?

Google says, in general, that click-out traffic is flat, but many brands say their site clicks are down. While it’s increasingly unlikely that AIOs have no impact, their prevalence in the consumer discovery journey is masking another trend. 

Consumers are also changing the external sites they most want to link out to post-SERP, namely away from brand domains and towards social and video platforms they deem offer a more dynamic and varied experience that cannot be easily replicated on SERPs.

Perhaps this is why trends in brand site traffic are down, whilst traffic on the likes of Reddit and YouTube is significantly up. The two trends are closely connected, as YouTube and Reddit are often the platforms most consistently cited by LLMs.

What can brands and advertisers do?

First, identify that the issue is not just AI alone. It is the connection between AI, social, and video platforms that can help brands better identify the best approaches for driving value through evolved onsite and offsite techniques.

Whether that is looking at alternative monetisation approaches for content. Or reassessing your creator strategy based on the content that is most referenced inside of LLMs. Or looking at community management on Reddit to ensure your brand appears as positively as possible, using targeted media tactics not only to drive direct mid-funnel engagement but also to guide organic conversations in the most important communities.

All of this means that, increasingly, the way your brand is experienced by a consumer no longer sits within a brand-owned environment, such as your website or app, where you have complete control. Instead, it unfolds across external environments, such as LLMs, and social or video platforms, where the job becomes guiding and optimising how your brand appears, rather than full control.

In this world, a measure of success moves away from pure click volume to an owned-domain focus, towards a deeper assessment of the quality and value of the clicks that do end up on your owned domains.

We will see brands spend more time thinking about unique experiences that they can offer customers in their owned environments – to give consumers better reasons to engage with them directly. 

We will also see more brands outsourcing their sales cycle to external environments. This could be through social commerce programs like TikTok Shop and YouTube’s new affiliate program. It may also be through utilising AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini as commerce platforms, powered by OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, or Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol.

What underpins all of this is the value of data

In performance marketing, we’ve been saying for a long time that data is the new gold, or oil, or air. And this is truer today than ever before, with more media targeting and bidding decisions made by platform AIs, that require oceans of first- and third-party data to learn how best to find and convert consumers into high-value customers.

And this is where brands will have a tightrope to walk moving forward – in balancing the value of their own data about their own customers, and how pivotal that is for their overall business health, with the need to access extra volume and growth, from pushing sales into platforms where consumers live and interact every day, and potentially giving up on some access to data as part of the bargain.

In short, whilst zero-click has been a challenge we’ve been navigating for years, the fundamental shift we are experiencing in how people search, discover and buy, is forcing brands to compete in an ecosystem where influence increasingly happens beyond their own domains.

Those who embrace external forces and invest in ensuring discoverability in this new ecosystem will be set for success.

Guy Gobert-Jones is MD Performance at Omnicom Media