Excerpted from Tell Newsletter #84 ☞
Zero-click search is when the person searching goes on a search engine and gets the answers they need right from the search engine. They don’t need to click on a website. This has been happening for a while. With snippets, and richer search engine pages.
But it is about to accelerate a lot with AI search such as that of Perplexity and OpenAI. Search, get your replies, refine your search, get better replies and refine that until you get the answer you need and then click and buy.
The metrics of website traffic will change. Less traffic and higher conversion rates. For e-commerce (and hotels are essentially a massive segment of e-commerce with big ticket items) this should not impact the revenue generated.
For information sites such as blogs and news, this will be a fundamental shift, since there is no conversion. Unless the person really just wants to read the long form version. Most of the knowledge will be shared through AI.
How fast will this move happen nobody knows. It takes time to change habits. But if we have learned anything over the years is that if there is an easier way to do something it will get adoption. And it is hard to argue against this in terms of ease of use (validity of data is on the line, but many people are more likely to accept easy-to-understand incorrect information, rather than a hard-to-verify correct information).
For marketing this changes a lot in terms of metrics and methods of measuring success. Metrics such as brand impressions and brand search on such search engines (if they are shared) will become critical. Page views and top-of-funnel metrics will shift off your own pages to other areas.
We will need to re-think how we measure what happens between the impressions and the conversions.
Search engine optimization is coming back to the top of the list of marketing efforts. But how do we optimize for AI? What is black-hat and what is white-hat this time?
