(201) 305-0055
Tim Peter Thinks

AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)

Screenshot of Google AI mode to illustrate the costs to Google — and for your business — from zero-click search.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Youtube Music | RSS

For all the talk about zero-click search, folks seem to keep overlooking one of its key consequences: How Google (and others) will make money. In short, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. Their entire business depends on clicks. Paid clicks.

The shift towards zero-click results signals a genuine turning point for how you think about marketing your business, in part, because it will absolutely grow your costs for acquiring new customers.

So, what’s the real story behind zero-click search? Does it forecast a world where Google is doomed? And, most importantly, what does it mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Past Appearances

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Best of Thinks Out Loud

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 18m 01s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story

AI and the reality of zero-click search go hand in hand. And while I think that the response to these, this idea of zero-click marketing, is a good one, this is the bigger picture.

So what is the bigger picture? What is the deeper meaning of artificial intelligence and zero-click marketing?

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 467 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

I want to talk about the reality of search marketing today. And this episode is very much a follow-up from last week’s discussion about the rise of a agentic AI among your customers. You don’t need to listen to last week’s episode for this one to make sense. But I’d like you to be aware that I’m building on a ton of assumptions that explored in gory detail last week. If you’ve got questions about those assumptions, you definitely want to check out last week’s episode.

It’s also a little less future focused and much more focused on our current reality, maybe where we’re going to be for the next six months or so. As I talked about last week, things could change at any time. So some of this may not age perfectly, but I think the bigger picture holds true.

I don’t think we’re going to see a massive shift in customer behaviors in the next three to six months. I explained the systemic reasons why that’s the case last week.

For one additional piece of evidence why I think that’s so, look at the public freak out that happened when ChatGPT, when OpenAI released its GPT-5 model this week. And more importantly, how the company backtracked and made its legacy models available to customers. Customers don’t typically accept change all that fast. We saw that play out in the most pure way possible over the last few days.

What’s also true is that while I think that this stuff is going to hold true for the next, you know, three to six to maybe nine months, I could absolutely be wrong about this.

As I mentioned last week, keep our core and explore methodology in mind. Focus 80% of your efforts on your core and about 20% of your efforts to see if things are changing. And that way, that should help ensure that you’ve got your bases covered in either case.

Regardless, this comes back to the bigger picture of where are we with search? And is Google losing? Is AI taking their business? Is zero click killing us?

Well, it’s complicated.

First, data for the last couple of months is potentially very misleading. I’m not convinced that the current data — that is data from June, July, and August — tells us as much as we might think it does.

We know that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is highest among younger people and better educated people. And there’s one large group of people that falls into both of those buckets, and that is students, particularly high school and college students. They’re not in school right now, and they are heavy users of these tools.

When we look at data from similar web or Google trends, we see that OpenAI’s traffic declined in July, and the gap between Google and OpenAI got wider. Over the last few weeks, that gap seems to have shrunk a tiny bit, which does align with kids heading back to school. So there’s some evidence that suggests that’s right.

What it also suggests is that any boost you see in ChatGPT’s numbers in the next month or two might be driven largely by students and not by the larger market.

Maybe.

Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re selling.

If students represent a large share of your customer base, then those numbers could be very meaningful to you. If they don’t, if you sell to a broader market than just students, then it means that activity by those student groups is going to make it tougher to see what’s genuinely happening with your actual customers. Non-commercial activity — or at least commercial activity unrelated to your business — might mask your reality.

Now, normally I’d tell you to simply pay attention to your analytics, but there’s two problems with this approach.

The first is that your analytics might not tell you the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers right now. I’m going to come back to this a little later in the show, but it’s an important point.

The second is that customer behaviors seem to follow a pattern right now of what’s called “explore and exploit.” This is a super common behavior among decision making strategies. People do this in all kinds of realms. What explore and exploit means in this specific case is that a fair number of folks are using AI for exploration. They’re engaging with AI to answer questions, to learn, to get exposed to new ideas, and yes, to find products and services they like — hotels, restaurants, clothing, technology, and so on.

However, at the same time, they can’t really buy through these tools (e.g., agentic AI) yet, at least not easily or consistently. Again, see last week’s episode for more on this topic.

Instead, when they’re ready to buy, when they’re ready to exploit what they’ve learned, they’re likely to navigate directly to you or search for you by brand name. And we’re seeing lots of companies that we work with getting significant increases in clicks and click-through rate on brand in terms of Google Search Console, as well as big lifts in “direct/none” traffic in their analytics. In other words, customers coming directly to the site.

But only after they found the brand during their explore activity.

This is critically important when we talk about the zero click search situation. Notice I called it a situation. I didn’t call it a problem. At least not yet. The reason is because today it’s only a real problem for certain industries. If you’re in publishing, for instance, or some other industry where your revenues are directly tied to your traffic, you do have a problem. Customers who don’t click — and more to the point, get the answers they need in the search results themselves — cost you real money. That’s a huge problem. No doubt about it.

Most other businesses, though, sell things, actual real physical products or services that the search results point to, but they don’t deliver.

For instance, if you sell hotel rooms, any zero-click answer isn’t robbing you of hotel reservations. Potential guests still have to book your hotel through some site. If you sell consulting services, clients still have to contact you to arrange the services that they need. If you sell software as a services, customers still have to sign up. If you sell books… they still have to go to a bookstore in some way, or form, whether online or in person to get the book.

For most businesses, zero click doesn’t have to mean zero revenue.

Now notice that I said your customers have to buy or reserve through some site. There is no guarantee right now that that site will be yours. Even when they don’t choose a competitor, they could still buy through a third party or some other intermediary. You know, they could buy through Amazon. They could buy through Expedia. And in some cases, that intermediary is Google.

For example, in cases like Google Shopping Ads or Google Metasearch for hotels, you’re not selling through Google, but you are paying for the clicks. And those still cost you money. You’re paying, in effect, a commission for Google to drive the sale.

More importantly, remember that in the past, at least some of those opportunities were free. We’ve gone from a free click to a paid click. Gatekeeper is going to gate and all that. You might have heard that once or twice before around here.

That to me is the biggest shift in search that we need to keep in mind. Search is not a free channel. We can argue whether it ever was. SEO activities always had a cost after all. Today though, you’re going to need to pay when customers are ready to buy from you, no matter whether they found you in traditional search or because an AI told them about you. And that’s the future we’re going to live in for a while. I simply don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Here’s why.

Google had revenue of $54 billion from Search in Q2 and $96.4 billion overall. They earned $33 billion of their $31 billion total earnings from services, notice that’s more than their overall earnings. Services include things like Maps and Android. We know that search and YouTube make up 75% of the total and search alone is 65% of the total number.

During that same period, paid clicks were up 4% and paid click revenue was up 12%. Think about that for a moment. By definition, Google has to be charging more for every click or else clicks and revenues would be more in line with one another and they’re not. Call me crazy, but someone should write a book about what this means for your business.

Anyway, to drive this revenue, Google is spending $85 billion this year largely on what they called “AI infrastructure investments.” It’s pretty easy to see that they’re paying for these investments on their revenue from search and ads more generally. And they’re going to keep on doing it.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO said in Q2 2024, this is a quote, “the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing.” That $85 billion dollar number includes an additional $10 billion that they just announced in this quarterly earnings call. They just said, “nope, we need to spend an additional $10 billion on top of the $75 billion we had already planned to spend to keep driving that.:

The plain truth is that as I talked about on The Becoming Radical podcast recently, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. I’m going to say that again. Google cannot survive in a zero-click world.

56% of its total revenues and some major percentage of its earnings, probably around 70%, came from clicks on search ads.
70%!

And yes, I know that I’m only looking at Google’s numbers here, but the same basic pattern exists for Meta and Amazon to say nothing of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and or Claude. And those last three have monumentally worse revenue numbers than Google does.

As I talked about last week, any or all of these players can only win if they successfully monetize what they offer to the marketplace. And at least some of that monetization almost certainly has to come from your business, from you in the form of ad dollars, and quite possibly for purposes of user experience and traceability, from clickable ads.

In short, it’s not that you should be worried about zero click, it’s that you should be worried about the end of free clicks. Remember, again, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to pay for their investments in AI or search or customer experience. They have to. That’s the reality we live in.

So what do you do about this? Well, you almost certainly should be working to get some short-term awareness boost by showing up in AI answers today. In fact, I’d encourage you to do that. For starters, it’s largely free, again, ignoring labor costs or the cost of qualified SEO folks who understand how to show up in these tools.

Normally, I would tell you you’re gonna base that decision on your own analytics and then invest as the demand grows.

But as I mentioned earlier, your analytics might not tell the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers:

  1. You won’t get the boosts we’re seeing in branded and direct navigation activity if you don’t show up in AI responses.
  2. You’re not going to see much traffic from AI answer engines if you don’t show up in the AI responses.

This is one case where you probably have to build in advance of the data. To flip a well-known quote on its head, “if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”

Longer term, you also need a strategy that connects you with customers directly, too. I’ve talked about this a lot in recent episodes and in my book. For reasons of time, I’m going to link to all of those in the show notes.

The point remains that the immediate future of search is not zero click. It’s zero free click. If you’re not adapting your marketing to that reality, you’re setting yourself and your business up for less revenue, higher costs, or both. So maybe let’s not do that.

There’s already a solution for zero-click marketing. It’s called marketing. The marketers and e-commerce folks who do a good job of that are going to win no matter what happens. I’m confident you can be one of them.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 467, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate it.

I want to thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

Back To Top
Search