This is a preview of Chapter 9 from my new ebook – Strategic SEO 2025 – a PDF which is available to download for free here.
The industry uses two related but distinct terms to describe this new world: “Zero-Click Search” and “Zero-Click Marketing.”
Understanding the difference is not just semantics; it’s the key to understanding the strategic and philosophical war being waged for the future of the web.
Zero-Click Search (ZCS): This is the user behaviour, the phenomenon itself. It occurs when a user types a query into a search engine like Google and finds the answer to their query directly on the search engine results page (SERP), without clicking through to any external website. This is a reality engineered by the search engines, designed to provide immediate answers and a more efficient user experience.
Zero-Click Marketing (ZCM): This is the strategic response. The term, largely popularised by Rand Fishkin and his team at SparkToro, refers to the practice of “creating standalone value in the platforms where people hang out, instead of dropping teasers and links in hopes that people will be compelled to click over to your site”. It is a proactive strategy focused on building brand awareness, influence, and community directly on platforms like Google, YouTube, Instagram, and others, independent of referral clicks.
The very language used to describe this trend reveals a deep schism in the SEO community.
Proponents, who see opportunity, have coalesced around the term “Zero-Click Marketing.”
They frame it as a new channel to be mastered, a new frontier for building influence and brand affinity. They are actively creating a new discipline around this concept.
Conversely, those who feel victimised by this trend – primarily publishers and businesses whose models are built on website traffic – almost exclusively use the term “Zero-Click Searches.”
For them, it is not an opportunity but a negative outcome being inflicted upon them by a monopolistic power.
Their language revolves around traffic loss, theft, and anticompetitive behaviour.
This linguistic split is the clearest indicator of the two warring camps.
One side is adapting and building a new strategy (ZCM); the other is fighting what it sees as an existential threat (ZCS).
To understand fully, you must understand both perspectives.
The Mechanics of the Clickless SERP: A Rogues’ Gallery of Features
The rise of zero-click searches is not an accident; it’s the result of a deliberate, long-term strategy by Google to transform its SERP from a list of links into a comprehensive answer platform.
This has been achieved through the introduction and refinement of numerous SERP features, each designed to satisfy user intent on-page.
- Featured Snippets (Position Zero): Often considered the original zero-click driver, these are the answer boxes that appear at the very top of the SERP, above the traditional organic results. They aim to provide a concise, direct answer to a user’s question, often formatted as a paragraph, a bulleted or numbered list, or a table. Google programmatically extracts this information from a single, high-ranking webpage that it deems to be a clear and authoritative source for the query.
- Knowledge Panels & Graphs: When you search for a well-known entity – a person, a company, a place, or a concept – a large information box often appears on the right-hand side of the desktop SERP. This is the Knowledge Panel, powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph. It aggregates factual information from a multitude of trusted sources, like Wikipedia, to provide a comprehensive overview, including dates, descriptions, images, and related information, satisfying many queries without requiring a click.
- Direct Answer Boxes: For simple, factual queries like “what is the capital of Sweden?” or “how old is the president?”, Google often provides an “Instant Answer” directly on the SERP. Unlike Featured Snippets, these answers frequently come from Google’s own licensed data sources or knowledge base and may not include a link to a third-party website at all, making them a pure form of zero-click result.
- The Local Pack: This is arguably the most impactful zero-click feature for small, local businesses. For searches with local intent, like “plumber near me” or “best pizza in Durham,” Google displays a map alongside three business listings. This “Local 3-Pack” provides essential information such as the business name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and customer reviews. It facilitates direct, high-value actions like phone calls or requests for directions, completely bypassing the business’s website.
- People Also Ask (PAA): This feature appears as a box of related questions in an accordion-style format. When a user clicks on a question, it expands to reveal a short answer – a snippet pulled from a webpage – along with a link to the source. A user can explore multiple facets of their topic and get answers to several related questions without ever leaving the Google results page.
- The New Apex Predator: AI Overviews (AIO): The launch and expansion of AI Overviews in 2024 represents the most significant and controversial evolution in this trend. Powered by Google’s Gemini models, AIOs are AI-generated summaries that synthesise information from multiple web sources to provide a single, comprehensive, conversational answer at the very top of the SERP. These overviews push all other results, including ads and traditional organic links, further down the page, dramatically increasing the likelihood of a zero-click search.
The Great Divide
The current state of zero-click search didn’t happen overnight. It is the culmination of a nearly two-decade strategic pivot by Google.
Two Competing Realities
The reaction to the relentless rise of zero-click search has been anything but uniform.
It has cleaved the digital marketing and publishing worlds in two, creating a “digital cold war” with no apparent middle ground.
On one side, you have a coalition of publishers, creators, and SEO professionals who view this trend as a catastrophic attack on the open web’s economic model.
On the other hand, you have a camp of marketers and strategists who see it as the next, unavoidable evolution of search – an opportunity to be seized, not a threat to be fought.
To understand the stakes, we must listen to both sides in their own words.
The Critics’ Corner: “A Slow, Brutal Asphyxiation of Organic Traffic”
This is the voice of those whose livelihoods are built on website traffic.
Their argument is a potent mix of documented financial injury and pointed accusations of monopolistic abuse.
They see Google not as an innovator improving user experience, but as a gatekeeper building a “walled garden” to trap users and hoard revenue.
The Core Argument – Traffic and Revenue Annihilation
The central complaint is that by scraping content and presenting it directly on the SERP, Google is severing the lifeline of referral traffic that millions of businesses depend on for advertising revenue, lead generation, affiliate sales, and e-commerce conversions.
The language used is often stark, describing the situation as a “bloodbath” where Google is “collecting scalps” and your website becomes just another “unpaid consultant”.
The most vocal critics are often publishers and the organisations that represent them.
The Independent Publishers Alliance, in a formal EU antitrust complaint, stated that Google’s actions cause “significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss”.
Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, captured the widespread feeling of a broken social contract between the search engine and creators: “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, no economic return”.
James Rosewell of the Movement for an Open Web frames it even more bluntly as a two-front assault: “They steal publishers’ content to feed their AI model and then they use this capability to steal traffic by putting the Overview ahead of the links to the original content”.
Lily Ray, a prominent SEO strategist, offers a stark prediction about the next step in Google’s AI integration. She warns, “If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current form, it’s going to have a devastating impact on the internet. It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers… Google holds all the power.”
Barry Adams puts a finer point on the outcome, stating, “I think ‘extinction’ is too strong of a word for what’s going to happen to websites. ‘Decimation’ is the right word.”
He quantifies this by estimating that clicks from AI Mode could be cut in half, which for many publishers “could be the difference between having a viable publishing business and going bankrupt.”
She’s right.
And if Google AI mode frightens you, wait until you hear what China’s top search engine, Baidu, has already moved to.
Gisele Navarro of HouseFresh provides the crucial first-hand perspective of a small publisher.
She laments the loss of the web’s serendipity, comparing AI search to “asking a librarian for a book, but they just tell you about the book instead.”
She captures the feeling of a broken ecosystem, stating, “This feeling of the web being a big library for all of us, I think that is gone.” Her conclusion is a grim one that reflects the feelings of many independent creators: “I think it’s going to destroy the open web as we know it, for sure. It probably already has.”
When considering future economic models, Matthew Prince of Cloudflare identifies a core issue with the “machine web”: “Robots don’t click on ads.”
This simple statement undercuts the entire ad-based revenue model if AI becomes the primary audience.
Tom Critchlow of Raptive reinforces this by questioning the viability of direct licensing deals, noting, “I don’t think that paying for content like this is a model that will work at the scale necessary to sustain the web. It’s difficult to see how that would work as a replacement for the decline in clicks.”
Another Wound – Loss of Strategic Data
Beyond the immediate financial hit, sophisticated critics point to a more insidious second-order effect: the loss of invaluable strategic data. Michael Bonfils articulates this perfectly.
The problem isn’t just the lost click; it’s the lost insight into the customer journey. He states, “AI Overviews remove visibility into the mid-funnel stage (user research and comparison). This makes it difficult to optimise content strategy since marketers can’t access the conversations users are having with AI”.
When a user gets their answer from a Google AI Overview, the business not only loses a potential customer but also loses the data point that would have informed their content strategy, product development, and market understanding.
Pushing Back on the “Adapt or Die” Narrative
Critics vehemently reject the notion that this is simply a natural evolution that businesses must adapt to.
They see this argument as a convenient excuse that absolves Google of its responsibility.
Sultan Mahmud reinforces this, arguing, “Organic traffic isn’t just a vanity metric – it directly impacts revenue and growth. The idea that businesses should just ‘adapt’ to losing traffic is flawed”.
They contend that this isn’t evolution; it’s the deliberate dismantling of the open web’s economic engine by a monopolist for its own gain.
“Influence Has Always Been Better Than Traffic”
On the other side of the divide are those who advocate for a radical rethinking of marketing goals (and I am largely on this side).
This camp, championed by figures like Rand Fishkin, argues that fighting against the tide of zero-click search is futile.
Instead, they propose embracing the new landscape and shifting the focus from chasing clicks to building influence. It’s worth noting this camp I am with was on the right side about quality score, too, as I pointed out in my 2025 Strategic SEO ebook (and my 2018 SEO book for beginners).
The Core Argument – Shift from Clicks to Influence
The central thesis of this school of thought is that the ultimate goal of marketing has always been influence, and that website traffic was merely a proxy for that influence, and often a poor one.
Zero-Click Marketing, therefore, is about achieving that primary goal of influence directly where the audience is, be it on the SERP, a social media feed, or a podcast.
The most prominent voice for this perspective is Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro and someone I’ve followed closely for 2 decades.
He argues that the math has fundamentally changed. In his company’s testing, a social media post with no link gets approximately 10 times the reach of a post that includes a link.
I think his conclusion is powerful:
“I’d rather influence 10 times as many people than I would draw traffic from a small percentage”. He also points out that the decades of link-building spam have made publications, podcasts, and other media sources more receptive to pitches that don’t ask for a link, making a zero-click approach more effective for modern PR and outreach.
The question is… what is more powerful for your brand?
A direct link or a call to action: “search for [your offering] on Google”
The Silver Lining? Higher Quality Traffic?
A key pillar of the proponent’s argument is that zero-click features act as a powerful filter. They satisfy the low-intent, top-of-funnel informational queries directly on the SERP.
This means that the users who do end up clicking through to a website are, by definition, more qualified. They are looking for something deeper than a simple answer and are more likely to be further down the conversion funnel.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen sees this as a net positive, stating it “compress[es] the buyer journey… you may be losing early clicks – but you’re gaining buyer readiness”.
The Opportunity – On-SERP Brand Building
Finally, this camp sees immense brand-building value in appearing in zero-click features.
Even if a user doesn’t click, seeing your brand’s name as the source of an authoritative answer in a Featured Snippet or AI Overview builds familiarity, credibility, and trust.
This on-SERP branding ensures that when a user is eventually ready to make a purchase or take a more significant action, your brand is already top of mind.
The Zero-Click Debate -Threat vs. Opportunity
To crystallise this fundamental conflict, the following table juxtaposes the core arguments of the two opposing camps.
It serves as an at-a-glance summary of the debate that defines our industry today.
| The Critics’ View: An Existential Threat | The Proponents’ View: A Strategic Opportunity |
| Core Argument: Traffic & Revenue Loss | Core Argument: Influence Over Clicks |
| “A slow, brutal asphyxiation of organic traffic.” 9 | “I’d rather influence 10 times as many people than I would draw traffic from a small percentage.” 6 |
| Core Argument: Monopolistic Abuse | Core Argument: Higher Quality Traffic |
| “Google is keeping users in its ‘walled garden’ to maximise its own ad revenue.” 8 | “You may be losing early clicks, but you’re gaining buyer readiness.” 14 |
| Core Argument: Loss of Strategic Data | Core Argument: On-SERP Brand Building |
| “The middle part of that, where a person is researching… that data is gone.” 30 | “Visibility in AI Overviews… builds familiarity. And when that person is ready to take action, you’re already the brand they recognise.” 14 |
The View from Mountain View
Through a carefully orchestrated series of official blog posts, executive statements, and legal filings, Google has built a clear, if highly contested, justification for its actions.
Understanding this official rationale is crucial, as it reveals the company’s strategic priorities and provides context for the intense backlash from publishers and creators.
The Prime Directive – Enhancing the User Experience
Google’s primary public-facing argument is that every change, from the earliest Knowledge Panels to the latest AI Overviews, is made in the service of the user.
The stated goal is to provide the best, most relevant, and most direct answers as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In a May 2024 blog post announcing the broad rollout of AI Overviews, the company claimed,
“People have already used AI Overviews billions of times… They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more”.
Google frames this shift not as a radical departure but as a natural evolution of search, comparing it to past updates like the move to mobile-first indexing.
The objective, they maintain, is to create a “more delightful” web for users across all platforms.
This positions Google as a user-centric innovator, with the implication that any negative impact on publishers is an unfortunate but necessary side effect of progress.
The “More and Better Clicks” Rebuttal
This is Google’s most direct – and most contentious – rebuttal to the widespread publisher concerns about traffic annihilation.
Faced with a mountain of data showing declining clicks, Google has advanced a counter-narrative: AI Overviews don’t kill traffic; they transform it for the better.
The official line, repeated in various forms, is that AIOs actually 1 increase clicks to a 2 more diverse set of websites.
The same May 2024 blog post boldly asserted, “We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query“.
They also claim that people are visiting a “greater diversity of websites” and that the clicks that do occur are of “higher quality,” meaning users are more likely to stay on the page because the AI has done a better job of qualifying their intent.
This message is echoed by Google’s executives. Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, insisted that the team is “really focused on how we make it easy to click to sites” and that AIOs will “ultimately create new opportunities for sites to rank”.
However, there is a massive, unbridgeable gap between these official claims and the data reported by virtually every independent analyst.
This isn’t a simple disagreement over numbers; it represents a fundamental breakdown of trust between Google and the web creator community.
While Google claims more and better clicks, third-party data paints a starkly different picture.
A July 2025 report from Similarweb, published in Press Gazette, documented a 27% year-over-year drop in traffic to the world’s top publishers and a jump in the overall zero-click search rate from 56% to a staggering 69% in the year following the AIO rollout.
Data from Ahrefs suggests that the presence of an AI Overview can cause the click-through rate for the number one organic result to plummet by as much as 34.5%.
These two sets of “facts” cannot coexist without a hidden variable or a difference in methodology.
It’s plausible that Google’s claims are technically true within a very narrow, specific context.
For instance, an AI Overview might surface a hyper-niche blog for a very long-tail query that would never have ranked or received a click before, thus increasing the “diversity” of sites getting traffic.
However, this micro-level gain is a drop in the ocean compared to the macro-level volume of traffic being lost by established sites on high-volume head terms.
This discrepancy creates a significant credibility gap, fueling the perception among publishers that they are being misled while their businesses are being systematically dismantled.
The “Fair Use” Defence – Our Position on Content Scraping
When the conversation shifts from traffic to legality, and accusations of “theft” and “scraping” arise, Google’s defence rests on two pillars: the legal doctrine of “fair use” and the assertion that it is only using publicly available information.
In a legal filing responding to a class-action lawsuit, Google’s position was unequivocal: “Using publicly available information to learn is not stealing. Nor is it an invasion of privacy, conversion, negligence, unfair competition, or copyright infringement”.
The company argues that this practice is not only legal but essential for the advancement of generative AI as a technology.
The core of their legal argument is that training an AI model on copyrighted material is a “transformative” use. Under U.S. copyright law, “transformative use” is a key factor in determining fair use.
Google contends that it is not simply re-publishing the original work but using it to create something entirely new – an AI model capable of generating novel responses.
In response to complaints that publishers are not given a choice, Google often points to existing controls, stating that “Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google”.
They refer to technical tools like the robots.txt file and snippet control meta tags (nosnippet, max-snippet, etc.) as the mechanisms for this control.
However, this argument is seen by many as disingenuous.
Internal documents unearthed during the U.S. antitrust trial revealed that Google executives explicitly considered giving publishers a true opt-out for AI training but ultimately decided against it, referring to the all-or-nothing approach as a “hard red line“.
This exposes the “control” they offer as a Hobson’s choice: allow your content to be used to train our AI and appear in our SERPs, or use the controls to block us and become effectively invisible on the world’s largest discovery platform – Google Search.
No Business Left Untouched
The impact of the zero-click revolution is not uniform. It lands with different force depending on a business’s monetisation model, its industry, and its historical reliance on organic search traffic.
For some, it is a minor tremor; for others, it is a category-five hurricane.
In this section, we will dissect the specific pain points and, in some cases, the unexpected opportunities that have emerged for key sectors of the economy.
The Small Business Squeeze is a Double-Edged Sword
For small businesses, the rise of zero-click search is a profoundly mixed bag, presenting both a significant threat and a unique opportunity.
The outcome often depends entirely on the nature of the business itself.
The Downside – Traffic Evaporation and Lost Opportunities
The primary negative impact is the straightforward reduction in organic website traffic.
This is especially damaging for small businesses that have invested heavily in content marketing to attract and convert customers.
Imagine a niche blogger who has spent years building a repository of expert articles, monetised through on-site display ads and affiliate links.
When Google scrapes their carefully crafted “how-to” guide for a Featured Snippet or AI Overview, they lose the very pageview that generates their revenue. If they are not a well-connected entity, they might also be entirely removed from SERPs.
This scenario limits opportunities for lead generation, diminishes the ability to tell a compelling brand story, and cuts off the flow of potential customers into the sales funnel.
The competition for the remaining clicks becomes fiercer, often favouring larger, more established brands and straining the limited resources of small business owners.
The Upside – The Power of the Local Pack
Conversely, for local service-based businesses – the plumbers, electricians, dentists, and restaurants of the world – the Google Local Pack can be a powerful and net-positive zero-click tool.
By surfacing crucial information like a phone number, address, business hours, and customer reviews directly on the SERP, the Local Pack facilitates immediate, high-intent actions.
A user searching for “emergency plumber” can click-to-call directly from the results page, completely bypassing the plumber’s website.
In this context, the zero-click “conversion” (a phone call) is far more valuable than a website visit ever was.
Indeed, one study found that businesses listed in the top three of the Local Pack receive 93% more actions (calls, direction requests) than those ranked just below them.
This dichotomy reveals a fundamental truth about the impact of zero-click search: it is dictated almost entirely by a business’s monetisation model.
The closer the business model is to direct, off-site action, the less damaging – and potentially more beneficial – the zero-click trend becomes.
For a local restaurant, the click was always just an unnecessary intermediate step to the real goal: a phone call for a reservation or a customer walking through the door. Zero-click search makes this journey more efficient.
However, for a business where the on-site engagement is the monetizable event, such as a publisher relying on ad impressions, the removal of the click is catastrophic.
Zero-click search is fundamentally short-circuiting the traditional customer journey. Whether that is a benefit or a disaster depends entirely on where your business makes its money.
The E-commerce Conundrum – Collapsing the Funnel
The world of e-commerce is also experiencing a significant transformation, though here too, the impact is nuanced and depends heavily on the user’s intent.
Informational vs. Transactional Queries
The most significant traffic erosion for e-commerce sites is happening at the top of the funnel, on broad, informational queries (e.g., “what are the best running shoes for flat feet?”).
These are the types of questions that AI Overviews are increasingly adept at answering.
However, as the user moves down the funnel to specific, transactional queries (e.g., “buy Nike Pegasus size 11 red”), the need to click through to a product page to view pricing, check inventory, see detailed images, and complete a purchase remains strong.
These bottom-of-funnel searches are far less affected by the zero-click trend.
This phenomenon is illustrated perfectly by a real-world case study from the B2B commerce SaaS firm, Commercetools.
Their CMO, Jen Jones, reported to Digiday that the company’s click-through rate (CTR) had declined by 20% following the rollout of AI Overviews.
However, their conversion rates held steady. This strongly suggests that the traffic they lost consisted of early-stage researchers who were being satisfied by the AIOs and were unlikely to convert anyway.
The zero-click SERP effectively filtered out low-intent users, making their remaining website traffic more qualified and valuable.
Despite this, e-commerce sites face a long-term threat from Google’s own properties, such as Google Shopping carousels and product listing ads (PLAs), which are designed to facilitate transactions within Google’s ecosystem, further reducing the need to visit a retailer’s website.
Adaptation is key, evidently.
The Publishers’ Plight: An Existential Crisis
Nowhere is the impact of zero-click search felt more acutely than in the publishing industry.
For news outlets, media companies, and independent creators whose business models are almost entirely dependent on website traffic to generate advertising revenue and drive subscriptions, the rise of on-SERP answers represents a full-blown existential crisis.
The data is staggering and paints a grim picture. A July 2025 report from Similarweb, analysing the year after the broad rollout of AI Overviews, found that the share of zero-click searches had surged from 56% to 69%.
In that same period, organic traffic to news publishers plummeted from over 2.3 billion monthly visits to under 1.7 billion – a loss of more than 600 million visits in less than a year.
A separate report from Enders Analysis concluded that AI Overviews were directly “cannibalizing website visits”.
This is not an abstract, industry-wide trend; it is having a measurable and devastating effect on individual, well-known brands.
The following table, based on data from Similarweb and analysis by Press Gazette, shows the concrete impact on several major publishers, comparing their zero-click rates before and after the widespread launch of AI Overviews.
| News Brand | Zero-Click Rate (May 2024) | Zero-Click Rate (May 2025 – Overall) | Zero-Click Rate (May 2025 – When AIO is Present) | Key Insight |
| Mail Online | 48.0% | 54.9% | 68.8% | Massive jump in zero-clicks, with AIOs driving a significantly higher rate than average. |
| People.com | 66.2% | 65.6% | 71.2% | Already high zero-click rate is pushed even higher when an AIO is present for a query. |
| Buzzfeed | 52.8% | 60.7% | 69.2% | Significant increase in overall zero-click rate, exacerbated by the presence of AIOs. |
| Ouest France | 39.8% | 54.5% | N/A | Experienced one of the largest overall increases in zero-click rate over the year. |
| The Independent (US) | 52.4% | 63.6% | N/A | Among the worst-hit dedicated newsrooms, with a dramatic rise in its overall zero-click rate. |
Source: Data from Similarweb, analysis by Press Gazette.
This data provides the receipts for the publishers’ claims of catastrophic harm.
It shows a direct correlation between the expansion of AI Overviews and the decline in user clicks.
For these businesses, the symbiotic relationship they once had with Google – providing content in exchange for traffic – has been unilaterally impacted.
The Legal Battlefield – Copyright, Antitrust, and the Fight for Fair Use
The Web Goes to Court
As the financial and strategic stakes have escalated, the conflict over zero-click searches has inevitably spilt out of industry blogs and corporate boardrooms and into courtrooms and regulatory chambers.
This is no longer just a debate about SEO tactics; it is a high-stakes legal war being fought on multiple fronts, with the outcomes poised to define the fundamental rules of the digital economy for decades to come.
Danielle Coffey, President of the News/Media Alliance, frames the issue in starkly moral and legal terms, calling Google’s actions “the definition of theft.” She argues that because “the AI answers are a substitute for the original product,” Google is effectively profiting from stolen goods.
She concludes, “They’re making money on our content and we get nothing in return… I don’t see that being a business proposition that we would ever willingly opt into.”
The Antitrust Front – Accusations of Monopoly Abuse
The primary legal weapon being wielded against Google by publishers and their allies is antitrust law.
The core argument is that Google is not merely competing but is illegally abusing its monopoly power in search to crush competitors and dominate adjacent markets.
The most significant action on this front is the formal antitrust complaint filed with the European Commission by a coalition of publishers, including the Independent Publishers Alliance.
The complaint alleges that Google is abusing its dominant market position by using AI Overviews to siphon traffic, readership, and revenue away from the very publishers whose content fuels the AI summaries.
A central pillar of this antitrust argument is the “no choice” dilemma.
Publishers contend that Google has created a coercive environment where they have no meaningful way to opt out of having their content scraped for AI Overviews without accepting the catastrophic penalty of being effectively de-listed from Google’s core search results.
This, they argue, is not a legitimate choice but an anticompetitive tying arrangement imposed by a monopolist, leaving them in a lose-lose situation.
The Copyright Front – The “Fair Use” Standoff
The second major legal battleground revolves around copyright law.
A wave of lawsuits has been filed against AI developers, including Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, by content creators who allege that the unauthorised scraping of their work to train large language models constitutes mass copyright infringement.
A prominent example is the lawsuit filed by education technology company Chegg against Google.
Chegg claims that Google’s AI Overviews engage in “unjust enrichment” by using Chegg’s proprietary educational content to build a competing answer engine.
This, they allege, has directly led to a devastating 49% drop in their non-subscriber traffic, as Google now provides answers that students once had to visit Chegg’s site to find.
Google’s defence against these copyright claims is anchored in the legal doctrine of “fair use”.
The company argues that training an AI model on publicly available data is a “transformative” use of that data.
They contend that they are not simply re-publishing copyrighted works but are using them as raw material to create something fundamentally new and different: a trained AI model.
In a court filing, Google’s lawyers asserted,
“Using publicly available information to learn is not stealing”.39
The outcome of these “fair use” cases will have monumental and far-reaching implications.
This is not a fight over a single search feature; it is a battle to establish the fundamental property rights for the digital age.
If the courts side with Google and other AI developers, it will legally codify a business model for the entire AI industry based on the uncompensated ingestion of the world’s public data. This would accelerate the development of AI but could devastate the creative industries that produce the data in the first place.
Conversely, if the courts side with the publishers and creators, it could force a radical shift in the economics of AI development.
It might compel AI companies to enter into widespread licensing agreements to use training data, creating a new revenue stream for creators but potentially slowing down AI innovation and concentrating power in the hands of a few large media companies that can strike such deals.
This legal fight will determine who profits from the vast repository of human knowledge on the internet and will set the precedent for the relationship between creators and AI for years to come.
The Zero-Click Playbook: A New SEO Framework for 2025 and Beyond
From Optimisation to Influence
We have dissected the problem, examined the battle lines, and understood the stakes. Now, we turn to the most critical question: What do we do about it?
The old SEO playbook, which centred on ranking a list of blue links to win a click, is dangerously obsolete.
Surviving and thriving in the zero-click era requires a new framework, a fundamental shift in mindset from Search Engine Optimisation to what might also be termed Search Experience Optimisation.
The goal is no longer just to rank; it is to be the answer, wherever that answer is delivered, and to build influence that transcends the click.
Search Everywhere Optimisation (coined by Ashley Liddell from Deviation) by another name.
Pillar 1: On-SERP SEO
The first priority is to adapt to the new terrain and maximise your brand’s visibility within the very SERP features that drive zero-click searches. If you can’t always win the click, you must win the impression and own the answer.
- Mastering Featured Snippets: Earning “Position Zero” is now table stakes for informational queries. This requires a laser focus on content structure. Your content must provide clear, concise answers to specific questions, ideally within the first 40-50 words of a relevant section. Use question-based headings (H2s, H3s) that mirror user queries, and leverage formatting like bulleted lists, numbered steps, and data tables, which Google’s algorithms can easily parse and display as a snippet.
- Dominating the Local Pack: For any business with a physical location or local service area, your Google Business Profile (GBP) is your most valuable on-SERP asset. It is non-negotiable to fully optimise it. This means completing every single field, uploading high-quality photos and videos, actively encouraging and responding to customer reviews, utilising Google Posts to share updates, and ensuring absolute consistency of your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) across the web.
- Content for AI (Answer Engine Optimisation – AEO): To increase the likelihood of being cited in an AI Overview in future, your content must be structured for machine readability and demonstrate immense authority. This involves two key tactics. First, implement structured data (Schema markup) to explicitly tell search engines what your content is about (e.g., using FAQ schema, How-to schema, or Product schema). Second, build deep topical authority by creating comprehensive content hubs that cover a subject from every angle, solidifying your site as a go-to resource that AI models can trust. This is about satisfying users who find your content on Google. Note that as I write this, indexation is key. If you have a site already indexed in Google, it is relatively easy to get into AI Overviews quickly by simply blogging.
Pillar 2: Becoming Click-Independent
The long-term survival strategy is to build a brand so strong and a community so loyal that your reliance on Google for traffic diminishes over time.
The goal is to make your business a destination, not just an answer to a search query.
- The Primacy of Brand: In a world of commoditised, AI-synthesised answers, a trusted brand becomes the ultimate differentiator. The strategic objective should be to shift user behaviour from generic, unbranded searches (e.g., “how to fix a leaky faucet”) to branded searches (e.g., “Bob’s Plumbing how to fix a leaky faucet”). Branded queries are far less likely to be intercepted by zero-click features and signal a direct relationship with the customer.
- Cultivating Owned Audiences: The most valuable digital assets are the ones you control directly. Focus relentlessly on building channels that are immune to Google’s algorithmic whims. This means growing a robust email list, fostering an engaged social media community, or even developing a mobile app. These are direct lines of communication to your audience that no search engine can take away.
- The E-E-A-T Imperative: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are no longer just SEO buzzwords; they are the four pillars of a defensible brand in the AI age. Both Google’s traditional ranking systems and its new AI models are explicitly designed to identify and surface content from sources that demonstrate these qualities. Publishing original research, featuring expert authors, showcasing real-world experience, and earning links and mentions from other authoritative sites are crucial signals that build the trust necessary to thrive.
Pillar 3: Rethinking Measurement
If clicks are no longer the primary measure of success, then metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and organic sessions can no longer be our Guiding Star.
We need a new scorecard, one that reflects the reality of on-SERP influence and brand building.
- From Clicks to Visibility: Your analytics focus must shift from tracking traffic to tracking visibility. The new key performance indicators (KPIs) include:
- Impression Share: How often is your brand appearing on the SERP for your most important queries? Are your impressions growing even if clicks are flat?
- SERP Feature Wins: How often are you capturing the on-SERP real estate that matters? This means tracking your appearances in Featured Snippets, People Also Ask boxes, Local Packs, and, crucially, your citation rate within AI Overviews.
- Brand Search Volume: Is the number of people searching directly for your brand name increasing over time? This is one of the strongest indicators that your zero-click brand-building efforts are working.
- Tracking Off-SERP Conversions: It’s essential to connect on-SERP visibility to real-world business outcomes. For local businesses, this means implementing call tracking to measure phone calls generated from your Google Business Profile. For all businesses, it means looking for correlations between periods of high SERP impressions and spikes in direct website traffic, as users who see your brand on Google may later navigate directly to your site.
Key Takeaway – The Future of Marketing is Influence
The shift to a zero-click reality is undeniably the most disruptive force to hit the world of SEO in a generation.
It is challenging long-held assumptions, dismantling established business models, and forcing a painful but necessary evolution in our industry.
For many, especially in the publishing world, this change feels like an existential threat, and their fight in the legal and regulatory arenas will have profound consequences for the entire digital ecosystem.
For others, it represents a clarification of purpose – a move away from the vanity metric of the click and toward the true goal of marketing: building influence and earning customer trust.
The path forward is not to fight a losing battle against the tide of technological change, nor is it to passively accept the erosion of our traffic. The future belongs to those who can master a hybrid strategy.
Dame Wendy Hall, a web pioneer, offers a more philosophical long-term view, stating, “I’m not worried in the sense that this is all an evolution… If Google goes this way, some bright spark will come up with a new way of making money.” However, she adds a crucial, sobering caveat: “Something will happen. But I guess for many people along the way, it will be too late.”
Technology advocate Cory Doctorow sees this moment of disruption as an opportunity, suggesting that user anger could be harnessed to “build a coalition” for change. He calls the current situation “a crisis we shouldn’t let go to waste.”
It requires us to become experts at winning on Google’s turf, optimising our content to be the answer wherever and however it is displayed. Simultaneously, it demands that we build resilient, independent brands and cultivate direct relationships with our audiences, creating a moat that no algorithm can cross.
The era of chasing the click is over.
The era of earning influence has begun.
Disclosure: Hobo Web uses generative AI when specifically writing about our own experiences, ideas, stories, concepts, tools, tool documentation or research. Our tool of choice for this process is Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Research. This assistance helps ensure our customers have clarity on everything we are involved with and what we stand for. It also ensures that when customers use Google Search to ask a question about Hobo Web software, the answer is always available to them, and it is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. All content was verified as correct by Shaun Anderson. See our AI policy.