Zero Click Marketing for Your Mom

[00:00:00] Amanda Natividad: I was recently on NPR's The Indicator talking about the zero-click internet. And while I am obviously very excited about that, this is not an episode that's a victory lap, or at least not only a victory lap. [00:00:13] The NPR experience taught me that even though I've been thinking and talking about zero-click for several years now, it's not exactly a household topic, and it doesn't need to be, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain this to the normies. [00:00:28] Normies like my mom, who honestly still doesn't fully understand what I do for a living. I mean, she knows I work in marketing. She knows I wrote a book. She knows I occasionally travel, stand on a stage, and at home that I say things into a microphone. But I am not convinced that she could explain zero-click marketing to another person. [00:00:52] So Mom, this episode is for you. Consider this zero-click marketing for your mom, or I guess my mom. Whatever. Let's go. [00:01:01] I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing. [00:01:09] ​The NPR episode opened with a question: How old is Paul Rudd? Co-host Darian Woods searched Google, and Google immediately gave him the answer: fifty-seven. That was it. The search was complete. [00:01:23] He didn't need to visit Wikipedia. He did not need to open IMDb. He did not need to click on a People magazine article unless he wanted to begin a much more serious investigation into Paul Rudd's apparent immunity to aging. Google gave him the answer directly. That is the zero-click internet. The simplest way to understand it is that the major platforms we use every day increasingly want to give us what we need without sending us somewhere else. [00:01:53] Google wants to answer the question directly on Google. Instagram wants you to watch the video on Instagram. ChatGPT wants you to read its summary and then another prompt inside ChatGPT. In all these instances, you don't leave the platform to click through to the source. And from the user's perspective, this can be great. [00:02:17] Nobody wakes up in the morning eager to visit a dozen websites. They want the answer, the recommendation. They want to learn something or be entertained. If Google can tell you Paul Rudd's age in one second, that's more convenient than clicking on the website, dismissing a newsletter pop-up, rejecting cookies, scrolling past ads, and looking for the sentence that contains his birthday. [00:02:41] The trouble is, someone still had to create the information Google used. A journalist reported it, a publisher verified it, a website hosted it, and then an editor maintained it. Historically, the bargain was that the search engine helped a person discover that website, and the website received a visit in return. [00:03:02] That visit mattered. It gave the publisher an opportunity to show an ad or earn an affiliate commission, sure, but it also gave them the opportunity to teach or entertain the user, to provide value, to build a relationship with that user so that they could keep supporting NPR, or so that they could buy an Atlantic subscription to read their written, edited, verified news. [00:03:27] Now, the platforms can extract the useful part, display it directly, and satisfy the user without delivering that visit. That's why zero-click is not a marketing trend. It's part of a much larger economic change in how the internet works. And this shift has been happening anyway, and AI has only accelerated it. [00:03:50] AI tools are especially good at absorbing a large amount of information, synthesizing it, and producing a clean answer. That is valuable to the person asking the question. It is less obviously valuable to all the people and organizations whose work helped produce the answer. [00:04:07] This is the tension at the center of the zero-click internet. The experience can become easier for the user while becoming much harder for the publisher or the creator. So what does this have to do with marketing? Well, for the marketing piece, it's this. We were taught to think of the website as the center of everything. [00:04:28] You publish a social post so that somebody will click the link. You ranked in Google so someone would come to your website. The click was treated as proof that the marketing worked. But people don't behave that orderly or that predictably. Someone might hear you on a podcast, remember your company's name, and then search for it three days later. [00:04:51] They might read an entire useful idea in a LinkedIn post and then never visit your website. They might see your product recommended in an AI answer, ask a colleague about it, and eventually show up as direct traffic. Your marketing influenced them. Your analytics just can't report it. Zero-click marketing is a response to that reality. [00:05:14] It means creating something useful enough to matter in the place where people encounter it, rather than making them click before they receive any value. Now, that doesn't mean links are bad or that websites are dead. No, not at all. It means the value cannot always be held hostage behind the click. A good social media post should contain an actual idea, not merely announce that the idea exists elsewhere. [00:05:40] A useful podcast should teach the listener something, even if they never visit the show notes. A video should be worth watching on the platform where it appears. The audience might click, and we should make that easy when they're ready, but we can't assume that the click tells us a deeper story than it shows. [00:06:00] My NPR interview is actually a really useful example of this. I spoke with co-host Adrienne Ma for about forty minutes. The final episode was only about nine minutes long, and only a few short clips of my voice appeared. If I measured the interview by the number of seconds in which I was audibly speaking, I might conclude that very little of it made the final cut. [00:06:23] But they opened with the Paul Rudd example I gave them. They used the zero-click framing we discussed. They included the statistic that sixty-eight percent of US Google searches now end without a click. And the rest of the episode explored the same central problem. What happens when platforms provide the answer while the websites supplying the information lose the visit? [00:06:45] My literal quotes are brief. My ideas traveled further. That is what influence often looks like. The measurable artifact is smaller than the actual contribution. And this happens in marketing all the time. Someone borrows your language. A customer repeats your argument internally. A reporter uses your example to shape a story. [00:07:10] A potential buyer remembers your company without remembering the post, podcast, or person who first introduced it. That can be frustrating because marketers like receipts. I certainly like receipts. But a lack of clean attribution does not mean a lack of impact. Sometimes the work is doing exactly what it should do. [00:07:32] It's moving through the world, changing how people understand a problem, and reaching places you cannot neatly trace back to a dashboard. So that is zero-click marketing for your mom. The platforms increasingly want to provide the answer themselves. It's convenient for users, difficult for publishers, and unavoidable for marketers. [00:07:55] Our job is to make ideas useful enough to stand on their own, clear enough to be able to be understood, and memorable enough to travel. And in my case, even if that means anointing Paul Rudd as the unofficial ambassador for zero-click marketing. He did not ask for the role, but I trust he will bear this new responsibility with dignity. [00:08:17] That's all for today. Friends, if you found this helpful, send this short episode to a colleague or a friend who needs to get up to zero-click speed. And Mom, if you're listening, let me know what you think, I guess [00:08:30] That's today, and I'll see you next week.