By No amount of tactical excellence can save you.
That’s the lesson in the zero-click era — you can be the best meme-maker on social, the greatest editor in short-form video, the best keyword researcher the SEO world has ever known… it won’t matter. If your website and business model are things Google and AI can disintermediate, they will. This is why thousands of publishers, creators, small business sites, affiliates, and niche players have lost everything in the last few years. I wish it weren’t so, but here we are.
My friend Cyrus Shepard recently analyzed 400 websites that DID NOT fall apart in the great traffic apocalypse of 2024-2026, and came away with exactly five features that predicted survival and success: here’s his analysis. And here’s my assessment:
Transcript
We talk a lot about the zero click era and zero click marketing, but not every website has lost traffic. Google hasn’t decimated everyone’s referrals, just most people’s. But some folks managed to win and Cyrus Shepard wrote a post on LinkedIn that I that I amplified where he analyzed four hundred websites that actually did well over the last year rather than collapsing in traffic and what they did differently. And I think this is it’s not about SEO.
SEO won’t really help you here. As I said in the post and as a lot of people repeated in the comments, no amount of tactical excellence can save you if your business model is wrong, if the the strategy of what your website provides is wrong. So these features are not necessarily SEO things. They’re not things you do for Google.
They are, do you actually offer a product or service? Something that is unique that you cannot get from Google itself. Right? Budget bites resembles other recipe websites, but it has a subscription meal plan.
That’s why it went up and all the other recipe sites went down. Mathnasium is a math tutoring site that isn’t just information about math, which of course, ChatGPT or Claude could help you with. It’s in person tutoring and online tutoring.
And that that is why these product or services sites are winning. It allows for task completion. That’s the this is the second one. Right?
Eighty three percent of the winning sites allowed for task completion. Like you can actually do power ball dot com and check your winner tickets from the source. Math is fun is this math tutorial type that site that has interactive widgets. It offers proprietary assets.
Ninety two percent of these went up. Letterbox dot com, great example because in the movie review site, which Google has been decimating movie review sites, but not this one because it uses data from its user base to graph movie popularity over time and compare it. So it’s offering something unique. Again, proprietary asset that only letterbox dot com has.
Tight topical focus. I think this works for some but fails for others. You can see the the winning percent is only seventy five and sixty one percent of losing sites actually had this too. So minecraft.wiki is this Wikipedia for Minecraft.
Lots of people are playing Minecraft of course, but man, if you’re super tight targeted on something and Google comes into that space like recipes for example. Right? You might be hyper focused on Taiwanese noodle recipes, but Google can very quickly disintermediate you. And then finally strong brand.
This was one of the weaker predictors as the numbers show here, but zoom skims, right? They they have these strong brands. You have to go to them. You can’t really avoid them.
You’re not gonna be able to get the same value by just going to Google or Google AI mode or the AI overviews. And so this happens. This I think is a great, great illustration of how the zero click era is not just about getting better at, you know, ranking in search engines or getting traffic from or doing well on social media or doing well in AI overviews and AI answers.
It’s about changing your business to adapt to the era of zero click. If you’re not doing that, you are gonna get disintermediated by search engines or AI tools or other folks who are.