Category: Zero Click

Data Marketing Research SEO Zero Click

In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden. Their financial and stock performance suggests that these changes boosted both ad revenue and investor confidence, and thus, it’s…
Predictions Psychology SEO Tactics Zero Click

Inimitable Product is the New “Make Great Content”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For 25 years, Google told websites to “just make great content,” and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content). But, no more. Google’s future is no longer indexing…
5-Minute Whiteboards SEO Zero Click

5 Strategic Features that Predict Survival in the Zero-Click Era

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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…
Data Research Zero Click

New Research: Influence Happens Everywhere, an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on the mobile and desktop web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Several weeks ago, I published some important research about where search happens on the web. Spoiler: everywhere, but ~73% is still Google. This data, fascinating as it is, begets another question – where does influence happen? What do people read, watch, listen-to, browse, and surf on the web *before* they search? For answers, I turned to our longtime friends at…
Data Research SEO Startups Zero Click

New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For 25 years, web search meant Google (and a little bit of Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo). But in the past 2.5 years, it’s often expanded to include the major AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, CoPilot, and Gemini. We found this broader definition welcome, but a little strange. If ChatGPT is search, why isn’t Instagram? Or YouTube? Or Amazon? It struck…
5-Minute Whiteboards Research Zero Click

How to Overcome the “Link in Comments” Problem on LinkedIn and Other Social Platforms

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Those pesky, anti-link, pro-native-content social platforms are at it again, muzzling the visibility of links anywhere and everywhere they can. Sure, they occasionally let something especially high-performing through, but as we learned when Twitter open-sourced its algo, these systems intentionally and consistently demote content with links… But… Amanda and I have been working on ways to outsmart these systems for…
AI/LLMs Industry Marketing Predictions Psychology Zero Click

The 5 Big Trends that Will Dominate Marketing in 2026

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I find most end-of-year prediction and crystal ball-gazing listicles to be trash. They don’t prove their assertions, use anecdotes rather than data at scale to back up their prognostications, and, worst of all, fail to grade their previous predictions (how the #$%@ else do you know if you can trust their current ones?!). And yes, I’m looking at you, Gartner,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something shaped like a ball bouncing around a pinball-machine. These modern buyer journeys bounce back and forth between channels and content in ways that can’t be readily modeled nor cleanly attributed (despite what your analytics tool tells…

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