Does Your Website Still Matter in the Zero-Click Era?

Scholars are divided, but we’re still believers. The website may be visited less, by fewer people, but it’s the only place to give your content efforts a permanent home, to own and control the brand experience, and to thoroughly and correctly inform search, AI tools, and yes, the occasional visitor about what you offer.

In this weeks’ 5-Minute Whiteboard, I dive into the reasons we’re putting our money where our mouth is on this, and still investing in a central, website hub, for all things SparkToro (FWIW, I do the same for Alertmouse, and plan to do that for Snackbar Studio, too — consumer or B2B, I think it’s the right move).

Transcript:

Search engines aren’t sending traffic to your website. AI tools aren’t sending traffic to your website. Social sites aren’t sending traffic to your website. As these three giant forces of the Internet collude and combine to prevent you from getting traffic, should you even bother with your website anymore? Can you just kinda phone it in? I think I think this is unfortunately not true.

We have to keep investing. SparkToro, we I’ll put my money where my mouth is here. We just spent months and a bunch of budget rebuilding our website from scratch, new branding, new design, all that kind of stuff. And it’s because of these four things.

Because we think that we still definitely need a home base for our content. If you’re looking for a video that I made or you’re looking for something that Amanda wrote about a topic or you’re looking for details about our whatever API or MCB, like that content still needs to live in a place. It has to have consistent home base where you can always count on it being. And I think that’s true no matter what you do.

I don’t care if you sell, you know, neckwear or software or experiences for vacations. You need a home base. Even if you’re distributing that content to social, even if search engines are taking that content and putting it in AI overviews, it’s also how AI tools get informed. That AI overview on Google, Google’s AI mode, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, all of them rely on the information that they crawl from your website.

If that information is only available in third party places, right, if you’ve distributed but you haven’t centralized, I think you’re in trouble. I think you could find far more misinformation and far older out of date information. One of the big reasons that we invested a whole bunch in our new support and help hub system on this new website is because Casey noticed that a bunch of the AI answers about what we do was wrong. It was wrong because it was pulling from old stuff and we needed to update it.

Third, this is still where the conversion happens.

Say what you want about all the distribution and the consumption. When someone actually wants to buy the product or service that you’ve got, they have to come to the website. And that experience is really important in determining how they’re gonna feel about your brand, whether they follow through on the purchase. It’s also an opportunity for that controllable brand experience. When you want them to experience who you are and what you are and what you’re not, all of that positioning happens on your website. Yes, obviously it will also happen in Google’s AI overviews and in, what social media says about you and all those sorts of things, but it is centrally happening on your site. And this is the only controllable place where you get to control the UI and the UX and the whatever colors and fonts and visual branding, but also style and language.

We think that what’s happening here is fewer visits, but the same level of influence for the website. The website is not getting less important. The fact that fewer people will visit doesn’t mean less people are gonna even experience the content on here. What we put on our website gets distributed through AI tools and and through Google really to far more people.

When we talk about that alligator graph, right, of impressions going up and traffic going down, clicks declining, guess what? Those impressions still count. They’re still having an impact. They are still changing people’s experience.

And also last note on this, we kinda think that the era of weird and human is coming.

Weird and human is not gonna happen in the Google AI overviews. It’s hard to make it happen inside any AI tools. Certainly it happens in your social media presence, but not necessarily in other people’s social media presence. And because of that, we decided intentionally that with our branding we wanted to be weird and human.

We wanted to use phrases like real data to cover your ass because we think that these bright colors and strange things would make sure that people know, oh, this is not AI. And we’re not, right? We’re not an AI product. SparkToro is real audience data, not synthesized.

And so, this human era, that might influence how you choose to invest in your website as well.

p.s. A special thanks to our designers, Fan Club Brands, for their excellent work on the new version of SparkToro’s site.