By Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers, content, and influence.
This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard shares some scary new stats and realities. It feels clear to me that the Zero-Click Platforms problem is going to get much worse before it gets any better, so we might as well fight the only battle we can still win.
Transcript
Andy Crestodina surveys a bunch of bloggers every year, and this year’s report just came out. He actually just emailed me about it today. He was very kind. He included a quote of mine in here.
I think what’s important to pay attention to here is a trend that you’ve almost certainly seen before, and that is blogging getting harder. And it’s not just blogging, it is earning traffic on the Internet. This is getting more and more difficult. The results here very clearly show that people who are blogging and writing, you you can see this this graph, spiking up the last two years, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, four, harder and harder to attract visitors from search engines.
In my position on this is that zero click is taking over everything. Google is trying to answer searches without clicks. Facebook is trying to keep people on Facebook. LinkedIn wants to keep people on LinkedIn.
Here’s another post. This is from, Tim Soulo over at Ahrefs. Oh, look. Ninety seven percent of web pages get zero traffic from Google.
And this is this is not super shocking to anyone, but what I what what scares me is that this report which is which is something that we did, at SparkToro which looked at zero click searches in US and the EU was done in May, and June of this year looking at the five previous months. And if you’ll recall, Google had rolled back AI overviews, which hadn’t rolled out very far. But today, if you search for, for example, my smoke alarm randomly went off. Well, here’s this here’s this AI overview.
Last night I was searching for something related to my Dungeons and Dragons game. The AI overview takes over the whole page. Today Geraldine was searching for something related to lighting installation. AI takes over the whole page. These, you know, you might argue well, but look you could you could get a click here or maybe someone will click on Reynolds restoration services.
I’m sorry friends, I I think this is taking a tremendous amount more traffic than even what we measured back in June of this year. And so if you’re my friend Adam who just put together this fireball x y z site, which is actually probably the best website I have ever read or you will ever read about finding the best smoke alarms out there. I I can’t recommend it enough. Adam walked me through it and was like, what what do you think? I was like, I think that you have done a superb job, that your personal, deep dive into smoke alarms is second to none on the Internet, and that it will get absolutely no freaking traffic.
And what instead, you know, what instead you are gonna have to do here is try and influence what these large language language models and Google is telling people. And to do that, you know, you’re essentially gonna have to be in all the places where Google is pulling information from, which is a lot of these websites that rank in the top ten and all across the rest of the web.
I don’t think, you know, I don’t think this is changing. I think bloggers are gonna find it harder and harder. I think small website builders are gonna find it harder and harder. I think everyone’s gonna find it harder and therefore, your only two options are number one, to try and fight this by eking out as much traffic as you can from sort of the few places where you can get it.
Like, hey, I’m gonna post in these subreddits and see if I can get some people over to my site. But Reddit doesn’t really like sending people off the site and people are, you know, think it’s terrible and spammy when you do. Or I’m gonna try and rank, you know, maybe here in Google and hope for the best. May maybe I can rank up here and get something.
I really I I struggle with that and the second thing is to say, you know what?
You win zero click Internet. The big platforms, you’re gonna take all of our traffic and that is okay because I can still have influence by being present in the places where people pay attention. And so rather than trying to get, you know for example Adam trying to, get his website to get traffic from the subreddits, he’s just posting the information directly And you you can see, right, if I look for something like searches for the keyword smoke alarms and then I see where people are going, for example, Reddit being a great place, I can see that people who search for smoke alarms often get information from RDIY and smart home and home automation and home improvement.
I think you have to be present with native content in the plat in the zero click platforms because that is the future.
Fighting against zero click is I I think it’s Sisyphean. It’s a losing battle, and I hope, I hope more people adopt this mindset because I think it’s it’s kind of the only way to win especially in a potential AI overview world.