The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem

There’s a reason zero-click content has taken over your feed, your marketing strategy, and increasingly, your job description. It’s not just because it performs better (although yeah, that is part of it). It’s because it’s the only reliable path forward in a digital ecosystem that’s hoarding traffic and eroding trust.

Welcome to the Zero-Trust Internet

Today’s platforms will crush your reach if you dare link out. Some of them aren’t even hiding that anymore.

  • Google answers your question before you click. Google users who see an AI summary in their results page are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one.
  • Facebook buries posts with external links. Meta’s spring 2025 “Widely Viewed Content Report” states 97.3% of all US post views on Facebook go to updates that don’t include a link to a source outside of the app.
  • LinkedIn hasn’t admitted that their algorithm suppresses links but routinely, I’ll see 8x the reach on a post when I don’t include a link.
  • TikTok prevents links on posts, and hides referral data altogether.

Even if you do manage to earn a click, you’re often rewarded with… nothing. Dark social masks the source, and TikTok isn’t the only offender. Links from Slack, Discord, Mastodon, and WhatsApp are falsely marked as “direct,” containing no other referral information.

And if dark social isn’t a big enough problem, we also have shrinking traffic to worry about. Yes, it’s due in part to clicks lost to Google’s AI summaries. But that’s part of a larger trend where the “Long Tail” of the web (a.k.a. Anybody who isn’t in the top few hundred websites) is slowly but steadily losing traffic to the internet’s biggest players. In 2023, we saw the Long Tail lost ~3.2% to the top 170 websites, equivalent to tens of millions of visitors and billions of clicks. The number of monthly unique visitors to the top 170 grew by 0.299%, but referral traffic only grew at 0.103%. This suggests that the most popular websites are sending out a shrinking share of the traffic they receive.

So yeah. The old game of “optimize for traffic” is just that. An old game. We’re competing for the scraps of the internet, and that’s impressions. 

Why Zero-Click Content Works

Zero-click content doesn’t try to fight the algorithm. It works with it.

It gives people standalone value in the feed, without forcing them to leave the platform. Done well, it earns attention through resonance, not bait. Over time, it builds trust, a currency that’s scarcer than ever.

When I started posting zero-click content on Twitter (now X) in 2020, I went from 1,000 to 10,000 followers in about 18 months. No growth hacks. No paid amplification. Just native content that taught, shared, and resonated. That same strategy helped grow my newsletter to 15,000 subscribers—with only the occasional ask to subscribe.

It’s Not “Never Link.” It’s “Don’t Depend on the Link.”

One of the biggest misconceptions I see is people thinking zero-click content means never sharing a CTA.

That’s not the point.

The point is: don’t make the click your only mechanism of value. Because platforms suppress it, users don’t normally like to click on it, and attribution tools can’t track it.

You can share links — and in a well-rounded content strategy, you should. Sometimes. But understand that your real influence will never be accurately measured through Google Analytics. Instead of a click-thirsty strategy, consider looking at your content strategy as a banking system, where you accrue algorithmic capital through zero-click content and spend some of that capital with occasional posts-with-links. Perhaps you publish five posts in a row with all standalone insights, embedded videos, image carousels. Users will dwell longer on your posts and (hopefully) engaged with them. This signals to the algorithm that your content should be served to your audience. And every now and then, you drop your link, “Subscribe to our newsletter,” or “Book a demo at your convenience.”

Publish, say, 4-5 zero-click posts for every 1 ask.

It’s not about avoiding links. It’s about earning the good will to share them.

(By the way, I recently talked about algorithmic capital with Ali Orlando Wert on Databox’s Move the Needle podcast. You can watch it below or listen wherever you get your pods.)

Attribution Is Broken. Measurement Isn’t.

If you can’t track the click… how do you prove success?

You can still measure impact—it just requires a mindset shift. Stop thinking in terms of ROI and start thinking in terms of VOI: Value on Investment.

That means:

  • Watching branded search lift over time
  • Tracking demos booked or sales closed from employee advocacy
  • Looking at incremental regional lift the way out-of-home advertisers do
  • Keeping a pulse on audience growth and engagement (more subscribers, more followers, more likes, more shares) over time
  • Measuring content sustainability: how many channels can one asset power?

One of my favorite examples is Dreamdata, a B2B company that leaned into employee advocacy on LinkedIn. Their marketing and sales employees post about marketing, revenue, life at work, and they all have the same CTA in their profile header. The result? A lift in booked demos — without ever needing a click from their feed posts. It’s clean and it’s measurable.

The trickiest thing is figuring out what your ideal metrics are. It depends on your channels, your goals, your campaign. It’s unique to your business.

For example, when I was on that Databox podcast, Ali Orlando Wert and I talked about how we track the impact of our newsletters. This is an anchor content piece for both of our company’s strategies, and we want to know how people subscribe and their conversion path afterwards. The Databox team actually built out a sample dashboard for me; you can see it here.

Zero-Click Is a Trust-Building Strategy

Most of your buyers aren’t in-market today. By some estimates (this one from Ehrenberg-Bass for the LinkedIn B2B Institute), 95% of B2B buyers aren’t actively looking for a solution right now. Companies change their service providers about once every five years… which means only 20% are in the market for those services in a given year. So if your content is only optimized for conversion, you’re ignoring the majority of your market.

Zero-click content builds familiarity and favorability with the 95%, so that when they are ready, you’re the brand they remember. That’s trust. And that’s the kind of equity that compounds.

Zero-Click Marketing Isn’t a Tactic. It’s a Strategy for a Referral-Hostile World.

It’s tempting to chase the same KPIs that made sense in 2015. But we’re not in that era anymore.

We’re in a time when platforms don’t want to send traffic, users are skeptical of being “funneled,” and marketers need to squeeze more value from every asset.

That’s what zero-click marketing does. It doesn’t just “work with the algorithm.” It works in spite of the ecosystem.

And that’s exactly what makes it worth investing in.