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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
ZCM Field Notes: Three New Studies That Explain What’s Happening to Search, AI, and Brand Visibility
Today I want to do something a little different and run through three recent pieces of research that, taken together, tell a pretty important story about where marketing is headed.
One is from Ross Simmonds from Foundation Inc on Reddit’s growing power in B2B SaaS search. One is from Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy Signal on Google click signals and why they still matter, even in the age of AI answers. And one is from Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive, who ran a very real-world experiment on how AI surfaced a single old negative review about Seer again and again in branded prompts.
And no, these are not all equally formal. Ross’s piece is the most dataset-heavy. Cyrus is doing synthesis from patents, trial testimony, and the Google leak. Wil’s is more of a field experiment on his own brand. But the reason I wanted to put them together is that they all point in the same direction:
Search is no longer just about your website ranking.
It is increasingly about whether platforms, users, and AI systems can find enough evidence to trust, repeat, and recommend you.
Let’s start with Ross.
https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-b2b-saas
Ross analyzed 8,566 keywords across 14 SaaS domains and found that in three of four verticals, Reddit outranked every vendor simultaneously on 50 to 66 percent of shared keywords. Even worse, 77 percent of Reddit’s winning search volume came from generic category terms, not just “best,” “review,” or “alternative” keywords. And on longer queries, six words or more, Reddit’s win rate jumped to 73 to 100 percent across verticals.
That matters because a lot of marketers still talk about Reddit like it’s just siphoning off listicle traffic or comparison-intent traffic.
Ross is basically saying: no, it’s bigger than that.
Reddit is not only winning on the obvious “best CRM software” type of searches. It is showing up across broader, more generic, often high-intent searches. It is competing before the buyer even gets to your polished vendor page.
And that connects to something SparkToro has been talking about for a while now, which is that platform-based discovery is not replacing traditional search so much as reshaping what people encounter inside it. In the Datos State of Search report, traditional search stayed remarkably stable, while zero-click behavior kept growing and Reddit remained one of the top external destinations from search in both the US and Europe.
So the first takeaway is not “go spam Reddit.”
Please don’t do that.
The takeaway is that third-party discussion is now part of your search surface area. Whether you participate or not, Reddit can become the page that shapes perception before your site ever gets a shot.
Now let’s go to Cyrus.
https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-b2b-saas
Cyrus’s big argument is that clicks still matter. Not in the dumb, old-school “just juice CTR” way. He is very explicit that the goal is not high CTR at any cost. The goal is relevance, usefulness, and satisfaction. He points to concepts like goodClicks and lastLongestClicks from patents, the API leak, and the antitrust trial, and he argues that Google appears to learn from whether people click, engage, and stop searching.
That is an important distinction.
Because a lot of people hear “zero-click” and think it means clicks no longer matter.
That is not what zero-click means.
Zero-click means fewer clicks are reaching your site. It does not mean user behavior has stopped informing the systems that decide what gets seen. In fact, Cyrus argues almost the opposite: AI answers can reduce clicks to websites while still relying on click-shaped search systems underneath. He notes that Google calls anchors, body text, and clicks three fundamental signals, and that AI Overviews and AI Mode often summarize top-ranking results that were surfaced, at least in part, through those same systems.
That should reframe the job for marketers.
The job is not “win the click” in isolation.
The job is to look like the result that deserves the click, then satisfy the visit so completely that the user does not need to keep searching. Cyrus even frames it as relevance, usefulness, and satisfaction.
And again, this lines up with broader behavior shifts. SparkToro and Datos found that a growing share of searches end without a click, and Rand notes that the new normal is still in the low 40s for desktop Google searches sending traffic outside Google in the US.
So yes, clicks matter. But they matter inside a system where you may get fewer of them, and where the winners are often the pages, brands, and discussions that best resolve intent upstream.
Then there is Wil’s piece, which I think is maybe the most visceral one of the three.
Wil writes that one old negative review from 2018, repeated across multiple sites, was showing up in at least one in three branded prompts about Seer. His point is not that the review was representative. His point is that AI did not care. The model found repeated third-party language and treated it as signal.
That is brutal, but it is useful.
Because it exposes the fantasy a lot of brands are still clinging to, which is: “Well, people know us. Our customers know us. The truth is out there.”
Cool. Is it published?
Because if it is sitting in Slack, in finance, in HR, in internal decks, in anecdotal customer love, then it may as well not exist for AI.
Wil’s team responded by publishing actual retention data, interviewing internal stakeholders, and asking clients for reviews. He says their 79.2 percent team-member retention rate started getting cited quickly, and after just two citations, some LLM outputs stopped repeating the “high turnover” claim. But he is also very honest that the fix was not durable. The citations faded. The misconception could return. His conclusion is that a single blog post is not a long-term fix, and that brands need an easier-to-cite, updatable source of truth.
That part really matters.
Because the lazy interpretation of GEO right now is something like: “Oh, okay, let’s crank out more listicles and comparison pages.”
Wil’s point is much more grounded than that.
If you do not publish defensible facts about yourself, third-party content can define you. And once AI starts synthesizing that stuff, a single weird artifact can become “the story” faster than most brand teams are prepared for.
So what do these three pieces say together?
Ross says the open web is not just your website anymore. Reddit and other third-party surfaces are taking over meaningful chunks of buyer discovery.
Cyrus says user behavior still trains the machine. Clicks, engagement, and satisfaction still seem to shape what search systems elevate, including the systems feeding AI answers.
Wil says if your brand does not publish credible, specific evidence about itself, AI may synthesize whatever scraps it can find and call that the truth.
Put all that together, and here is my takeaway:
We are moving from an era of “rank my page” to an era of “influence the evidence layer.”
That evidence layer includes your site, yes. But it also includes reviews, forums, discussions, search snippets, branded facts, third-party mentions, and the pages AI systems find easiest to cite and summarize.
That is why zero-click marketing matters.
Not because traffic is dead. Not because clicks are fake. But because influence now happens across a messier, more distributed surface area than most analytics setups can measure cleanly. SparkToro’s own research keeps showing that search remains deeply entrenched, AI is becoming mainstream, and zero-click behavior continues to grow.
So if I were a marketer listening to this, here’s what I’d do.
I would stop treating Reddit, reviews, and third-party commentary as side noise.
I would audit what evidence exists about my brand online.
I would publish more concrete facts, especially the ones only my company can credibly provide.
And I would spend less time obsessing over “How do I get the click?” and more time asking, “Do I look like the best answer before, during, and after the click?”
Because increasingly, that is the game.
And the brands that understand that early are going to have a real advantage.
–
Anyway, those research, investigative, and experimental pieces hit my desk the other day and I wanted to share them with you. Check out all their work and please, yes, read Ross’s, Cyrus’s, and Wil’s articles. They’re free and I’ve linked to them in the show notes.
I’ll see ya next week on Zero Click Marketing.
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BLOG POST:
A couple stats kind of make me laugh in our Google Analytics: our direct traffic, which states that around 45% of our traffic is direct; and our search traffic, which states around 24% of our traffic is from search. It's funny because this doesn't tell me a lot. Or rather, it tells me something. Just not the thing many marketers want it to tell them.
It does not tell me that direct magically created demand out of thin air, or that search deserves a medal for persuading someone to care about us. It mostly tells me where someone showed up right before analytics noticed them. It's directionally useful, but mostly, it reminds me that the channel that captures demand is not always the channel that created it.
Rand's recent research on the top 5,000 most-visited websites makes this painfully clear. Search and social together make up nearly half of visits to those sites, which is huge. But search (a.k.a. Google) is nearly a quarter of that visitation overall. People are spending time across social media, news, commerce, entertainment, email, productivity tools, and a long tail of other destinations before they ever decide to search for something. In other words: search is concentrated, while influence is fragmented.
Google is so big that in Rand's analysis, it is as large as the next 13 sites COMBINED. So when someone eventually Googles your brand, your category, or the problem you solve. Search gets way too much credit. The point is that search captures demand in a highly concentrated environment, while the more fragmented parts of the web often created that demand earlier. What actually happens — and it's so freakin' frustrating that we almost never see it — is that someone sees a post on LinkedIn, they hear a company's founder on a podcast, they see a sponsored post in a newsletter they trust, a peer drops the company's name in Slack, and then after that, the user searches the company on Google and makes the conversion. We can't see this pingpong journey and we have no idea how the customer is actually progressing through that funnel, vortex, ladder, or whatever the heck it's called now.
But we're seeing more breadcrumbs of what's happening. And I think what's happening is that we're moving away form an era of "rank my page" to an era of "influence the evidence layer." That’s how I framed it in today's Zero Click Marketing episode, and I think it fits here too. The evidence layer includes your website, yes. But it also includes reviews, forums, discussions, search snippets, branded facts, third-party mentions, and the pages AI systems find easiest to cite and summarize. If those surfaces influence whether people trust, remember, or search for you later, then they are part of performance whether Google Analytics can cleanly assign them a row in a channel report or not.
That framing becomes even more important when you look at Rand’s other report on where search actually happens. Across 41 major desktop sites in the US in Q4 2025, Google accounted for 73.7% of searches. Traditional search engines as a group made up about 80% of all searches; commerce sites accounted for about 10%; social platforms 5.5%; and AI tools 3.2%. Amazon, Bing, and YouTube each had more search activity than ChatGPT in that dataset. Rand’s point from all this is that search is a behavior, not a channel, and a lot more of it happens across the web than the usual Google-versus-ChatGPT discourse suggests.
Now... this is useful as it gives us a better way to think about our jobs. Our friend Cyrus Shepard’s recent research explains: our job is not just to rank, and it’s not even just to win the click. It’s to look like the result most likely to satisfy the searcher — and then actually do it. In his analysis of Google’s click signals on Zyppy Signal, Cyrus argues that Google appears to evaluate whether a result earns the click, whether the content proves useful, and whether it satisfies the search strongly enough that the user doesn’t bounce back to keep looking. Which means your search presence is not just your page rank. It’s the whole body of public evidence that makes your result look relevant, credible, and worth choosing in the first place.
That "evidence layer" I referred to earlier is now looking a lot more concrete. Ross Simmonds at Foundation Inc just published research on Reddit’s role in B2B SaaS search, and he found that third-party discussion is not just siphoning off a few "best software" keywords around the edges. In his analysis of 8,566 keywords across 14 SaaS domains, Reddit outranked every vendor simultaneously on 50-66% of shared keywords in 3 of 4 verticals. Even more interesting: 77% of the search volume Reddit won came from generic category keywords, not just "best," "review," or "alternative" terms. And as queries got longer, Reddit’s advantage grew, with win rates hitting 73-100% across verticals for six-word-plus searches. In other words: the evidence layer is not just your website plus some reviews. It is also the public conversation happening in places like Reddit, where buyers increasingly encounter category-shaping opinions before they ever land on a vendor site.
Wil Reynolds’ recent experiment on Seer Interactive makes the flip side of this painfully clear. He found that one negative review theme — "high account manager turnover" — kept surfacing in branded AI outputs, appearing 67 times in their tracking. Wil traced that back to a small set of review domains, where duplicated or thin evidence was effectively being treated as corroboration. Once Seer published real retention data and made it public, Perplexity cited the post immediately, and after just two citations, LLMs stopped referencing "high turnover" altogether. But the fix did not stick on its own: over time, citations faded, Seer republished an updated version, and then the citations and retention stat started showing up again. So if your strongest proof points are trapped in Slack, finance, HR, customer calls, or your founder’s head, they're not part of the evidence layer yet. And if they're not published, they're not really helping you.
https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/geo-experiment-how-ai-highlighted-the-1-bad-review-we-got-in-24-years
Search still matters tremendously. Rankings and clicks still matter. But they all matter differently, because increasingly, so does the body of public, crawlable, citeable evidence surrounding your brand. And yep, our job as marketers has gotten even harder: publish the proof, shape the conversation, and make sure the web has enough accurate, credible signals to trust, repeat, and recommend you. Because if you don't influence the evidence layer, someone else will.