Clicks used to rule the digital world. Got people to click on your link? Good! It means that half the battle to get them to buy, subscribe, engage, or love you back has been won.
This gave birth to something I’m happy to see fading: clickbait. Baiting users to click was the goal of every digital marketer (and still is to a certain extent). But then…you won’t believe what happened. It’s downright shocking!
Clickbait stopped working (so well).
Have you noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to get people to click on your CTAs? Don’t rush to fire your copywriter; they’re not to blame. It’s the algorithms.
I don’t know if our inherent laziness trained the algorithms to despise outbound links more than anything or if they trained us to do what benefits the social network overlords — to leave the platform as rarely as possible. But one thing is clear: we don’t click as much as we used to.
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More than two-thirds of Google searches end without a click. Most social media networks will bury posts with outbound links, so you have no choice but to add that abhorrent “link in comments” bit. The few platforms that don’t prioritize native content are now statistical outliers.
Image from Amanda Natividad’s excellent piece on zero-click content
Zero-click content isn’t new but it’s spreading faster than ever
Google introduced featured snippets in 2014 — almost a decade ago. It was their way to offer quick answers to user queries and eliminate the need for clicks. SERPs are constantly updated and, which each update, we get more answers upfront. No need to click or leave Google. Stay where you are, everything you need is there.
The same goes for social media platforms. When Instagram didn’t allow clickable links in posts (still doesn’t, by the way), I was pissed. How the heck am I supposed to get people to where it matters? Change that link in bio every 5 hours?
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg saw (and I didn’t) back then:
- The lifespan of a social media post is short and growing shorter. Save for YouTube videos on evergreen topics, everything you post today will be forgotten tomorrow. Social media posts live less than fruit flies (a fruit fly lives between 8 and 15 days, not 24 hours, as is commonly believed).
- People don’t want to click. They don’t like long buyer journeys anymore. Tell your story, deliver your message, make your point — fast and without taking them for a walk (onto a new platform). Even cybercriminals know this: zero-click attacks are now a thing.
Alexa and Siri paved the way for AI-enhanced zero-click searches. However, voice search didn’t have the impact most pundits predicted 10 years ago or so. AI chatbots might.
The launch of ChatGPT changed how we look for information online. Look at these non-ambiguous trend lines.
You may argue that “AI research” could be referring to research into AI, not to AI used as a research assistant. I would agree with you — if only the line didn’t spike with the launch of ChatGPT.
We can see a nearly identical trend in “AI search”, with the same spike at the end of November (ChatGPT was launched on November 30).
What’s the appeal of zero-click, AI-powered search?
Its biggest promise: making life easier for content creators. AI can help you with ideation, thoroughness, and research. It’s a cognitive labor assistant, as a friend of mine likes to say.
In assisting your cognitive labor, AI chatbots remove the need to click. Ask a question and you get a reply in the same window. It takes a lot of pleading and begging to get ChatGPT to give you a link — it usually summarizes everything it “reads” online for your comfort.
From a user’s perspective, it’s definitely more convenient: you don’t have to click on a search result anymore, get annoyed with how vague it is, go back, find another one, click again, and so on.
From a marketer’s perspective, I would argue that things have gotten knottier.
AI promises to simplify content (but also adds new layers of complexity)
Ironically enough, AI doesn’t necessarily make your life easier. Back in the olden days (read: 10 years ago), it was enough to post a link to your latest blog post on every social media platform and forum you could find. Even with the crappiest organic reach (thanks for making that a thing, Facebook!), you would still get some traction.
Things are more complicated now.
People want native content. We’re all lazy here, so would it be possible for you to summarize your 2,000-word blog post in a tweet? Or a featured snippet I can see on my mobile with no scroll? Perhaps a Twitter thread if I’m feeling generous?
Content just got commoditized by AI, so marketers are expected to put in hard work elsewhere: creating bite-sized content for each platform, changing formats, and repurposing their content pillars.
A blast from the past: metrics just got murky again
In the past decade, accountability and trackability in marketing flourished. We got all these new fancy tools to track the efficacy of our efforts. We knew exactly who watched, bought, engaged — and where they came from. Most of the metrics we measured and proudly displayed in our annual review slideshows were based on clicks.
We no longer had to approximate, guess, or round up numbers like our “ancestors” did when all they had to go on were vague numbers like circulation for print magazines or total viewers of a TV show where they placed an ad.
Sure, things weren’t perfect and a lot of our marketing efforts are still hard to evaluate with precision. When clicks are taken off the table, our marketing hindsight is bound to get fuzzy again.
We’ll be relying on imprecise metrics, like impressions more and more. Once again, a lot of our efforts will feel like shots in the dark. The notoriously tough to measure brand awareness gets a pole position again — but no better metrics to go by.
When “real” metrics become irrelevant, we go back to “murky” territory. We toil harder than ever for the most fickle of all types of engagement — attention.
How to thrive in a zero-click digital world
Nothing has changed the digital world overnight (yet). Not even a “black swan” event like the launch of ChatGPT and all its wrappers could prompt a sudden death of our online habits. We’ve still got people clicking — at least for now. This means we’ve still got time to ensure a smooth, resilient transition.
Owning your own plot of digital land has never been more important
Build your blog, newsletter, podcast, video series — but make sure you can control the platform you publish on. If you rely too much on a third-party platform, like a social media network, it’s time to add another channel to your mix.
Do it now, while you can still get people to click and de-platform.
Speaking of social media platforms: download all your data from the social media networks you use. Remember that you own nothing there, not even the content you painstakingly created and nurtured. And not even your followers.
If the platform goes away or if your access to it is restricted because you broke an arbitrary rule you had no idea about (who reads T&Cs anyway?), everything goes away.
Less gated content, more upfront value
I launched my digital marketing agency’s blog when you could still get away with CTAs like “get in touch if you want to learn how we do keyword research without paying for expensive tools”. That went away pretty quickly.
Comprehensive blog posts are still in demand for now. But it’s getting harder to get people to them from other platforms, which means you’ll have to “de-construct” them and post them in bite-sized pieces on your social media profiles.
As for the usual VIPs of our content strategies, eBooks and whitepapers that we usually hide behind paywalls where the admission ticket is the user’s email address, those won’t die out yet. But they will have to be pretty damn good to be downloaded.
Before you publish one of those, make sure it is, indeed, earth-shattering, novel, and life-changing for the reader.
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Back to basics: email like your life depends on it
You must have noticed the recent downpour of newsletters. Ideas to Power the Future is one them (thank you for being here!)
Email is the one channel where engagement hasn’t been massively altered by AI. Why? Because despite its old age, email looks like a trendsetter in the new zero-click, value-upfront world. You can inform, convince, convert, and entertain your readers in a single email, all without them having to move to another platform to “reap benefits”.
And if you do it right, they might even break their new zero-click habit and click on the products you sell. Provided your email campaigns are good enough, of course.
That’s it from me today! See you next week!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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