AI Overview and Zero Click Search. What this means for marketing (and sales)

I recently read an article from The Search Engine Journal where a study found that 60% of searches were resolved without users clicking links.

Putting aside my big question of how is Google and Bing going to adapt their revenue strategy, this has a huge impact on marketing.

In the past, when we optimized and created articles to appear top of the search engine results page it was mostly top of funnel and general content.

Marketing department and outside agencies loved this type of content because they could pretty much write it  by themselves without interviewing the subject matter experts.

And when ChatGPT came out, they could crank out even more top of funnel content.

But now with a lot of simple and informational queries being resolved with AI Overview, we are losing a large portion of clicks and web traffic.

Don’t worry - this is not the end for SEO or content writing.

We just need to adapt and:
✅ Shift from top of funnel general information to middle funnel educational content.
✅ Optimize SEO to long tail keyword phrases and a specific sales questions.
✅ Tap into the tribal knowledge of our product engineers, sales and support teams to get their specialized knowledge down in written form.

Zero click search has changed the game.

As marketers we need to offer something deeper than the general information that users can get from AI Overview or ChatGPT.

We need to interview our subject matter experts (our sales team!) who know first hand what problems our customers are struggling to solve.

Give buyers something that ChatGPT and AI Overview cannot:
The unique experience and expertise that only your company can provide.

p.s.
If you want to read the original article, here it is:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/study-google-ai-overviews-appear-in-47-of-search-results/535096/