UpTrajectory Review
The HubSpot Marketing Blog highlights a significant shift in consumer behavior with the rise of zero-click searches, where users find answers directly on search results pages without visiting websites. This trend, driven by AI and rich results, is impacting organic web traffic, with estimates suggesting a decline of 15% to 25% for many businesses. The article offers insights into adapting marketing strategies to this new landscape, emphasizing the importance of answer engine optimization (AEO) to maintain visibility and drive conversions.
For small business owners, this shift underscores the necessity of evolving marketing strategies to include AEO. As traditional SEO becomes less effective in driving traffic, focusing on how your brand appears in AI-generated answers can be crucial. This week, operators should assess their current content strategies and consider how to optimize for zero-click results, ensuring they remain relevant in an increasingly competitive digital space. Ignoring this trend could mean losing potential customers to competitors who adapt more swiftly.
Takeaway: Adapt your marketing strategy to include answer engine optimization to stay competitive in a zero-click search environment.
From the original item — HubSpot Marketing Blog:
Search results used to be a doorway. A brand ranked, someone clicked, and they landed on a website. But today, that model is eroding faster than most marketing teams are equipped to move.
Bain & Company research found that about 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches. For some businesses, this means more impressions, but across the board, it’s reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.
What does this mean for marketing teams? How can they measure it and achieve success?
This guide breaks it all down, including what zero-click searches are, why they matter, and how to turn zero-click visibility into conversions using answer engine optimization (AEO). HubSpot’s AEO solutions, including its standalone AEO tool and built-in features in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, help teams identify where their brand appears in AI-generated answers and optimize content to increase citation visibility across search and AI platforms.
Table of Contents
- TL;DR Executive Summary
- What are zero-click searches?
- How Zero-Click Disrupts the Marketing Funnel
- How to Adapt SEO in a Zero-Click World
- When to Pursue or Avoid Zero-Click Keywords
- How to Measure Zero-Click Impact
- Zero-Click Searches Playbook by Funnel Stage
- FAQs About Zero-Click Searches
- AEO Complements SEO
TL;DR Executive Summary
Zero-click searches occur when a user gets their answer on the search results page (SERP) through an AI overview or other rich results, without clicking on a website. AI Overviews increase the likelihood of zero-click behavior for informational queries, while featured snippets satisfy simple question intent directly on the SERP, and People Also Ask (PAA) boxes expand answer paths without requiring a click.
Answer engine optimization focuses on earning citations, summaries, answer placements, and even voice mentions for a website and brand, in ways traditional SEO does not. AEO includes, but is not limited to, creating answer-first content to improve eligibility for featured snippets, AI Overviews, and other answer surfaces.
HubSpot’s free AEO Grader provides a one-time baseline assessment of how your brand is currently performing in answer engines. For teams ready to go beyond that snapshot, HubSpot AEO offers continuous prompt tracking and prioritized recommendations to improve your answer engine visibility over time.
What are zero-click searches?
A zero-click search occurs when a search engine query is answered directly on the search results page via a featured snippet, knowledge panel, People Also Ask (PAA) box, local pack, AI Overview, or other rich results rather than having a user visit a separate website.
AI-powered rich results include:
- Featured snippets, which return a direct answer in a boxed format at the top of the SERP.
- Knowledge panels, which provide quick overviews of entities like companies, people, and places.
- People Also Ask, which boxes surface-related questions with expandable answers.
- AI Overviews, which synthesize multi-source answers directly in the SERP.
- Local Pack, which displays a map and three local business listings based on the user’s location or search.
Here’s an example of one from the very on-brand search of: “What is Bollywood?”
As consumers, these results can be convenient and helpful, but for businesses, they’re taking their toll on the organic website traffic that was once a golden metric.
Why should marketers care about zero-click searches?
Zero-click searches have changed buyer search behavior.
According to McKinsey, half of Google’s results already feature these AI Overviews along with other rich results, and trends predict that number will reach 75% by 2028. That means many queries that used to earn businesses clicks and bring prospective buyers to their websites are no longer performing as well as they once did.
Zero-click searches have changed reporting.
The challenge with AI features for marketers isn’t just traffic, however; it’s also attribution.
Organic click-through rates (CTR) have dropped to 40.3% in the U.S. and 43.5% in the EU/UK, while clicks to Google-owned properties like YouTube and Maps increased to 14.3% in the U.S.
Because of this, the impression data in a company’s Search Console may be stable or growing, but it’s likely increasingly coming from sources other than the sessions, leads, and pipeline stakeholders expect to see. Tools like HubSpot AEO help bridge this gap by showing how zero-click visibility contributes to brand awareness, engagement, and pipeline, even when clicks decline.
Zero clicks can improve brand recognition and recall.
Zero clicks are not all bad news, though. While zero-click results may not directly drive organic traffic, they can still demonstrate expertise, and the brand awareness that comes from being cited in these rich results can drive higher conversion rates when users do visit a site.
When a buyer sees a brand cited in an AI Overview or featured snippet multiple times during their research, they automatically arrive at the site pre-warmed — with far less convincing needed at conversion.
Curious how a business is currently performing with answer engines like ChatGPT and Gemini? HubSpot AEO gives you continuous visibility into how your brand is cited across answer engines, with prompt tracking, competitor analysis, and prioritized recommendations to improve your visibility over time.
How Zero-Click Disrupts the Marketing Funnel
The traditional marketing funnel (illustrating the buyer’s journey) assumed that search drove a click, the click drove a visit, and the visit eventually drove a lead.
Zero-click searches don’t eliminate this path, but they restructure it, with more of the early stages happening directly on the SERP. HubSpot’s evolved hourglass visualization of the buyer’s journey and Loop Marketing accounts for this.
Let’s take a look at the potential impact of zero-click searches in each phase of the buyer’s journey.
Awareness: The SERP is now a branding arena.
At the top of the funnel, users are just beginning to understand their pain point and become aware of possible solutions. In the SERP, they’re learning about brands that are in this conversation before they ever reach a website.
Pre-AI-as-we-know-it, users would scroll through the SERP, seeing different brand names and favicons and associate them with their search even if they didn’t click.
Now, when a query has an AI overview or one of the other AI rich results, that scrolling doesn’t happen as often. Users only see and “become aware” of the brands and websites cited in the results, while everything below tends to get ignored.
A brand’s representation in those answers functions like advertising. They are the key to building awareness and attracting leads in the SERP.
Say there’s a luxury travel agent specializing in the Caribbean. Users researching “how to plan a trip to St. Lucia” may get their ideas and education from AI recommendations and sponsored results, not from the agency’s content.
But this is particularly consequential for B2B teams. Say someone searches, “best CRM for mid-market” or “enterprise content marketing tools.” There’s a good chance they may form vendor shortlists based on AI overviews, not on a business’s content.
Consideration: Interest and Evaluation Without a Click
In the consideration stage, people are actively looking for solutions and considering which one might be right for them. People Also Ask boxes and featured snippets satisfy the depth of research that used to require three or four site visits during this stage.
For instance, if a user sees a brand mentioned in a featured snippet and then cited in the PAA, they are already poised to build a preference. In the consideration phase, the goal isn’t to force a click; it’s to make the brand the recurring right answer.
With HubSpot’s AEO capabilities in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, teams can use CRM data to understand which prompts matter most to their audience, then track how often their brand appears in AI-generated answers.
Using our travel agent example, if users researching “how to plan a trip to st lucia” see the same website both in the AI overview and PAA, there’s a good chance they’ll begin to see the agency as someone who knows their stuff.
The same goes for the B2B Saas example:
Repetition breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds trust.
Conversion: Queries With Intent
Conversion is the one stage in the buyer’s journey where the traditional SERP is still fairly intact.
In some instances, conversion-stage queries may surface a Local Pack or structured snippets with commercial intent, but many conversion-related queries, like comparisons or those including words like “buying,” “demo,” or “consultation,” are less likely to trigger AI Overviews. So, investments in paid search and SEO are still valid.
Thinking of our St. Lucia trip, for instance, the query “st lucia travel agent consultation” returns no AI overview or rich results.
Kind of a relief, right? It can be especially for B2B businesses.
For B2B with high-intent commercial queries, the path from the SERP to owned engagement can be compressed thanks to AI. As with our St. Lucia trip, the query “free content marketing tools demo” for our SaaS example returns no rich results.
Alternatively, a search for “HubSpot vs Salesforce” may surface a comparison page in an AI Overview, but it still requires a click for the user to get the full value. Plus, the prospect who arrives on a website already understands its offering. At this point, the landing page’s job is confirmation, not introduction.
But remember, buyers also don’t usually jump straight to the conversion stage of their journey. So, stay vigilant. Regardless of the experience here, the path to the brand’s website and a purchase can be significantly longer than it once was due to AI intervention.
Note: Loop Marketing revisits the buyer’s journey and marketing funnel to adapt to modern behaviors and AI influence on search. Learn more about it here.
Content and Capture Strategy by Funnel Stage
How to Adapt SEO in a Zero-Click World
The fact that Google rank doesn’t matter the way it used to doesn’t mean organic optimization is obsolete. It means the mechanics of what marketers are optimizing for have changed. Enter Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
Here’s what marketing teams should do.
Shift your KPIs before your content.
The first thing marketing leaders need to pivot is how they define success. If the marketing team is still reporting organic sessions as the primary SEO metric, they’re measuring a declining output instead of the influence driving it.
Swap or supplement these metrics:
- Organic sessions as the headline KPI → Add: SERP impression share, branded search volume, and AI citation frequency.
- Rank tracking for individual keywords → Add: Featured snippet and AI Overview ownership rate across keyword clusters.
- Traffic-based content ROI → Add: Pipeline influenced by organic touchpoints, including zero-click ones.
This reframe also protects marketing teams internally.
When leadership asks why traffic is down, marketers will have data showing that despite the traffic dip, impressions are stable, branded search is up, and the organic-assisted pipeline is growing.
Format your content to lead with direct answers.
Answer engines like Google’s AI Overviews, Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot don’t process web content the way traditional crawlers do. Rather, they build knowledge networks that connect facts, entities, and relationships, and formatting plays a big part in this.
HubSpot AEO provides actionable recommendations on structuring content for answer-first visibility, guiding teams on how to format pages so they’re more likely to be surfaced in AI Overviews and other rich results.
Thankfully, the content formatting that improves zero-click eligibility is many of the same ones that have helped with traditional SEO:
- Lead with the answer. Open each section with a direct, 40–60-word response to the implicit question before expanding into evidence and context. AI and snippet algorithms reward answer-first architecture.
- Use structured headers as question formats. “What is zero-click SEO?” performs better for SERP features than “Overview” or “Introduction.”
- Include definition boxes or callouts. A clearly formatted definition paragraph is highly likely to be pulled as a snippet.
- Use tables for comparisons and lists for sequential steps. Google consistently favors these formats for list and table-type featured snippets.
- Add FAQ schema to pages already ranking on page one. This signals Q&A structure to both Google and AI systems, helping content show up for common questions and PAA results.
Speaking of PAA, for PAA eligibility, make sure to:
- Map the questions the content needs to answer.
- Include those questions verbatim as H3 subheads.
- Follow each with a 2–4 sentence direct answer.
This mirrors the format Google uses to serve PAA results and can also aid other AI-powered rich results.
Pro tip: Prioritize pages that already have strong impressions but declining CTR. Those are the clearest signals that a SERP feature has moved in, and that the content formatting isn’t competing with it.
From there, audit content for answer-first eligibility, asking, “Does this page answer the target query within the first 100 words, or does it make the reader scroll to find it?”
Pages that bury their answer are losing snippet eligibility to competitors who lead with it.
Implement structured data in your content.
Speaking of formatting, more and more AI SERP results, such as knowledge panels and featured snippets, depend specifically on structured data (aka schema markup) to provide answers directly in search results.
The essential schema types to implement:
- FAQ schema surfaces answers in expandable SERP formats and signals Q&A structure to AI systems. Note that since 2024, Google restricts FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites, but FAQ schema still provides structural value for AI citation. This is especially helpful for PAA.
- Article/BlogPosting schema makes editorial content eligible for Top Stories and establishes author, publication date, and content context.
- Organization and Website schema anchors entities in the Knowledge Graph and supports knowledge panel eligibility.
- HowTo schema supports how-to queries with step-based answer formats.
According to Google’s own structured data documentation, Rotten Tomatoes saw a 25% higher click-through rate after adding structured data to 100,000 pages, and Nestlé found that pages appearing as rich results earned an 82% higher CTR than pages without them.
Implement schema in JSON-LD format (Google’s preferred method), validate using Google’s Rich Results Test, and prioritize the pages already ranking on page one.
Use local SEO to optimize for knowledge panels and packs.
For brands with physical locations or local service areas, local search optimization is one of the highest-leverage zero-click investments available. In fact, according to Backlinko, 42% of searchers click on Google map pack results for local queries, making a three-pack listing one of the highest-value placements in local search.
To strengthen local zero-click presence:
- Keep a brand’s Google Business Profile fully populated and regularly updated.
- Implement LocalBusiness schema with consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data.
- Earn structured citations across relevant directories.
- Generate review volume — star ratings in rich snippets directly influence clicks.
Optimize third-party channels AI systems trust.
If a product appears consistently across Reddit discussions, forums, industry articles, and review sites with similar messaging, AI systems gain confidence citing the consensus around it.
In practice, this means marketers’ pivot plan needs to include channels that feel adjacent to SEO but directly feed it:
- Third-party review platforms (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot). AI systems heavily draw on these for product-category queries. An incomplete or outdated profile or poor reviews here could be a missed citation.
- Industry publications and guest content. A mention in a high-profile article carries more AI citation weight than 10 posts on an owned blog. They are an external validation of a company’s expertise.
- Reddit and community forums. Google and AI systems increasingly treat these as authoritative signals for how real users perceive a product. Participating authentically, not spamming, matters.
- YouTube. YouTube is held as the second most widely trafficked website in the world, and its content is even delivered in Google SERPs. A video that answers a core question an audience searches for is a zero-click asset that works across multiple surfaces simultaneously.
Focus your efforts on commercial intent.
When AI Overviews are present, click-through rates plummet to just 8%, compared to 15% for traditional search results without AI summaries, according to The Digital Bloom.
The pivot: Marketers should reduce investment in purely informational, top-of-funnel content that will increasingly be answered by AI without a click, and reinvest in:
- Commercial comparison content (“X vs. Y,” “best [category] for [use case]”). These queries still drive clicks because users need to evaluate details.
- Original research and proprietary data. AI systems can’t synthesize what doesn’t exist yet; a company’s own studies become both citation bait and click drivers.
- Tool pages, templates, and calculators. Utility content that requires interaction can’t be zero-clicked away; it must be experienced.
This doesn’t mean abandoning awareness content entirely, but marketing leaders should be strategic about where they expect a click versus where they’re optimizing for citation and brand recall. HubSpot AEO helps teams identify which queries are driving answer engine visibility versus clicks, enabling smarter prioritization of commercial-intent content that’s more likely to convert.
When to Pursue or Avoid Zero-Click Keywords
Not every keyword deserves an optimization investment for zero-click visibility. The decision should come down to commercial potential and content differentiation. Here are some quick tips to help marketers decide when to pursue zero-click visibility and when not to.
Pursue zero-click visibility when:
- The query has commercial or navigational intent. Users searching things like “best project management tools for agencies” are evaluating vendors, not just learning.
- Teams are targeting brand awareness at scale, and a SERP placement gets their brand in front of net-new audiences.
- Brands can win the snippet with differentiated data, such as original research, unique statistics, or a proprietary framework that no other competitor has.
- The keyword represents an easy win where existing content is close to snippet-eligible with minor reformatting.
Avoid zero-click investment when:
- The query is purely informational and of low commercial value. Definitions, basic how-tos, and commodity facts won’t move the pipeline.
- A team’s negative keyword strategy already deprioritizes that traffic as irrelevant.
- Winning the snippet would cannibalize an existing high-performing page by satisfying intent before a click to a higher-value offer.
Pro tip: Use a test-first approach. Run a 30-day experiment on 3–5 target keywords. Restructure the content with an answer-first format, add FAQ schema, and compare CTR and brand mentions before and after. This tells marketers whether the investment scales before committing full editorial resources.
How to Measure Zero-Click Impact
Like its counterparts, SEO, content marketing, and social media, AEO is a long-term strategy. That said, marketers and SEO strategists must make a habit of reviewing their work and tracking their performance. HubSpot AEO is designed to support this shift, giving marketers the ability to measure influence across AI-powered search experiences rather than relying solely on traditional traffic metrics.
Let’s take a look at the metrics teams will want to report on.
AEO and Answer Engine Visibility Metrics
Click-through rate is no longer a sufficient measure of search performance. A robust zero-click measurement framework includes SERP, brand, and pipeline measurements. HubSpot AEO centralizes these metrics by tracking AI citation frequency, share of voice in generated answers, and overall brand presence across answer engines, giving marketers a clearer picture of performance beyond clicks.
SERP visibility metrics:
- Impression share by keyword cluster (not just ranked keywords).
- Featured snippet and AI Overview ownership rate for target queries.
- PAA appearance frequency across priority topic groups.
Brand influence metrics:
- Branded search volume month-over-month.
- Direct traffic trends correlated with SERP feature wins.
- Share of voice in AI-generated answers (trackable via HubSpot AEO).
Pipeline influence metrics:
- Assisted conversions where the first or last touch was a branded or non-branded organic search.
- Demo and trial volume from pages receiving AI Overview or snippet traffic.
- Time-to-conversion trends for search-driven versus direct-traffic leads.
A Sample Zero-Click Scorecard
Reporting Frequency
Build a monthly cadence of measuring AEO performance. Teams that compound their advantage as answer engine adoption continues to expand. Using HubSpot’s AEO features in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise, teams can monitor changes in answer engine visibility over time, making it easier to spot trends, measure improvements, and adjust strategy on a consistent cadence.
A review cadence should include:
- Reviewing your HubSpot AEO dashboard to track answer engine visibility trends and check progress against competitors over time.
- Auditing the top-20 priority queries for snippet and AI Overview ownership changes.
- Reviewing Search Console impression data for queries gaining impressions without corresponding click growth (a signal of zero-click capture).
- Checking search evolution trends to stay ahead of new SERP features as they roll out.
Zero-Click Searches Playbook by Funnel Stage
Awareness: How to Get Cited in AI Overviews and Snippets
Getting cited in AI Overviews isn’t purely a technical challenge — it’s a challenge of credibility. AI systems favor sources that demonstrate expertise, consistency, and corroboration across multiple platforms.
In other words, if a product appears consistently across Reddit discussions, forums, industry articles, and review sites with similar messaging, AI systems gain confidence citing the consensus around it.
Awareness-stage actions:
- Publish original research and proprietary data. AI systems are trained to value primary sources.
- Earn mentions in high-authority industry publications, not just a company’s blog. Think interviews, guest articles, podcast appearances, news coverage, and reviews.
- Maintain consistent brand messaging and positioning across all owned and earned content. This means both visual and verbal.
- Optimize for E-E-A-T signals — author bios, credentials, and first-hand expertise markers.
Consideration: How to Capture Interest Without a Click
At the consideration stage, the goal is to make a brand the persistent right answer to the questions buyers are actively researching. Even if they don’t click, repeated positive SERP exposure builds trust and ultimately preference.
Consideration-stage actions:
- Build “vs.” and comparison content that surfaces when buyers evaluate alternatives.
- Create answer-first FAQ sections on product and service pages — these are highly eligible for PAA boxes.
- Target questions with commercial intent: “how does [your product] work,” “what does [your product] cost,” “[competitor] alternative.”
- Use SERP feature tracking to monitor which pages are earning snippet placements and optimize the ones close to the threshold.
Conversion: How to Turn Zero-Click Visibility into Demand
The conversion question is where most zero-click guides go quiet. Here’s the practical answer: Visibility that doesn’t convert is a targeting problem, not a zero-click problem.
Conversion-stage actions:
- Make AI Overview citations lead to pages with strong, single CTAs — don’t send AI-referred traffic to generic blog posts.
- Create conversion paths that don’t require a click-first journey. Branded search demand, direct type-in traffic, and re-engagement via email all benefit from SERP-level awareness.
- Use retargeting to capture users who search for a brand’s terms but don’t convert on their first visit.
- For B2B, measure demo requests and pipeline influenced by branded search as a proxy for zero-click conversion impact.
HubSpot AEO supports each stage of this playbook by helping marketers understand where their content is being cited, how visibility shifts across the funnel, and what optimizations will increase influence in AI-driven search results.
Pro tip: Tag AI Overviews and featured snippet traffic as a separate segment in marketing analytics. If those visitors convert at a higher rate than average organic traffic — which data suggests they do — it’s a strong signal to double down on zero-click optimization.
FAQs About Zero-Click Searches
How do I turn zero-click visibility into conversions?
The key is recognizing that zero-click visibility is top-of-funnel influence. It builds brand recall and trust before the conversion moment. To convert that visibility, ensure every page that earns AI citations or featured snippets has a high-intent CTA visible above the fold (i.e., free trial, demo request, gated asset).
Track branded search volume as the leading conversion indicator. When zero-click awareness is working, branded searches (and their conversion rates) should increase.
If marketers are building this infrastructure now, they should start with HubSpot AEO Grader to understand their current AI representation baseline, then map which cited content is sending users toward or away from conversion. HubSpot AEO can then help teams track which pieces of content are earning AI citations and how that visibility contributes to downstream conversion signals like branded search and direct traffic.
When should you prioritize AEO over traditional SEO?
AEO and traditional SEO aren’t competing priorities — they’re complementary. SEO drives rankings and clicks. AEO earns citations and visibility in AI-generated answers. Build both.
Prioritize AEO-specific investments (answer-first content formatting, FAQ schema, AI citation tracking) when organic traffic has plateaued despite stable or improving rankings, when a product is being evaluated in AI-powered research interfaces, or when a company is in a category where buyers conduct significant zero-click research before ever reaching a brand’s website (software, financial services, professional services).
Traditional SEO remains essential for capturing the 40% of searches that still result in clicks, and strong rankings remain a prerequisite for AI citation eligibility. So build both, but measure them separately.
What is the best way to report zero-click wins internally?
Frame zero-click reporting around business outcomes, not search mechanics. Show stakeholders the connection between SERP impression share and branded search volume growth, between AI citation frequency and direct traffic trends, and between featured snippet ownership and pipeline-influenced revenue.
For teams using Marketing Hub Professional or higher, HubSpot’s AEO features offer deeper scoring, guidance, and content recommendations that can help build dashboards combining page performance, answer engine visibility, and conversion impact — giving marketers the data architecture to make that business case clearly.
The most effective internal reporting frames zero-click search not as “traffic we’re losing” but as “influence we’re gaining in a channel that’s growing faster than traditional search.”
AEO Complements SEO
Think of AEO as SEO’s complement for the AI era: SEO helps you rank in traditional search results; AEO helps you earn visibility in AI-generated answers. HubSpot brings these strategies together in Marketing Hub, helping teams manage traditional search performance alongside AI-driven visibility in a single place.
The same fundamentals still apply — structured data, strong E-E-A-T signals, and clear, authoritative content now determine not just rankings, but whether a brand gets cited directly in search.
The shift isn’t about doing more; it’s about working smarter with what already exists. Small changes — like surfacing answers earlier or aligning content to common questions — can significantly increase visibility without rebuilding an entire content strategy.
Zero-click search doesn’t remove opportunity; it redistributes it. The brands that win will be the ones that show up consistently, build trust before the click, and measure success beyond traffic — turning visibility into influence, and influence into pipeline.
