How worried should B2B marketers be about zero-click search?

As I enter my fourteenth year as a B2B content writer, I’ve been reflecting on the various trends I’ve seen that were supposed to completely transform the content marketing world.

First came the great SEO panic. Then the regulation-driven tracking crash. And most recently, total AI Armageddon.

Each had a significant and lasting impact on how content is produced and campaigns are structured. But in hindsight, they didn’t really bring about the kind of fundamental change in our industry that many prophesied. The world kept turning, and the fundamentals of great content writing (largely) remained unchanged.

Today, we find ourselves face-to-face with a so-called traffic apocalypse. If we’re to learn from the past, we should respond in a proactive, yet measured, way – adapting quickly, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But this time things feel different.

What is the ‘traffic apocalypse’?

The AI-powered results you see on Google today have created ‘zero-click’ searches. You search for something, AI provides you with an answer in Google, and you move on with your life.

As the name suggests, those searches involve zero clicks. If you’ve mastered GEO, AI might pull answers from your content. But the searcher never clicks through to your website.

That means no tracking, no ongoing content journey, and no opportunity to introduce the searcher to the offering you’re trying to sell to them.

It is, in many ways, apocalyptic. Content marketing as a concept is built on the idea that good content gets found through search, and that gets people onto your website and ultimately into your sales pipeline. This threatens to fundamentally undermine that model.

How worried should B2B marketers be about zero-click search?

While there’s no doubt that millions of zero-click searches are happening today, analysts seem divided on just how big their impact is. Estimates range from a 15% to around a 55% projected decrease in overall clickthroughs from organic search this year [i].

Wherever the number actually falls, clearly it’s not great news. But the amount it impacts you will really depend on the kind of marketer you are. If ad revenue generated through web traffic is one of your main revenue sources, this shift certainly could qualify as being apocalyptic.

But, if you’re in B2B, it might not actually change that much. AI summaries provide fast answers to simple questions. In B2B, we’ve always accepted that most customers do some amount of self-driven research on a topic before they make their way to your content and website.

In our field, we specialise in answering more complex questions. Nobody is making a million-dollar buying decision off a single AI summary to a basic question. Their journey may start there, but invariably it will still involve seeking more detailed answers to more complex questions down the line. That’s when they’ll come to you. Just as they always have.

How should B2B marketers be thinking about zero-click search?

With that said, it’s still not something we can afford to ignore. Zero-click search marks a shift in buyer behaviour and buying journeys. So, there are a few things we should keep in mind when planning and creating content:

#1) Make sure your content is included in AI summaries

Your buyers might not rely on AI summaries for answers to complex questions, but they certainly might use them to do something like gather a shortlist of vendors capable of meeting their needs. So, it’s important to take every measure possible to ensure your name and content shows up in those summaries.

My colleague George recently published a brilliant overview of how to do that.

#2) Get more specific with the questions your content answers

Space in AI summaries is limited. So, if you want to maximise your chances of showing up there, you’ll need to be very specific with the questions your content answers. Think of this in the same way you think about SEO. It’s tough to go after the most popular search terms, so refocus on answering questions that are tightly linked to your offering and likely to be asked by high-intent prospects.

#3) Provide deep content that meets B2B buyer needs

B2B buyers still need detailed answers to specific technical questions. Once they’ve found you from an AI summary, they’re still going to explore your content directly to assess whether your solutions are the right choice for them.

One mistake some brands are making today is leaning too heavily into answering basic high-level questions to help them compete for position in LLM-generated answers and summaries. It’s okay to do that, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of deeper, more detailed content that pushes prospects through that consideration stage and turns them into customers.

Maintain your commitment to creating quality content for humans

One of the good things about search LLMs like Google’s is that they look for high-quality, trusted content with a high degree of domain authority. So, in that sense, appealing to those LLMs is just business as usual for content marketers.

This isn’t the time to lean into tricks and contort your content to try to ensure you appear in as many zero-click search results as possible. Instead, stay the course, continue to focus on creating readable, authoritative, valuable, and genuinely insightful content that humans love.

Because after all, search LLMs aren’t out to undermine what you do. They just want to provide human searchers with the best information and content. Continue producing that, and you’ll be well on your way to mastering this brave new world.

I’m not saying don’t be scared. Just channel your concern into the fundamentals you already rely on. Because once again, we’re looking at a major shift that’s going to shake things up, but is unlikely to destroy everything.

[i] https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/

https://www.seo.com/blog/zero-click-searches/

https://www.jellyfish.com/en-gb/training/blog/how-zero-click-searches-are-changing-seo-in-2025