Your site’s content reaches a lot of people, but fewer and fewer people actually visit your site. It’s happening, and it shows in the numbers. This phenomenon is called Zero Click Search.
I want to find a restaurant, I want to find armbands for the baby’s bath, I want the latest news from the town of Frascati. I go and search inside ChatGPT with search turned on, or inside Perplexity, or straight in Google. And all of these give me a conversational answer directly. They write it out for me. They no longer put a list of links I have to go and visit and read first. It’s the AI engine that runs the search under the hood on my behalf, on the armbands, on current events, on beaches, on the product, on whatever it is. It makes a synthesis and hands me back an answer with references, with links I might then choose to go and check.
Obviously this gives users much faster answers, but it drastically lowers the odds they’ll jump to the sites where the information came from.
Two numbers worth chewing on
There are two figures I find very interesting here, out of a SimilarWeb report focused mainly on news sites in the United States, so take them with a pinch of salt, but they still give us a perspective on what could happen soon.
The first: traffic coming from search engines to sites is going down. In general, people visit fewer websites because they stay directly on the conversational search platform. The second: of the little traffic that’s left, the proportion coming directly from ChatGPT rather than from Google has grown.
The questions this forces on us
It’s worth asking a few questions, especially for those of us who produce sites and content with effort, commitment and consistency. Is it worth carrying on? What’s the incentive to create content if I get less and less return from it? Am I basically just supplying data so a third-party platform can serve ready-made answers, while people rarely land on my page, on my content?
The second question: if the future is shaping up the way it looks, should we start designing our content, our services, our offers so that they’re read by AI agents and algorithms and then reported back to the end user? It’s no longer about having a platform, a search engine that hands over a list of links as an intermediary. There’s an actual agent in between. So how does our content change, how do we publish it, how do we get paid? What do we actually need to put out there in a context dominated by artificial intelligence?
The third question: how does the flow of money change across this whole system? Because we have several actors. We have the user looking for answers, services, entertainment, the usual. We have whoever delivers those services and whoever publishes the information, which up to now has been whoever runs the website. And then we have the search intermediary, which is turning into an AI platform, so much stricter, much more restrictive, and much more of a gatekeeper over the traffic heading to our content. And fourth, there are the advertisers too, people who might want to pay to have the AI surface certain content and services rather than others. How does the money go around?
Order out of disorder
Think about it: there’s a huge number of web agencies, agencies specialized in SEO, and there are designers and there are programmers. The web is a giant market, and within a few years a whole set of things we’ve been doing for 20 years is under serious question. It almost feels like we moved from TV to the web, and just as we got comfortable with the web, we’re moving on to artificial intelligence, which is still web, but you can genuinely consider it another medium.
In a period of change this fast there’s certainly chaos, confusion, a lot of fragmentation, and if you empathize with it you can feel afraid. But in my view these are exactly the situations with the most opportunity, because whoever manages to look far ahead and understand what the regularities are, the new patterns, whoever manages to bring order to the disorder, will win, and win big.
If this AI world confuses you and you want a hand, I offer both corporate training and consulting on these topics, starting from the technical side and moving toward the use cases. Get in touch. And above all, like, share, and leave me your number.
