Marketing of products and services has always evolved over time, but more recently these changes have felt considerable and fast. A lot of business owners and marketers that I work with are struggling to keep up and asking how do I market myself when nobody’s clicking anymore?
The website traffic is down. Leads from Google feel thinner. Content that used to pull people in seems to disappear without a trace. And yet, when a potential customer does finally get in touch, they already know your competitors, they’ve already formed a view on pricing, and they’ve already half-decided before you’ve said a word.
This is the new reality of how people find and buy things and it changes almost everything about how you should be marketing your business.
What Is Zero-Click And Why Should You Care?
Zero-click search is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when someone gets the answer they were looking for without ever clicking through to a website.
A few years ago, if someone wanted to know what to look for in a particular service, they’d search Google, click a few results, read a few articles, and form a view. You had a chance to be one of those articles. That click was how businesses like yours got discovered.
That behaviour is changing fast.
Google’s AI Overviews now appear in around 47% of all searches, answering questions directly on the results page. ChatGPT holds around 80% of the global AI chatbot market. Perplexity grew from 230 million to 780 million monthly searches in less than a year.
These tools don’t tease an answer and send you somewhere else, they just answer the question, right there.
The result is that around 60% of Google searches now end with no click at all. More than half the people searching for things in your market never reach anyone’s website.
If your marketing strategy is built around getting people to click through to your site, you’re working against a tide that’s only going one way.
SEO Isn’t Dead It’s Evolving
Here’s where I want to push back on something you’ll hear a lot: that SEO is dead and you need to throw out everything you know and start again.
That’s not true, and it’s not helpful.
The fundamentals that make SEO work have always been the same: produce content that genuinely helps people, demonstrate real expertise, build credibility over time, and make it easy for search engines to understand what you do.
None of that has changed. What HAS changed is the number of places those search engines now live and the format they want your answers in. In 2026, being visible in search means thinking across three overlapping disciplines:
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Still essential. Still the foundation. Getting your website to rank in Google’s traditional results so people who do click find you. Technical setup, relevant content, backlinks, page experience. All still matters.
AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation
This is about structuring your content so that search engines and AI tools can extract a clean, direct answer and serve it immediately, in a featured snippet, a “People Also Ask” box, or a voice search response. Short, clear, question-based content. FAQs with proper structure. Information formatted so a machine can lift it cleanly and use it as an answer.
GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation
This is the newest layer. It’s about ensuring that when ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview generates a response about your topic, your brand and your content are part of the source material it draws on. Less about keywords, more about being recognised across multiple platforms as an authoritative, trustworthy voice on the subjects that matter to your buyers.
Think of them as the same job at different stages of evolution. SEO built your visibility in the old search world. AEO adapts that visibility for direct-answer formats. GEO extends it into the AI-generated conversation that’s increasingly happening before anyone ever visits a website.
Write genuinely helpful content. Demonstrate real expertise. Build credibility. Just do it in a format that works across all three surfaces, not just the one from ten years ago.
Your Customer Has Changed Too
The zero-click shift isn’t just a traffic problem, rather it changes the nature of who arrives at your business and what they need from you when they get there.
Most buyers today have already used an AI tool to understand their problem, identify their options, get a rough sense of pricing, and form a shortlist before they contact anyone.
They’re not entering your marketing funnel at the top. They’re arriving in the middle, already informed, already comparing, already forming a view. I would call this the Pre-Educated Buyer. And it matters because most small business marketing is still built to educate people who already know what they need to know.
Think about the last considered purchase you made such as a piece of software, a specialist service, a piece of equipment. Did you arrive at the vendor’s website completely cold? Or did you already have a view before you got there?
A sales and marketing process designed to inform buyers who are already informed doesn’t just waste time, it creates friction at exactly the moment you need to be building confidence. The businesses pulling ahead right now are the ones who’ve worked out that their job is no longer to explain things from scratch, but instead give an already-informed buyer a clear and confident reason to choose them specifically.
Enter The Concept Of Loop Marketing
HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar recently introduced a framework they’re calling Loop Marketing, built specifically for this environment, and it’s worth understanding because it describes something genuinely different from the linear funnel most businesses have been running. And honestly I think it hits the mark well for how we need to adapt our approach to marketing going forward.
The traditional funnel goes in one direction: spend to generate awareness, nurture prospects toward a decision, close the sale, reset. There’s no compounding, no learning, no structural improvement. Each new customer costs roughly what the last one cost.
The loop is different. It’s a continuous cycle where each stage makes the next one stronger. HubSpot breaks it into four stages: Express, Tailor, Amplify, Evolve.
In terms of what this looks like for businesses is:
Express – Define who you are and why you matter
In a world where AI can produce generic content in seconds, the businesses that stand out are the ones with a clear, distinctive voice. Not a polished tagline, but a genuine perspective on your industry that only you could articulate, because it comes from real experience. If your content could have been written by anyone, it won’t be remembered by anyone. And crucially, it won’t be cited by AI tools that are specifically looking for authoritative, specific, human-led insight.
Tailor – Make your marketing speak to real situations
The loop model says: use what you know about people who’ve already bought from you, what triggered their search, what nearly stopped them buying, which competitor they were seriously considering and use that to make your messaging feel like it was written for someone in exactly their situation. That precision is what converts a Pre-Educated Buyer. They don’t need more information. They need to feel understood.
Amplify – Show up where buyers are before they reach you
Buyers aren’t following your funnel. They’re following their feeds, their communities, and their AI tools. Amplifying means showing up in those spaces with content that delivers genuine value without asking for a click. LinkedIn. Industry newsletters. Podcasts your clients listen to. Community forums where your buyers ask questions. Research shows that zero‑click content (posts without links) can generate up to six times the reach of posts that ask people to click away on LinkedIn. The algorithm rewards content that keeps people on-platform. So does the Pre-Educated Buyer, who isn’t looking for a new website to visit, they’re looking for a name they can trust.
Evolve – Get smarter with every cycle
Traditional campaigns waited months for results and adjusted slowly. The loop model says: if you’re capturing the right data, which messages resonated, which content accelerated decisions, which objections came up in every lost deal, you can improve in near real-time. Each sale teaches you something that makes the next one cheaper and faster. Over 12 to 24 months, that compounding effect shows up as measurable improvements in conversion rates, sales cycle length, and the quality of inbound enquiries.
What Does Loop Marketing Look Like in Practice?
The loop gives you the framework, but here is the practical translation for a business owner.
Write content that earns authority, not just traffic
The shift from pure SEO to SEO-plus-AEO-plus-GEO doesn’t mean starting over. It means adjusting how you structure what you already know.
For AEO, that means building FAQ sections sparingly into your pages, using clear question-based headings, and giving direct answers early rather than burying the point halfway down a long article. If someone asks “what does a fractional marketer cost?” your page should answer that question cleanly in the first two paragraphs, not make them scroll through four sections of preamble to find out.
For GEO, it means writing content that only you could produce. AI systems tend to reference content that is authoritative, well-structured, and easy to interpret.
What they specifically look for is insight that reflects real-world experience, not content that repackages what’s already out there.
Your view on why a common approach in your industry produces poor results. The pattern you’ve spotted across dozens of client engagements. The question every new prospect asks you that nobody else is answering publicly. That’s the content that gets cited.
Audit your website for the buyer who already knows things
Most small business websites are designed for cold prospects who arrive knowing nothing. Audit yours through the eyes of someone who’s already done their research. Do you answer the questions a half-decided buyer has?
Not “what do we do?” but “why you specifically, over the three competitors I’ve already looked at?” Your real process. Honest answers to the awkward questions. Specific results from real clients. This is the content that converts an informed buyer, and it’s the part most business websites handle worst.
Build referrals like a business asset, not an afterthought
The zero-click world doesn’t touch word of mouth. A recommendation from someone your prospect already trusts bypasses the entire discovery layer of AI tools, the search results, the comparison research. They already know who they’re calling.
Referrals have always been the highest-converting, lowest-cost source of new business for SMEs. The difference now is that the channels competing with them are delivering less.
A structured referral process of knowing when to ask, making it easy, tracking where your best clients come from, is one of the highest-return investments a small business can make right now.
Show up in the places buyers look before they start searching
GEO benefits from strategic presence across platforms where AI tools discover information and that includes more than just your website. Reddit threads, LinkedIn, industry forums, niche newsletters: these are the platforms AI tools actively draw on when generating answers. Showing up consistently in those spaces with genuine insight builds the kind of presence that can’t be bought with an ad budget and can’t be switched off when the budget runs out.
Capture what you learn from every sale
Every deal you close, and every one you lose, contains data most businesses never gather properly. What triggered the enquiry? What objection nearly killed it? Which competitor kept coming up? What finally made them choose you?
When you gather this consistently across 20 or 30 sales, you stop guessing what your marketing should say and start knowing. You can adapt your messaging or target content more precisely. The sales cycle shortens. This is the Evolve stage of the loop in action and most businesses could start doing it this week with nothing more than a better habit around what gets noted after every sales conversation.
How to Know If Your Marketing Is Working In A World Of SEO/AEO/GEO
If your entire view of marketing performance is website traffic and click-through rates, the zero-click world is going to make your dashboards look bleak, whether or not your marketing is really working.
The metrics worth tracking now are different:
- Branded search volume – are more people searching directly for your business by name over time?
- Where inbound enquiries are coming from – referrals, direct, word of mouth, social?
- AI visibility – is your brand being referenced when AI tools answer questions in your category? Tools like Gumshoe and Scrunch now let you track this.
- Conversion rate on inbound leads – if your marketing is reaching better-qualified buyers, your close rate should reflect that
- Content engagement on native platforms – not clicks out, but genuine responses, saves, and shares in-platform
These are the leading indicators of a model that’s building momentum. Website traffic is a lagging indicator of a model that’s becoming structurally less reliable.
Zero Click Is Not A Revolution, It’s An Evolution
Marketing in a zero-click world isn’t about finding the next tactic or discovering which platform is growing fastest this quarter.
It’s about understanding that search has evolved and your content strategy needs to evolve with it. The fundamentals haven’t changed: be genuinely helpful, demonstrate real expertise, build credibility over time. But the format has. Businesses that adapt that content across SEO, AEO, and GEO rather than optimising for one surface and ignoring the others are the ones that will maintain and grow their visibility as the landscape keeps shifting.
Layer the Loop Marketing framework on top of that and you have a model where each cycle compounds. Every sale makes the next one easier. Every piece of content builds on the last. The marketing gets smarter the longer you run it.
None of this requires a huge budget. Most of it is a change in how you think about what your content is for, who it’s written for, and what you do with the intelligence your business generates every single day.
If you’re looking at your current marketing and wondering why it feels like you’re working harder for diminishing returns, it’s usually a sign to look at the model not just the tactics.
For help finding the opportunities get in touch and let’s look at where you actually stand.
