- Search Is Shifting to Answers, Not Clicks: AI-powered overviews and chatbots are increasingly delivering information on the results page, reducing traditional click-through traffic.
- B2B Marketers Must Reinvent SEO & Brand: Enterprises are restructuring site content and metadata for AI crawlability while boosting awareness via paid social, OOH, and thought leadership.
- DTC Brands Balance Performance & Presence: Direct-to-consumer teams are pruning low-value keyword bids and amplifying earned media to ensure their brand voice surfaces in AI-driven snippets.
- New AI-Centric Metrics Emerge: “Share of model” and assisted conversions track brand citations in AI answers and downstream impact, supplementing or replacing CTR and pageviews.
- Diversification Is Essential: Building resilient marketing programs across search optimization, storytelling, and community engagement helps brands remain discoverable and relevant, regardless of clicks.
In recent months, industry observers have noted a profound shift in how prospects and customers seek information online. Platforms that once funneled users through links to brand websites now deliver direct answers in search results, a phenomenon that has accelerated with the rollout of AI-driven features such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational agents like ChatGPT.
Marketers at both business-to-business (B2B) firms and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands find themselves confronting this “zero-click” reality, where traditional search strategies no longer guarantee traffic or lead generation.
Drawing on conversations with senior marketing executives and analyses published in trade outlets, this article explores how these companies are adapting their approaches to maintain visibility, engagement, and pipeline health amid the rise of instant, on-page answers.
Rewriting the B2B Playbook for AI Search
For organizations whose customer journeys unfold over weeks or months, search has long served as a reliable source of demand generation. Yet when AI-powered results begin summarizing product details, pricing, and comparisons on the results page itself, that funnel starts to leak at the very top.
Marketing leaders at established service providers are now reevaluating how they invest in search. Rather than simply boosting bids on high-intent keywords, they are restructuring website content, revisiting page hierarchies, refining metadata, and ensuring that their expertise appears prominently in AI-generated overviews.
In parallel, they are expanding brand-building activities—leveraging channels like paid social, out-of-home, and thought-leadership content—to shore up awareness beyond the narrow confines of search.
DTC’s Dual Challenge: Performance and Presence
Consumer-facing brands, long accustomed to attributing up to a fifth of their ad spend to paid search, see their carefully tuned campaigns facing diminishing returns as AI agents serve answers directly.
Younger demographic segments, in particular, are embracing chat-based discovery tools that bypass search engine results pages altogether. In response, DTC marketers have begun pruning low-value keyword bids and revising ad copy to address user intent more precisely. Simultaneously, they’re investing in rich earned media—podcasts, editorial features, and influencer partnerships—so that when language models crawl the web, their brand voice registers as authoritative.
This dual focus on paid efficiency and editorial presence aims to recapture mindshare even when clicks no longer materialize.
New Metrics for an AI-First Era
As clicks diminish, so too do traditional KPIs like CTR and pageviews. Alternatives have emerged: “share of model,” which tracks how often a brand is cited within AI-generated snippets, and assisted conversions, which measure downstream impact after a user engages with non-click search results.
Teams are building dashboards that blend these AI-centric indicators with classic sales metrics, yielding a more holistic view of how search touchpoints contribute to pipeline progression.
Organizations that pioneered this blended measurement approach report greater confidence in their SEO investments and clearer line-of-sight between search visibility and revenue outcomes.
Building Resilient Search Strategies
Zero-click search represents more than a fleeting trend; it signals a fundamental evolution in information access.
Brands that succeed will be those that embrace richer content frameworks—stories, insights, and data assets that AI systems deem worthy of front-page display—and that diversify their marketing mix to lessen dependence on any single channel.
By weaving search optimization into a broader tapestry of brand storytelling, thought leadership, and community engagement, both B2B and DTC marketers can navigate the new search frontier with confidence, ensuring their expertise remains discoverable, whether a user clicks through or not.
