AI Has Changed the Click: Why Zero-Click Marketing Is the New Normal

Part 1 of a 2-Part Series on AI, Zero-Click Marketing & Email Strategy

Welcome to the Zero-Click Marketing Era!

Thanks to AI, the rules of digital engagement are shifting quickly.

AI-powered platforms like Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Gmail are reshaping how users interact with content. The result? More often than not, your audience sees your content, gets the answer, watches the demo, or finds the offer without ever clicking in an email, on a search result or in a social post.

This new reality is zero-click marketing: a world where traffic, conversion, and even awareness happen on a platform, not on a site.

This trend, which Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has analysed closely, shows a marked decline in outbound traffic from Google. It’s not happening just in search, either.

LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Gmail are evolving to keep users engaged within their platforms. They often extract or auto-present content in a way that makes clicks optional and maybe even unnecessary.

Can you imagine a digital marketing world without clicks? It’s coming, and it means we have a lot of rethinking to do.

What Is zero-click marketing?

Simply put, zero-click marketing uses content designed to deliver the goods immediately, without forcing the user to visit another page.

Things like these:

• Featured snippets in search results
• Carousels with full product info
• Social posts that teach, entertain, or solve problems within the post itself
• Emails that summarise, persuade, and inspire action before the open. If you have followed my work here on the blog, in my book Holistic Email Marketing, or my thought leadership in trade publications, you’ll recognise it as the “nudge” effect.

As Fishkin has said, we’re no longer optimising for clicks. We are optimising for impact as measured in brand recall, direct traffic, offline conversions, and assisted sales.

AI and platforms are rewriting the customer journey

AI-powered platforms aren’t just changing how users consume content. They’re dictating the journey itself. They extract and present information before a user acts. This bypasses the click altogether.

This is the core of zero-click marketing: Your content is surfaced, summarised, and sometimes even answered on the platform. The user never has to leave it!

Here’s where this is happening:

• Google: Its new Search Generative Experience (SGE) delivers full answers, product recommendations, and summaries at the top of the page—before organic listings even appear.
• Gmail: Gmail’s Promotions tab uses AI to auto-extract promotional details like discount codes, images, and expiry dates from your email, showing users the offer without them opening the message.
• LinkedIn: Native, full-text posts that stay on-platform perform far better than external links, which the algorithm actively deprioritises.
• Instagram: Still no outbound links in feed post. Brands must convert within the app using CTAs, captions, and shoppable features.
• Email: The inbox is becoming more dynamic. Preview panes, summaries, and schema-enabled content mean users often get the gist without a click—or even an open. This, along with Gmail auto-extraction, is a serious development for email marketers. I will cover it in detail in Part 2 of this blog series.

Across the board, these changes signal a shift from navigation to extraction. Platforms are no longer gateways to your content—they are the content environment. If you’re not optimising for that reality, you will lose influence.

How marketers must adapt

Focus on content that delivers value instantly.

Create assets that inform, inspire, and convert in-feed, in-inbox, or in-SERP. Don’t rely on a click to finish the message.

Rethink your KPIs.

Clicks and traffic still matter. But they no longer tell the full story. Start measuring these actions:

• Brand search volume
• Direct traffic increases
• Engagements like shares, saves, and comments

Use the tools the platforms give you.

Where possible, embrace structured data and schema markup. This gives platforms like Google and Gmail the information they’re going to extract anyway, just with more accuracy and brand control.

What about email?

You might think email might suffer in a zero-click world. The reality is more nuanced.

Yes, platforms like Gmail are doing more with your content before users open it. But email still drives clicks, conversions, and behaviour, even if attribution doesn’t tell the full story.

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll look at these topics:

• How Gmail’s automatic content extraction affects open and click rates
• Why email is still a critical sales driver, even if it doesn’t get the credit
• What schema markup can do to preserve message integrity
• How to track performance in a world of broken attribution

Conclusion: You’re not losing clicks, you’re gaining a new challenge

The click might be fading, but your content’s job just got harder. In a zero-click world, you need to inform, persuade, and convert before the click even happens, if it ever does.

Your takeaway? Be useful. Be findable. Be clear.

Above all, be ready for what AI is doing to the customer journey.