It's not clicking.

There’s wild energy in the city today, as the World Cup officially kicks off in Toronto. I’m writing to you from a cafe downtown, before heading out of the city for a meeting shortly, while the chaos ensues.

I was looking up info yesterday about how the city’s being affected, especially because my studio happens to be located in a restricted access zone during World Cup game days. Of course, I was served info through AI overviews, and then dove deeper in Gemini because… I had lots of questions about how to still get things done and get around over the next few weeks here in the city.

This week my friends at Growclass hosted an online summit called Proofed, and it covered one of the terms I’ve been meaning to explore: “zero click” marketing. The first few times I heard the term a couple of years ago, it sounded a bit jarring… but it’s super relevant and is rapidly shifting as Google makes major changes to search.

For today’s edition of The Intersection, it’s a bit of a marketing lesson, because things are moving fast. We’re diving into zero-click marketing, how demand gets built through content, community, search, and third-party signals.

What does zero-click mean, and how does it apply to trust, visibility, and the work we do now?

Amanda Natividad, who’s pretty much credited for creating the term, led a session called The Zero Click Playbook: How to Build Demand Before the Website Visits during Proofed.

Why? Because people are discovering, evaluating, trusting, doubting, comparing, and deciding long before they ever land on a website.

Sometimes they never land there at all…

That matters if you’re a marketer. It matters if you’re a founder. It matters if you run a nonprofit. It matters if you’re an educator, consultant, creator, or community builder. It matters even if you’re just a real person trying to make sense of what to buy, who to trust, what to believe, and where to spend your attention.

The internet is no longer a simple path from search result to website to decision.

It is messier than that now. More human, in some ways. More fragmented, in many ways, and harder to measure than marketers like to admit.

Zero-click marketing is the idea that value, trust, and demand are increasingly built before someone clicks through to your site. People might see your post on LinkedIn, hear you on a podcast, watch a short video, see your name mentioned in a Slack group, scan a Reddit thread, ask ChatGPT for recommendations, or notice your work through someone else’s newsletter.

Then, much later, they might Google you. And when they do, Google often gets the credit. But it was not the whole story…

The website is no longer the front door

I started off my freelance days building basic websites in HTML/CSS, then there were blogs and basic WordPress, and no matter the platform, the website was the hub (what clients asked for first).

So for years, the digital marketing playbook was built around traffic.

Publish the post. Get the click. Capture the email. Attribute the source. Show the graph. Explain the graph. Defend it in a meeting where everyone pretends the graph tells the whole truth. It was never perfect, but it was clear enough.

Now, that model is breaking down.

Amanda shared what she called the “alligator graph”: impressions are rising while clicks are declining. In other words, more people may be seeing your work, but fewer people are clicking away from the platforms where they found it.

Search is not dead. Social is not dead. Websites are not dead. Email is definitely not dead, despite people hosting a funeral for it every few months. (Thanks for reading my newsletter, by the way!)

But the behaviour has changed.

Search itself is bigger than Google. People search on Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, and niche communities. Search is not just a channel anymore. It is a behaviour.

We need to stop thinking of discovery as something that only happens on our own properties. People are not waiting politely at the front door of our homepage. They are walking around the neighbourhood, asking other people what they think of us.

That includes customers, peers, communities, AI tools, social feeds, search results, review sites, podcast episodes, event pages, and all the little third-party breadcrumbs that form someone’s impression before we even know they are looking.

The public record matters more than ever

We’re shaping the public record. You and I can be, right now.

The public record is not only what you say about yourself. It is the collection of signals that exists around you: the posts, interviews, mentions, testimonials, reviews, case studies, comments, event appearances, newsletters, podcast conversations, community discussions, and search results that help people and AI tools understand who you are.

This is where zero-click marketing connects directly to brand. You’ve heard me say that a brand is not just a logo, colour palette, or tagline. It is the meaning people attach to you based on repeated signals over time.

Those signals are now being gathered and summarized by humans and machines.

That means if all your best proof is sitting quietly in a folder called “testimonials,” or hidden in your inbox, or buried in a sales deck no one sees, it is not doing the work it could be doing.

If your clients say great things about you, that should be visible. If your team has expertise, that should be shared. If your organization has impact, that should be documented. If your community trusts you, that trust should have artifacts people can find.

This is something I think about a lot through Clarity Content. The work is to help founders, leaders, and organizations turn their expertise into visible proof. Not just create content in a loud or performative way, but in a way that helps the right people understand what they know, what they believe, and why it matters.

The content itself often has to do the job before the website ever gets a chance. (That’s what “zero click” is all about).

Content has to be useful where people find it

This is a big shift from the “digital marketing” I came up learning about.
Here’s a reminder:

A lot of marketing still treats social posts, videos, and newsletters like little trailers for the “real” content somewhere else. (The post teases the idea, I remember doing this a lot in the past). The link holds the value and the audience has to leave where they are to get the actual answer. That made more sense when the click was easier to earn.

But now, platforms often reduce the reach of posts with external links. SparkToro has often seen posts without links get significantly more reach, sometimes 10 times more, depending on the platform. Meta has even advised business accounts to put links in the comments instead of captions because links can reduce reach.

We can still share links sometimes, but remember:
The post itself needs to be worth consuming.

The LinkedIn post should teach. The short video should stand on its own. The newsletter should offer a real idea (as I try to do here, not just sending you somewhere else). The podcast appearance should create value even if someone never books a call. The case study should prove something.

This is one of the reasons I focus on founder-led and leader-led content.

When someone with actual experience explains how they think, what they’re noticing, what they’ve learned, or how they approach a problem, it creates trust in a way generic content rarely can.

People do not only want information. They want judgment. They want perspective. They want to understand how you see the world.

That is hard to outsource entirely.

Measurement is getting messier (that might be a good thing)

Attribution is not as clean as many marketers and owners want it to be.

A lot of analytics already miss parts of the journey. Only about 30% of users accept cookies, 20% to 60% of browsers may block analytics tracking, and multi-device behaviour makes the journey even harder to follow.

Then there’s “dark social,” where traffic from places like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and DMs can show up as direct traffic, even though the actual influence happened elsewhere.

So when someone says, “I found you through Google,” the real answer might be more complicated.

Maybe they first saw your post three months ago. Maybe a friend shared your newsletter in a group chat. Maybe they heard your name on a podcast. Maybe they watched a clip but did not engage. Maybe they searched your name after seeing you speak at an event. Maybe they asked an AI tool for recommendations, then Googled you separately.

The dashboard might only show the final step.

That does not mean measurement is useless. It means we need to stop pretending one number explains the whole relationship.

Amanda recommended looking at correlation, not perfect attribution. Track the leading indicators beside business outcomes: impressions, audience growth, engagement, branded search, product page views, demo requests, inquiries, newsletter replies, event registrations, and sales conversations.

This is especially important for B2B, nonprofit, and service-based work, where the sales cycle is often longer and more relationship-driven.

The question is not only, “Did this one post convert?”
Better questions could be:

• What are people starting to associate us with?

• Are the right people seeing our ideas more often?

• Are people repeating our language back to us?

• Are we being mentioned in the right rooms, threads, and communities?

• Are more people searching for us by name?

• Are sales conversations starting warmer?

• Are people arriving with more context?

Those are less tidy, but they are often more useful.

AI is changing search, but the fundamentals still matter

Another Proofed session I found helpful was Tiffany DaSilva’s on How AI is Changing SEO. Basically, SEO looks different because the interface is changing.

I liked her analogy: Google used to be like a library. You searched, browsed the shelves, and chose the source yourself. Now, more often, you are talking to the librarian. The librarian summarizes the answer for you, and you may never browse the shelves.

But the books still matter.

Your website still matters. Your structure still matters. Your content still matters. Your authority still matters. Your credibility still matters.

Tiffany talked about the importance of making your website easy for both humans and machines to understand. That includes technical basics, clear titles and headings, strong page structure, helpful FAQs, visible proof, schema, backlinks, and brand mentions across other trusted sources.

She also talked about E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It is a framework Google uses to evaluate quality, but I think it is also a helpful lens for content more broadly.

• Does this content show real experience?

• Does it demonstrate actual expertise?

• Does it build authority in a specific area?

• Does it give people reasons to trust us?

Those questions matter for SEO and they matter for AI search. They also matter for social content. If you’re a nonprofit trying to build credibility, or a founder trying to explain why your company should exist, these are also key questions.

The more AI-generated sameness we see, the more valuable real perspective becomes.

(That’s why I’m encouraging people to come down to the studio and be real).

This is why community still matters

Proofed was a live learning environment with people asking questions, challenging assumptions, and sharing context in real time. That matters.

I use AI tools every day. They are powerful, and I only scratch the surface some days. They can help us think, create, organize, research, and move faster. They are not a replacement for being in community with people who are doing the work.

There is something different about learning from experts in a live session. You hear what they emphasize. You catch the nuance. You see where the room gets curious. You learn from the questions other people ask. You get reminded that everyone is trying to figure this out at the same time. I love experiencing this.

That is part of why I host Moment of Clarity. It is why I teach. It is why I speak at conferences and run workshops in-person. It is why I believe in creating spaces where people can learn together instead of only consuming information alone.

And it is one of the reasons I’m hosting the Together for Impact Summit this fall for the nonprofit sector.

The nonprofit world is navigating the same shifts around trust, attention, technology, storytelling, and community — often with fewer resources and higher stakes. These conversations are not just for marketers in SaaS companies or people optimizing LinkedIn posts.

They are for anyone trying to earn attention ethically, build trust consistently, and create meaningful change in a noisier world.

What does this all mean for you?

• For founders, this means your expertise needs to be visible before someone is ready to buy. People are evaluating you long before they fill out a form. They want to understand how you think, what you stand for, and whether you can help them make sense of their problem.

• For nonprofits, this means your impact needs to be findable and repeatable. People should be able to understand what you do, why it matters, who you serve, and what proof exists — not only through a donation page, but through stories, community signals, partnerships, media, events, and educational content.

• For marketers, this means the job is no longer only to drive clicks. It is to create demand, shape understanding, build memory, and make the organization easier to trust across many different touchpoints.

• For educators, this means we need to help people understand principles, not just tactics. The tools will change, and the platforms will change. The best practices will be updated, contradicted, and rebranded by someone with a carousel next week.

The deeper questions should still be:

• Are we useful?

• Are we clear?

• Are we credible?

• Are we memorable?

• Are we showing up where people already are?

• Are we building trust before we ask for anything?

A few things to reflect on

If you’re thinking about how this applies to your own work, here are a few questions to think about:

1. Where are people likely discovering you before they visit your website?

2. What would they find if they searched your name, your organization, your category, or the problem you solve?

3. What proof of your expertise exists publicly right now?

4. What do your best clients, customers, students, donors, or community members already know about you that strangers would not be able to see?

5. Are you creating content that delivers value on its own, or are you mostly asking people to click somewhere else?

6. What are the ideas you want people to associate with you over the next year?

7. And maybe the biggest one:

8. If your website was not the first place someone met you, would the rest of your public presence still build trust?

The bigger shift

The zero-click world can sound like bad news if you only look at it through the lens of lost traffic… but the bigger shift is that we need to build trust in more places.

We need to create content that is valuable before the conversion. We need to document proof, not just make claims. We need to understand that visibility is not only about being found — it is about being remembered for the right things.

This is the work I get to do across my consulting projects, Clarity Content, The Good Growth Company, my teaching, and of course in this newsletter.

At the intersection of marketing, community, technology, and trust, the goal is to build something worth finding.

Thanks for reading till the end. Have a great weekend — whether you’re watching the World Cup or not.