Navigating Zero-Click: Why Publishers Need to Swing From Reach to Relevance

Steven Wilson-Beales
Dec 16, 2025
4 min read

This article is based on a presentation I delivered for Journalism.co.uk

For publishers, “zero-click” has become shorthand for everything that feels broken about search right now. Traffic is down. Visibility is volatile. Google answers questions before readers ever reach your site. AI overviews summarise your reporting without sending you the click.

The reaction across publishing has been predictable: panic, experimentation without strategy, and a rush to “do something with AI”.

That’s a mistake.

Zero-click is not a sudden crisis. It’s the logical endpoint of a journey publishers have been on for over a decade — one many participated in willingly.

The problem isn’t that search has changed. The problem is that too many publishers built strategies assuming it never would.

Zero-Click Isn’t New. This Phase Is Just Less Forgiving

Zero-click didn’t arrive with AI Overviews.

It began with:

Rich snippets
Featured snippets
Knowledge panels
“People Also Ask”
Top Stories carousels
Entity cards
Video and forum prioritisation

Each step reduced the need for users to click. Each step was met with short-term optimisation tactics rather than long-term strategy.

AI has simply removed the last illusion: search is no longer a reliable traffic engine for commoditised content.

If your growth model depends on explaining things that Google — or an LLM — can explain just as well, you were always living on borrowed time.

The SERP Has Closed — And It’s Not Reopening

Compare a results page from 2023 to today and the shift is unmistakable.

Brands dominate. Ads have expanded. AI Overviews sit above organic results. Publications are pushed further down — if they appear at all.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a product decision.

Google’s incentives no longer align with sending publishers traffic at scale. AI Mode makes that explicit. The question leaders should be asking isn’t “How do we get our clicks back?” but “What does success look like when clicks are no longer guaranteed?”

AI Search Is a Channel — Not Your Lifeline

There’s a growing belief that LLM referrals will replace lost search traffic.

They won’t.

The data already tells us that AI-driven referrals represent a tiny fraction of traditional search volume, often hovering around 1% for most publishers. Worse, bot traffic and scraper activity inflate costs without delivering meaningful commercial value.

AI visibility matters. But treating AI search as the solution misunderstands the problem.

AI is just another distribution channel — one that:

Rewards authority over volume
Amplifies brand recognition
Prioritises entities, not pages
Collapses marginal differentiation

If your content doesn’t stand out to humans, it won’t stand out to machines either.

SEO Isn’t Dead — But 'Comfortable' SEO Is

Let’s be clear: SEO is not dead.

But the era of:

Thin explainers
Endless “what is” content
Incremental keyword targeting
Publishing for algorithms first

…is over.

Search visibility now flows to sites that already demonstrate:

Subject authority
Brand recognition
Trust and credibility
Technical excellence
Clear editorial purpose

What Users Still Want (Despite the Noise)

Amid all the panic, three truths remain stubbornly consistent:

1. Users Still Want Breaking News

When something matters now, people still seek primary sources. Speed, credibility, and access cannot be automated away. It should also be remembered that Hard News still attracts a healthy amount of clicks from search, because the % of AI Overviews in this space are (for now) limited.

2. Users Still Want Context

AI can summarise. It cannot replace lived expertise, institutional memory, or editorial judgment. Readers want help understanding why something matters — not just what happened.

3. Blind Experimentation Is Dangerous

Google Discover volatility, AI optimisation gimmicks, and speculative content strategies can destroy trust faster than they build reach.

Proceed — but proceed with caution.

Fix the Foundations Before You Touch AI

Before investing in AI visibility tools or prompt-tracking dashboards, publishers should ask themselves some uncomfortable questions:

Is our core content up to date?
Are we still carrying years of thin or duplicated material?
Have we paid down our technical debt?
Do we actually understand our audience’s needs?
Can our teams work across editorial, product, SEO, and commercial silos?

If the answer to any of those is “no”, AI will magnify your weaknesses — not solve them.

Content for Machines vs Content for Brand

Publishers now need to be explicit about a distinction many have blurred for years.

Content for AI

This content:

Reinforces entities and topic authority
Demonstrates EEAT signals
Is well-structured, internally linked, and fast
Is written in clear, modular paragraphs — not bloated pages

Its job is visibility.

Content for Brand

This content does something machines cannot replicate:

Original reporting that requires access and trust
Deep expert analysis
Perspectives that challenge consensus
Investigations and proprietary research
Journalism that holds power to account
Coverage of communities algorithms routinely ignore

Its job is differentiation.

Confuse the two, and you lose at both.

In many ways, your brand needs to be that beautiful castle that, once users find it, they never want to leave.

Search Everywhere — Or Be Invisible Somewhere

Search is no longer a single destination.

Visibility now happens across:

Traditional search
AI interfaces
YouTube
Reddit
Social platforms
Creator ecosystems

Publishers who still think in terms of “Google traffic” are already behind. The winners think in terms of presence, not sessions.

Video and the Creator Reality

Creators aren’t stealing publisher audiences. They’re filling gaps publishers left open.

Video, personality-driven formats, and direct audience relationships aren’t optional experiments anymore. They’re how authority is perceived in an AI-mediated world.

Ignore that at your peril.

One Last Warning: Don’t Piss Off Google

Provocation doesn’t mean recklessness.

Short-term wins that undermine trust — aggressive monetisation, manipulative tactics, low-quality AI output — have long memories. Google may change constantly, but it never forgets.