Rand Fishkin

It's my last day at Moz, and the first time I've had a new job in 17 years. Blog post with the details ---> https://lnkd.in/eDxwzC6

Clicks are dying.
Attribution is dying.
The way we've done digital marketing for 25yrs is dying.

In 7 minutes (😮), I'm gonna try to show the future of what's working and why, combining 4 presentations I've been giving on stages the last few years into one comprehensive idea.

LMK if you're picking up what I'm putting down here 👇👇👇

NEW research: https://lnkd.in/gdDM-jEx

Thanks to our good friends at Datos, A Semrush Company, I've got new numbers on zero-click searches in not just the United States, but the European Union as well. This study also includes answers to burning questions like:

- What happens after Americans and Europeans search Google?
- What percent of searches in 2024 end without a click?
- Have the EU’s regulations curbed Google’s ability to funnel search traffic to its own properties (YouTube, Google Flights, Google Hotels, etc.)?
- Is the popular media narrative that Google is losing out to LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Microsoft’s Bing correct?
- Has the rollout of AI Overviews changed how many searches consumers perform, how many results they click, or how much traffic Google sends to the open web?

See the full study, including 9 new charts and graphs, on the blog now 😎 🔥

NEW post: https://lnkd.in/gik9jGyH

Yes, we got a nice shoutout on Last Week Tonight. But there's far more important things to cover, like what John Oliver focused on in his discussion around big tech monopolies!

If you're not familiar with the Big Tech Monopoly bill being considered this summer by the US Congress... get ready. It could have a massive effect on entrepreneurship, marketing, Google's results, SEO, PPC, and more. I did my best to make an accessible explanation of what's going on, and threw in lots of Lucky Charms jokes, too ;-)

NEW Research: https://lnkd.in/gaiM4Dy9

68% of Google searches (blended mobile & desktop avg) in Similarweb's clickstream panel now end without a click. That's up 33% from when our first data point around this trend ten years ago (in 2016 with the now-defunct Jumpshot).

Thanks to the hard work of Similarweb's Adelle Kehoe and Sam Sheridan, we've published new, updated numbers on Zero Click Search in the United States, covering January-April of 2026. In this report, you'll find a comparison to the past studies, methodology details, and more of what this means for the fast-declining open web.

Five big pieces of Zero-Click Marketing news this week:

1) Google's new UI manipulations (ain't no way I'm calling them "upgrades") inside AI Mode, AI Answers, and Discover are all clearly designed to limit tracking, keep people in Google, and encourage extra searches.

2) Meta's new pay-for-links in organic posts scheme might be the most aggressive and obvious Zero-Click nudge I've seen yet. Creators are trying to end-around it with nudges to search rather than click, but I suspect this will further compound social's anti-link bias (unless you pay).

3) 2023 appears to have been the height of referred traffic to the open web (with a slight caveat for the 2024 election traffic surge in the US). It's been declining ever since, with the most rapid fall in the last 2 years. Most of that is Google, no surprise, but every other traffic source (social, email, referral links) are declining, too.

4) The (raw, purely traffic) value of a branded subReddit appears to be 3-4X what the traffic opportunity of all AI tools combined is. That's a combination of the fact that subReddits can get a lot of reach in search, that more users are searching directly in/on Reddit, and that AI tools send a vanishingly tiny amount of traffic (avg. of 0.5% of referrals).

5) 85% of brand mentions by AI responses come from third-parties, not the brand's website. Publishers are the biggest source. Like I've been saying for a while, PR is the future of AI visibility; IMO everything else is just temporary tricks.

p.s. Zero Click Marketing, our book, is now on Amazon 😉

I'll put the sources for all of these in the comments.

Does your website still matter?

If most of the people who used to visit are now getting answers from AI tools, from Google's AI Overview, from what people say about you on social, on YouTube, on Reddit... what's the point of investing heavily in your site?

My $0.02 on the Zero-Click Era's impact 👇

The data DOES NOT match the narrative. And that's a problem.

So, this coming Wednesday, Eli Goodman (founder of Datos, A Semrush Company, the source of this info) and I are giving a webinar about:
- What's really happening with AI vs. traditional search usage
- Where Google is declining, growing, and really not changing much
- Claude vs. Gemini vs. ChatGPT and whether we've got a three-way battle or something very different shaping up
- Whether people really are asking Google longer queries
- How AI Mode adoption is trending
- And loads more insight to give data context, not just graphs (though, yeah, we'll have lots of great graphs, too) 😎

Not every business can survive the Zero-Click era. That's not my opinion; it's reality. If your web strategy centers on driving traffic > earning awareness/trust/intent-to-act, you're in deep trouble.

Cyrus S. did some relevant research that you shouldn't miss, regardless of whether you care about SEO 👇

I'm going to attempt to tie three disparate concepts together into a prediction of the future (which I rarely make, but IMO warrants an exception):

1) After ~12 years of operation, Google's most important ranking factor switched from links to user behavior
2) AI tools and AI-powered answers within existing platforms (Google, Amazon, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc.) are currently reliant on model training data + live web/index searches
3) A huge amount of marketing time + budget is going toward influencing places marketers hope/believe will affect AI answers (probably 10X more than is warranted by potential ROI, but that's a different discussion)

Here's what I believe will happen:
- The AI systems (native tools like Claude and ChatGPT, but obviously Google/Bing, and eventually the social and e-commerce players, too) will exhaust the value of text in their training corpora and get diminishing returns from live web search
- Like Google before them, they'll turn to weighting by usage... i.e. did a lot of real humans read this article? Then we should heavily use it in our responses. Did some marketer post this listicle hoping to influence AI, but no one ever visited it? Then we should ignore it.
- A metric ton of AI-influence work will be useless and a surprising amount of PR-to-influence-real-people work will become valuable.

This might already be starting. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find the correlation between AI visibility and which products/services have huge engagement/go viral/get covered on social and by well-read press is way higher than the correlation between AI visibility and the most common content creation + distribution tactics the field's currently employing.

I seriously doubt it will take AI companies 12 years this time; I think it's coming soon if it isn't already here. And if you're not trying to influence *people* in the places they pay attention, you're gonna have a bad time.

Top of Funnel was always done on rented land.
But middle and bottom of funnel? OWNED or GTFO!

Well, friends, bad news. No one wants to visit your site to learn about your brand or research your product or compare you to the competition. They want to do that with instant answers and AI and TikToks and IG Reels and Reddit threads. So... if you're still doing Middle and Bottom-of-Funnel marketing functions exclusively on your site? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Publishers - DO NOT let AI crawl, index, and ingest your content without forcing them to pay. It's just not worth it.

Brands - You probably *should* let AI crawl, index, and ingest your content for free. The return of Zero Click Marketing may not be visible in your analytics, but if your audience is influenced by LLMs, it makes sense.

More in this excellent piece from Shahzad Abbas at Define 👇

This. This is the graph I think is going to generate the most interest, discussion, and even fear among folks who see our latest State of Search (Q4 2025) report with Datos, A Semrush Company.

ChatGPT's growth was expected to slow, but an actual downturn? Fewer users than in Q2/Q3? That's wild. In 8 days, I'm joining Eli Goodman for a webinar going through this and dozens of other graphs, charts, and findings from the report - February 11 @ 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern

You have two choices:

A) You fight the platforms, user preferences, and Wall St pressure on big tech to earn the tiny scraps of traffic still available at the top, middle, and bottom of the marketing funnel.

B) You give users and platforms what they want: Zero Click Marketing that serves top, middle, and yes, even bottom of funnel content to people in the places they already pay attention. Instant answers in search, full customer journeys on social, responses in AI tools... that's how almost everyone wants to do the buying process (right up to the point of conversion, which still happens on your website).

Can you do a little of both? Yeah. We do it, too. But we also recognize that most of our marketing is now Zero-Click. It's made for platforms first, blog posts, articles, research reports, FAQs, embedded video, etc. second.

Slides from my new ZCM deck for #SMMW; see you there this afternoon!

The data in Similarweb's latest report will probably infuriate both:
Group A) Those who've been huge AI proponents, certain that all marketing activity is and should be moving to AI tool visibility
AND
Group B) Those who've long suspected AI use (especially in certain categories) was overhyped, but haven't had the data to prove it... or worse, haven't been able to get their AI-derangement-syndrome bosses to believe the data, despite its veracity.

The numbers are pretty stark, and I covered a handful of the most meaningful graphs 👇

NEW research: https://lnkd.in/gY7nVmC4

Search happens everywhere. Not just Google, ChatGPT, and Bing. Our latest project with Datos, A Semrush Company analyzed search on 41 major websites via their desktop panel and found that if you broaden the definition of search, Google is 73%, not 90%+. And ChatGPT is 3.2%, well behind several players rarely mentioned in the conversation.

And, if billions of searches are taking place on dozens of sites, not just "traditional" and "AI tools," maybe SEO should be bigger than those two categories as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you think cigarettes, gambling, crypto, or the chemicals industry are hated... wait 'til you see what people think of AI 😳

Morning Consult runs large scale surveys on hundreds of brands, and AI is nearly the least trusted (and most negatively perceived) category they measure.

I wonder if businesses will keep adopting AI (b/c execs are obsessed) while consumers drift away. The decline of ChatGPT the last 6 months (that we saw in Datos' State of Search report) could be a canary in this coalmine 🤔

Interesting if you read the full report - the anglosphere (US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ) hate AI most. Africa least.

AI responses aren't lies; they're rarely dead wrong. But they're also nowhere near consistent. If you're using Google AI, ChatGPT, or Claude to get lists of recommendations (products, brands, etc.), or if you're trying to track if your own brand/product/entity in their responses, please arm yourself with this knowledge first.

Yesterday I published a heap of charts, graphs, dataviz, and stats... but for some people those don't land. So I made a short video attempting to sum up the painstaking AI consistency research that went near-viral after yesterday's launch (30K views in the first 24hrs!). Thanks to everyone who helped share it, and 🤞 this will help even more to wrap their heads around it 👇

Getting your brand into ChatGPT, Claude, & Google AI Mode.
Same as getting your brand at the top of Google's rankings... right?

I was pretty convinced by my LinkedIn feed that it was the same tactics, same process. Then, I watched Michael King present on the topic, and changed my mind. If this matters at all to your business, work, or clients, I urge you to watch his talk, now live on YouTube. I guarantee you'll learn a ton about the differences and how to optimize for AI visibility.

Why bother tracking your brand (or personal) name on the web? So what if people or publications mention you? Not like you can do much about it, right?

Well... when I left my first startup and co-founded a new one, brand tracking was a huge part of my work day one. And when AI arrived and started treating every mention's co-citation of words and phrases as gospel, it got even more important. So, lemme walk you through the 7 reasons I you should care about brand tracking (no matter what tool or process you use) 👇

Should you spam AI tools? Use gray hat SEO techniques? Publish a bunch of listicles where you're #1, or open a few dozen Reddit accounts to push a narrative, or pay for article placement on the right domains with exactly the right chunking of content to get your brand atop the AI Overviews?

For 20 years, I was a staunch proponent of "white hat" only. Now? Now that Google and the rest of Big Tech have proven themselves to be far, far more evil than any black hat SEO ever was? I say: screw 'em. As long as it doesn't hurt you/your business, you have no responsibility to be ethical toward giant corporations that would never return the favor.

Clip from my interview with Danny Goodwin for SEL's 20 year anniversary:

NEW: SparkToro's MCP Server is now live

You can connect directly to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini Enterprise and use prompts to run reports, get data, compare, extract -- anything you've been using CSV exports + AI tool imports to do (and more).

We've got detailed docs and a blog post with the announcement and example use cases on the site. Would love to hear how you're using it (I found it insanely easy to connect to Claude; didn't even need the docs' walkthrough). A huge thanks to Casey Henry for prioritizing this after customer requests 🥰

Everyone says "don't hire friends." I'm totally against this philosophy.

At SparkToro, Casey Henry and Amanda Natividad are close friends of mine and with each other.
At Alertmouse, Nathan Kriege and Adam Doppelt are close friends of mine and with each other.
At Snackbar Studio, Nicolas Kraj, Francesco Mazza, Miriam Cabrera Galván, and Geraldine DeRuiter are close friends.

And this is true despite the incredibly painful loss of close friendships at my first startup (something I've vowed won't happen again). That's because the friendship, to me and to my friends/colleagues, matters most. I recently talked about this on Ron Schmelzer's podcast 👇

IMO the biggest, unanswered marketing world question this year: What % of purchases on the web are influenced (at least partially) by an AI tool right now?

Very hard to answer with data, but crowdsourcing might uncover directionally how marketers are *feeling* (at least) 👇👇👇