Beyond SEO: How To Win Attention In The Age Of Zero-Click

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I’m so excited ’cause I’m once again joined by Patty Parobek. She’s our VP of AI and ML Transformation here at Mod Op. She is leading all of our adoption and change management initiatives to help us use AI.

[00:00:24] Tessa Burg: To make us faster, better, smarter, and deliver higher quality outcomes for our clients. And this conversation was inspired by an incredible post. So if you don’t follow Patty on LinkedIn, I highly recommend it. She’s constantly publishing content, so much so we’re trying to think of how we get it out to more of our clients.

[00:00:44] Tessa Burg: But happy to have you here today, Patty, to dive into beyond SEO, how we’re going to win attention in the age of zero click.

[00:00:55] Patty Parobek: Yes. Awesome. Always a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:59] Tessa Burg: Yay. So, uh, let’s talk about that post. You were responding to something that Rand Fishkin pointed out about Google, and he said Google grew by four ChatGPTS in 2024.

[00:01:17] Patty Parobek: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:17] Tessa Burg: Why is that framing so powerful and what does that mean? When zero click. And for people who might not be familiar with the phrase zero click, um, this is the behavior that Google is now using the AI results at the top and people are reading those and they’re getting what they need from that AI paragraph that is now above all of the organic links.

[00:01:46] Tessa Burg: And so people are not clicking on these organic links. So tell me a, so let’s go back to the question. So that’s what zero click is. So why is it so important? Why is this framing so powerful that Google grew by four ChatGPTs in 2024?

[00:02:01] Patty Parobek: Yeah. So let’s start at the beginning of that question. The, the framing is important.

[00:02:07] Patty Parobek: Uh, and if you guys don’t follow Rand Fishkin, uh, or you’re not familiar with him, he’s the founder of SparkToro and very many other things. He used to be the head of Moz, uh, as an SEO, and he’s grown since then. But he did an amazing. Session at SEO Week 2025 called “You’re Bigger Than SEO”. And in that he has a lot of this information.

[00:02:29] Patty Parobek: So if you haven’t listened to that, search for it on YouTube. Give it a listen. It is amazing. I’m a huge Rand Fishkin fan girl and have been for, ever since I was an SEO, so

[00:02:39] Tessa Burg: I know. Me too.

[00:02:40] Patty Parobek: Uh, highly recommend. Yeah, exactly. So the framing is so important. As part of the overall conversation because, uh, because there’s always this headline that SEO is dead, or SEO is dying every year for the last 20 years.

[00:02:55] Patty Parobek: Right. And, uh, is, SEO dying was kind of the one of the things he was facing and, and talking through in that session. So the fact that ChatGPT has grown so significantly in such a short amount of time, is scaring a lot of people because it’s changing how people research. It’s changing how people search in general, and that huge jump makes people believe that Google is then going away because it’s replacing the traffic, right?

[00:03:25] Patty Parobek: But in fact, Google is also still growing and it’s growing also. At a significant rate. And it, you don’t think about that because we’re in this AI bubble right now. Uh, but Google search is very much still a positive growing thing. And uh, and the, the statement was, and I love it, that ChatGPT yeah, grew so significantly in 2024, but Google search grew by four times what ChatGPT grew.

[00:03:59] Patty Parobek: So it is, it basically. Uh, you know, absorbed that amount of search. So still healthy SEO search, still very healthy practices and will be as long as your customer base is still using that.

[00:04:15] Patty Parobek: Right? Zero click though is. The part where you start getting worried because maybe only 40%. Of browser based Google searches are now resulting in any click to your website. And that is a concern because, well, what do you do if you can’t rely on traffic? And, and notoriously Google traffic has been the, the number one traffic source of probably any website or digital entity.

[00:04:44] Patty Parobek: So what do you do when that goes away? Uh, and that’s, that’s what we’re gonna talk through today.

[00:04:51] Tessa Burg: Yeah. And I think. It’s such an important conversation because both of us have worked on e-commerce businesses where 60, 70, 80% of their traffic was coming from search engines, predominantly Google. And back in the day when Google would change an algorithm and their traffic would tank, so would their revenue, so would everything.

[00:05:13] Tessa Burg: And it was like the planet was on fire because. The businesses depended so heavily on that Google search traffic, and we know this is happening right now to companies that are, especially companies that are exclusively e-commerce, they are not seeing the traffic. So Google’s growing SEO isn’t dead, but what does success look like now if traffic isn’t a metric of success?

[00:05:44] Patty Parobek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So revenue will always be the main measure of success. I think the limitation is that if you’re not in direct e-commerce, you don’t have your thumb on the pulse of how your marketing activity is directly corresponding or correlating to revenue. So what do you do if you can no longer look at traffic as a representation of, is my audience continuing to buy from me or not?

[00:06:12] Patty Parobek: And the. One of the big takeaways from the whole discussion and session and is something I also really agree with, and that’s while traffic is going to continue to decrease, but pockets of influence and attention is increasing. So. The, the thought there, which I again, very strongly believe is true, is you have to focus on where are the places that your audience is actually being influenced?

[00:06:45] Patty Parobek: How can you measure the influence in those pockets? And then how can you correlate that to bottom of the funnel, mid funnel metrics and, and create that journey and the pipeline of metrics in a completely different way.

[00:07:00] Tessa Burg: And, uh. I feel like that is a big nut to crack because if you’re a business and you’re like, well, my revenue was dependent on the gosh darn traffic, or you are even a retailer and you’re seeing the traffic go down and you are seeing soft sales, it, it feels like a direct correlation. Now we do have other data points that are saying sales are softening across the board, uh, and that there are obviously more indicators, but. I think what’s important for marketers, and what I want to ask you Patty, is how do marketers find where people are being influenced?

[00:07:39] Tessa Burg: I mean, ’cause they’re, I imagine a lot of people just started paying to get the traffic back. And they went right to sponsored, um, content and media and paid media because they need to fill that gap to keep the revenue going, but in parallel to some short term things. How do they, what type of research should they be doing?

[00:08:01] Tessa Burg: What kinds of tools should they be using to better understand Yeah. Where their audience is being influenced.

[00:08:06] Patty Parobek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, I love this question. So my first, how I’m gonna answer that in two ways. First is what not to do. What not to do is trust aggregate reporting and trends out there that say, everyone in this demographic is now doing this trend, so hop on board.

[00:08:28] Patty Parobek: And honestly, like generative engine optimization is one of those things your customers could certainly not be using ChatGPT or Gemini. Or any of the larger language model chats to find research right now. Uh, it, and that could very well be true. Tessa and I at part of our career worked on e-cards, subscription, e-cards, and one of our demographics for e-cards was a 65 plus year old woman.

[00:08:56] Patty Parobek: And I would venture to say that there, there very could well be target markets that aren’t necessarily using this yet. And if you’re in B2B. They likely are, and you have to figure out where those pockets are and, and what to use. So how to do it is, uh, start with your customer. So here’s what’s great.

[00:09:18] Patty Parobek: There’s ways, if you are a small business, you don’t have. Uh, the ability to invest in very large market research programs or ways to talk to your whole customer base. Uh, if you’re a small business, you might also be an entrepreneur mindset. Just pick up the phone and talk to your customers. You can talk to a sample of them and understand how is their journey changed?

[00:09:43] Patty Parobek: How did they discover you? Can you walk me through, are you using these technologies? Are you on Facebook? All of the things that you might have not known. Had you not just had the conversation, if you are a larger business and you can afford the conversation, now is the time to invest in market research, probably at a faster clip than you’ve ever had to do market research before.

[00:10:04] Patty Parobek: Maybe you did it two years ago, maybe you should even be doing it every six months now, because that’s the speed of how things are changing and evolving in the market space. The luxury of technology now though is that there’s so many amazing tools that as a parallel path, while you’re getting real customer data, you can start to find trends and validation points with new tools.

[00:10:30] Patty Parobek: And uh, of course I’m going to mention. Rand Fishkin’s own tool, SparkToro an amazing place to start to see for this specific audience that I have, where are they going, what channels are they most invested in? And they pull that data from datas from different click panels, and they pull that data from like other, other ways that they could, like, you know, it’s trustworthy enough data to be able to find some real insights.

[00:10:58] Patty Parobek: And in that, you know, if you are. Uh, a DIY paint provider, you might find your customer base is actually more interested in Pinterest than you ever thought, and you weren’t investing enough time there. And if you’re a B2B, you know, SaaS provider, you’ll probably find, oh man, you should really pay attention to Claude.

[00:11:18] Patty Parobek: But you won’t know until you start surveying your own customer base in that way. Yeah. Are there other tools that you know of? Tessa, you, you do a lot of this.

[00:11:25] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. Well, you know, I love using. I do think a lot of people probably started upping their spend in media, in paid search, like trying to do what they can to get that traffic and the visibility back now, and you can use those results, especially if you are using an AI platform that instead of you optimizing the budget, the platform is optimizing to where your customers are and it’s going across channel.

[00:11:56] Tessa Burg: And so you are getting. Data, you’re getting a sense of their journey across many different channels. And yes, you’re paying for it, but then you can pull that out in the backend. And sim not simple, but you know, we talk about AI a lot, but a data science model, you can build, um, a cluster analysis model and say, help me better understand.

[00:12:19] Tessa Burg: The journey and the types of customers that have interacted with me across all of these channels. And you know, we’re building a tool audience lab to kind of ingest that data and allow people to ask questions of those segments. So that’s another way if you jumped on, you know, paying for media, which honestly I think you should, because we all have businesses to run.

[00:12:40] Tessa Burg: And like Patty said, revenue. It’s the key driver. You gotta figure out how to keep the lights on. Um, the data that you’re collecting is super valuable and if you did not, uh, use a platform or you’re not working with partners who understand omnichannel cross channel optimization, it would be a good time right now to shift into that, uh, there and take a look at that backend and, and that paired with market intelligence is gonna give you.

[00:13:10] Tessa Burg: A really clear picture of not just where are they being influenced, but where in that journey or is preference being set because we know that that now is becoming even a like, really important place to be is in that consideration set before there are even signals of purchase. Um, so that’s what I would add to it.

[00:13:36] Tessa Burg: And it’s, you know, there’s no. Magic bullet. Like I would would say you should invest all four of these lanes to Patty’s point in parallel because. There, this is not, this is a very big challenge. This is a monumental shift in behavior and. It is only going to become more fragmented. So the time you invest right now in trying to understand that behavior in a very fragmented landscape will pay dividends and you’ll be able to scale the solutions you launch against the insight, uh, for years to come because fragmentation will continue.

[00:14:23] Tessa Burg: Um, so we talk about. How people can get to know people better. And I mentioned it’s becoming more fragmented, but Patty, why is it becoming more fragmented or, or like I said, it is going to continue, but what are some of the drivers that are happening in the search and buying networks, buying groups, even consumer research that is going to continue this trend of fragmentation of how I learn about products, how I’m influenced and inspired against my needs and wants.

[00:14:59] Patty Parobek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I’ll give an answer. I’m actually, I’m really interested in your answer. Okay. To be honest, but one of the things that’s impacting my own journey, and I’m using channels in different methods that I’ve ever used before.

[00:15:16] Patty Parobek: One, obviously the, the prevalence of everything that you see and just the fragmentation of your own. In the different ways that you’re seeing it, but I am obviously a super user of every. Large language model that I can get my hands on. In fact, I mean, we know like 80 90% of marketers are all using ChatGPT, Claude to do any kind of business.

[00:15:41] Patty Parobek: And the way that I prompt engineer and the tokens that I use are gonna be different from anybody else’s. And so the answers and outputs that I’m going to get to help me on my path and direct me to the next step in my journey is going to be actually very different than yours. I mean, some of the things might be very.

[00:16:00] Patty Parobek: Similar, we might use lots of the same types of methodologies and tokens, but I, I do believe the hidden gems that we’re going to find in our paths are going to be different, and that’s going to lead to an even, uh, new net of diverse channels, diverse perspectives, diverse content. Uh, and yeah, I, I believe that that.

[00:16:25] Patty Parobek: AI and large language models are actually going to contribute to that fragmentation. Of course, they’re, yeah. What did, what were you thinking when you asked that question?

[00:16:33] Tessa Burg: I totally agree with that. I think too, what contributes to fragmentation is the lack of trust and transparency and being able to understand where you’re getting credible information and what’s real.

[00:16:45] Tessa Burg: Like a lot of people are using ChatGPT, but then, you know, even ChatGPT right below it says, Hey, this might not be accurate. And so you’re going somewhere else to find out, well, where is that accurate? And that’s probably a search engine, um, for a lot of people because then they can see the source or maybe they.

[00:17:02] Tessa Burg: Are a little bit more advanced than they know how to use deep research. There’s an explosion of tech, you know, at least 13 new pieces of tech being launched every day that is being built off of the foundational models for niche audiences.

[00:17:21] Tessa Burg: There’s also going to be different types of hardware introduced.

[00:17:27] Tessa Burg: Wearables glasses. Uh, I don’t know when the phone’s gonna be reimagined, but I bet that’s gonna happen. But the, the way we access the information where we put our trust, uh, and the selecting the tools to use in that, and even the combination of tools is going to continue to evolve. ’cause there really is not going to be a slowdown in. Sort of content and influence tool creation.

[00:17:57] Patty Parobek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:17:59] Patty Parobek: You know, what that also makes me think of is that at the end of that. Lack of trust game. You’ve exhausted all the resources. You’re finding different patterns and different correlations. You don’t know how to trust. What do you do? You actually go to your human expert, right?

[00:18:15] Patty Parobek: Like what is the source of truth that I actually trust? And that trust and authority signal is important also to a large language matter is one of the most. Important factors for any kind of like zero click optimization or LLM , you have to be trustworthy and authoritative. So it’s another reason to find out where your audience is looking for expert opinions, advice, uh, content where they’re looking for influence and being a trustworthy, authoritative presence in those pockets.

[00:18:50] Tessa Burg: Yeah, we talk about it all the time, that expertise. Is a new line of revenue for a lot of companies, but it has to be authentic. Like you cannot be selling at every point. And I think that’s really hard, especially in B2B for people and sales, uh, driven organizations to understand. But if you are able to capture preference early, which comes through trust and authenticity, then.

[00:19:18] Tessa Burg: Your sales cycles will go down, the sales pipeline, velocity will increase. Uh, and we’re seeing that in studies that, you know, when we partner with Forrester. So Patty, we’re already at time and that stinks because we could talk about this all day. But if you had to leave people with one last thing, uh, what would it be?

[00:19:40] Patty Parobek: So I would say this might be a new net. Way of thinking about your strategy for the upcoming second half of the year for 2026. The first place to start is with the research. You need to find where your customers are being influenced and that might not look like traffic. So apart from traffic, work with your team to figure out how can I capture what the share of voice is for my brand in this influencer.

[00:20:10] Tessa Burg: Love it. Thank you so much again for joining us and we will definitely pick this up in a part two as we continue this journey with our clients. If you wanna find Patty, you can find her on LinkedIn, Parobek, her last name is spelled P-A-R-O-B-E-K, and you can also find us at modop.com with all the rest of the Leader Generation episodes.

[00:20:33] Tessa Burg: Until next time, Patty, thanks.

[00:20:36] Patty Parobek: Thank you.