The Click Was Never the Strategy — Being Remembered Is

For years, digital marketing organised itself around the click. It was easy to count, so it quietly became the goal instead of evidence that attention had become intent.

Writing in Forbes, Esade's David Lopez-Lopez makes the case that this logic has broken. People now discover, evaluate and remember brands without ever landing on their website. Pew Research found that when an AI summary appears, US Google users click a traditional result in just 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary is shown.

Influence has not disappeared. It has moved upstream into the answer, the feed, the community thread and the synthesis. That is where preference starts forming.

From "how do we rank?" to "are we part of the answer?"

That question changes the brief. Being part of an answer depends on clear explanations, original evidence, named experts, structured content, credible citations and consistent mentions beyond your own site.

A good business can build those signals. The work rewards specificity, useful evidence and consistent attribution, not novelty for its own sake.

Zero click marketing is not "post more"

• Give the insight away. A weak zero click play says "here's a teaser, click to learn more." A strong one says "here's the answer, use it now." Only one of those gets quoted back to a buyer by an AI assistant.
• Publish where attention already is. A framework explained in full inside a LinkedIn article, a transcript on a video, a properly structured FAQ — these are placements, not funnels.
• Make attribution machine-readable. Named authors, consistent entity details, structured data and clean citations are what turn "someone said this" into "your brand said this."

This does not mean abandoning your website, SEO or performance marketing. Strong traditional SEO still supplies roughly 90% of the foundation for AI visibility. The extension is to make that work easy to understand, attribute and cite wherever the first brand exposure happens.

Source: Forbes / Esade — The Click Is No Longer The Strategy: How Brands Win In A Zero-Click World