Making Zero-Click Search Click: 12 Micro-Experiments for the Early Days of Generative Engine Optimization

AI-powered search is reshaping the B2B buyer journey — and marketers are struggling to keep pace.

“Click-through rates have plummeted in the year since Google introduced AI-generated summaries,” wrote Bain & Company consultants in a March analysis. Though the trend is most visible in B2C spaces, where four in five consumers rely on “zero-click” results at least 40% of the time, B2B clickthrough rates are falling by as much as 30% in categories like software, according to the firm’s research.

The rapid drop-off in such a core measure is “throwing everybody into a bit of a panic,” says Tom Kaneshige, chief content officer of the CMO Council in San Jose, California.

“As organic click-through rates fall, marketers are losing share of voice in high-value, non-branded searches” that shape a buyer’s selection of potential vendors and chances of converting, Bain researchers explain. 

In fact, 85% of B2B buyers purchase from a “day one” list of vendors they had in mind at the start of their search, according to the firm. And now, that list is increasingly likely to be stamped by GenAI — with scant regard for marketer-created content.   

Per Bain, about 60% of searches on traditional engines such as Google and Bing now end without the user progressing to a destination site. At the same time, platforms powered by large language models (LLMs) are “surging in popularity,” the firm notes, pointing to ChatGPT’s 44% traffic boost in November 2024 and Perplexity’s monthly user count, which surpassed 15 million late last year (and continues to climb).  

Though this speed and scale may seem dizzying, there’s precedent.

“If you think of the B2B buying cycle … most of the buying journey already happens before a form fill,” says Aditi Uppal, vice president of corporate and growth marketing at Teradata, a B2B software company headquartered in San Diego, CA. “Zero-click just makes that research more compressed and mediated because now buyers get AI summarized answers and side-by-side vendor comparisons, social proof, in just a few swipes.”

The smart marketer can use this evolution to their advantage by investing time — and any leftover spend — into experiments that demystify today’s state of play and give some direction in what Kaneshige says are the “Wild West” days of generative engine optimization (GEO), also called answer engine optimization (AEO). The following are his and Uppal’s ideas and advice for near-term GEO experiments.

1. Start with strategy. Uppal and her team use an “experimentation innovation roadmap” to help decide which trends and opportunities to pilot, what success looks like, and when it’s time to sunset or scale. Such an approach can also guard against what Kaneshige sees as a tendency among some marketers to “over-rotate” on shiny new objects at the expense of other staples in the ever-growing slate of B2B buyer personas.
2. Look up. Uppal says the executives in her network are “more curious” than stressed by the immediate impact of GenAI on marketing metrics. These leaders are most interested in “AI as an opportunity” and how it’s “changing the experience that we are delivering to our customers,” she explains.
3. Identify the new metrics that matter. Balance clicks with emerging measures that help illustrate your company’s share of voice in today’s search landscape, Uppal suggests. As zero-click gives rise to in-feed content on social platforms, for example, consider impressions, saves, and other such engagement markers that speak to your visibility and influence, she says. It’s also worth examining any notable changes in sources of site traffic (e.g., organic versus paid, traditional search engine versus LLM platform).
4. Partner with AI search vendors. Go straight to the source to understand the data and just how much AI is “contributing versus the traditional marketing metrics,” Uppal advises.
5. Lead the conversation. One way to future-proof your content strategy is to “prioritize deep topical authority over shallow keyword tactics,” Bain researchers say. Tactically, this means clarifying the intent topics for which you’d like to be known and then building a steady stream of high-quality content around them, Uppal says. “Frequency and consistency [are] key in making sure that your content gets picked up, especially by LLMs,” she explains. As an example, her team has been coalescing around cloud and data analytics topics for over three years — a long-tail tactic that, though launched well before the zero-click boom, has led to a healthy share of voice today.
6. Refresh FAQs. Many marketers, including Uppal, are seeing early success in revamping their FAQs to better answer the anticipated questions of bottom- to mid-funnel prospects, improve their odds of attribution in generated search results, and increase their share of voice for high-value keywords, she explains.
7. Switch up formats. “We are being as micro-segmented as we can by the persona that we are targeting and based on the stage that a buyer is in,” Uppal says. As buyers become less likely to leave their originating search site, short-form, awareness-focused content will become increasingly valuable during discovery phases, she explains. Also play with video and interactive formats to boost visibility in AI searches, Bain researchers advise, and forgo PDFs and gated assets, which aren’t as crawlable.
8. Don’t count long-form content out. Deeper, more brand-focused content will continue to play a vital part on owned channels (e.g., website, communities, events, email) for customers you’ve built trust with during discovery, says Uppal. High-quality communications will also have a growing role externally, says Kaneshige, because sophisticated B2B marketers are “finding that, if they can land in credible publications, that’s going to help their views, their brand mentions, their citations.”
9. Implement guardrails. GEO-related content standards should prioritize accuracy, transparency, and quality. “We all know AI overviews can hallucinate, and the search snippets definitely can strip nuance or context,” Uppal says. So be wary of oversimplifying a complex concept or overblowing a product claim, which can erode trust and potentially raise compliance issues. Also, ensure you have a swift process for handling errors discovered in attributions, she advises. “We need to be quick to correct or flag misrepresentations of our content and AI-generated summaries.”
10. Stick to the facts. Look for opportunities to incorporate original research and concrete statistics, Kaneshige says. “AEO tends to, at least for now, really value quantifiable things like survey results,” he explains.
11. Learn from yesterday. Look to past hype cycles for an idea of what might work — and what almost certainly won’t. “In the early days of SEO, marketers tried to game the system,” Kaneshige says, pointing to tactics like hiding repetitive keywords on websites, which incited brand backlash. “I’d suggest they avoid such tactics with AEO.” He’s also skeptical of the claim he’s heard that SEO best practices can port over to AEO, which he thinks is premature.
12. Shape tomorrow. “Good marketers will look at this as an opportunity,” Kaneshige says of trends like zero-click and GEO. “Because they can do things now that they were never able to do before.” He points to a recent event where a vendor used GenAI to quickly draw up a hyper-personalized white paper for each prospect who visited their booth, replete with custom solution recommendations reflecting their need, industry, and company. “You couldn’t do that without AI because of the resources and even the processing of it would have been too difficult,” he says.

As zero-click rises and reshapes engagement — like omnichannel did not so long ago, and SEO not so long before that — Uppal takes to heart the title of Intel founder Andy Grove’s 1999 business book, Only the Paranoid Survive.

“It’s not about being reactive,” she says. Instead, it’s about staying true to the timeless tenets of good marketing. “If you have a good content strategy, if you have a very customer-focused approach to creating content, then I just think that this is an enabler. It’s an accelerator.”