Why brands are rethinking search in the age of zero clicks

New Delhi: As artificial intelligence starts answering user queries before they click through to a website, marketers, publishers and platforms are being forced to rethink one of digital media’s oldest assumptions that visibility in search will naturally lead to traffic.

At a discussion on “Zero-Click Strategy: Winning in the Age of Invisible Search”, industry leaders said the shift is no longer theoretical. 

AI-driven search interfaces are already changing how information is discovered, how brands are surfaced and how performance is measured.

At the centre of the conversation was what speakers described as the “vanishing click”, the growing tendency of users to get answers directly on AI platforms instead of visiting publisher or brand websites.

For brands, that has immediate consequences. A page may still rank high, but traffic may still fall.

Sumeet Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at Info Edge, said the trend is already visible in real traffic behaviour. She noted that even when a brand remains at the top of search rankings across key terms, traffic can still decline.

When Info Edge examined its own patterns more closely, Singh said the company found that traffic had dropped by around 30-40 per cent. 

Of that, about 8-10 per cent appeared to be linked to AI Overviews and large language model-led discovery, while the rest was shaped by broader shifts in media spending and user behaviour.

That, she suggested, has forced marketers back to the basics. The answer, in her view, lies less in chasing hacks and more in understanding intent and ensuring visibility across the wider internet.

That wider visibility is becoming more important because in AI-led discovery, presence may not always convert into a click. Instead, value may come from being cited, mentioned or surfaced as a trusted source inside AI-generated responses.

Sai Narayan, Chief Marketing Officer at Policybazaar, said the logic behind zero-click is not entirely new. Brand marketers, he argued, have long dealt with a version of it, because much of brand advertising works without any immediate click at all.

For him, the larger point is that strong brand-building continues to shape discovery, even if the first user interaction now happens through an AI interface rather than a traditional search result.

Narayan said the company’s long-term investments in brand building have helped lift direct traffic and app downloads, which shows that awareness still matters even when search journeys become more fragmented.

At the same time, he acknowledged that organic discovery itself is changing. Search behaviour is becoming more conversational, which means marketers can no longer optimise only for keywords. They now have to think in terms of questions, prompts and intent.

From the publisher side, Times Internet COO Puneet Gupt said the current moment should not be seen simply as the death of search, but as a reorganisation of how traffic gets distributed.

He argued that the industry may be moving not towards “zero click” in an absolute sense, but towards a redistribution of clicks across multiple destinations and interfaces. 

In that environment, brands and publishers will need to build presence across several discovery layers, including AI engines, partnerships and platforms, instead of relying too heavily on one search pipeline.

Gupt also flagged a deeper shift that could emerge as AI agents become more capable. The next disruption, he said, may not just be fewer clicks, but reduced access to consumer information itself if transactions begin happening inside AI systems without users ever reaching a website.

For platforms, that means measurement frameworks also need to evolve.

Adam Goodman, Director of AI in Advertising, APAC, at Microsoft Advertising, said “share of conversation” could become a key metric for brands as AI search grows. In a world where responses are generated rather than simply listed, brands will need to know not just whether they rank, but whether they are being cited and how they are being represented.

Goodman said Microsoft has already introduced tools to address that need. The company recently launched an AI Performance Report within Bing Webmaster Tools, which allows brands to see how they are being cited, and which pages and pieces of content are being referenced inside AI-led experiences.

He added that visibility in this environment will come from a broader mix of tactics, spanning GEO, AEO and SEO, rather than any one optimisation framework in isolation.

For agencies, the shift is also changing how success is measured.

Santosh Mishra, Managing Partner, Digital, at WPP Media, said marketers now need to think about demand generation before the click happens. In his view, the more relevant signals may increasingly be brand searches, mentions and search interest rather than click-through rates alone.

That is because awareness and intent still sit upstream of action, even if the final interaction no longer happens on a website in the same way.

Across the discussion, one theme came through clearly: the industry is still in an adjustment phase. There is no settled playbook yet, but the direction of change is becoming harder to ignore.

Singh summed it up as a broader shift in how content itself is judged. The internet, she said, is moving from keyword density to knowledge density.

In the AI search era, rankings still matter, but they are no longer the whole story. For brands, authority, trust, structured knowledge and relevance to user intent are becoming just as critical as discoverability.

Even as the “search” is not disappearing, it is clearly being rewritten. And in that rewritten system, brands may need to optimise not only for search engines, but for what some in the industry are now beginning to call trust engines.