Marketing has had one obsession for the entire span of its digital life: how do we drag the customer to our website?

Social posts that drive traffic to your website. Adverts linked to a landing page. “Click here for more.” Lead magnets, gated content, retargeting ads, “register your interest” forms that demand an email address to access a PDF.

We have been doing this since AT&T placed the first banner ad on HotWired in October 1994, and we are still doing it now because somewhere along the line, the entire industry decided that the ultimate goal of all marketing was to drag people to our website with the determination of a pillaging Viking.

There is just one small problem – they aren’t coming any more.

You probably know this, even if you haven’t quite admitted it. When did you last actually click through to a website? For finding a recipe, checking a fact, settling an argument about who was in a film? Most of us live whole days inside Google, Maps, Instagram, TikTok and ChatGPT without ever leaving the platform. Google answers questions directly, AI summarises information, Maps tells you whether a restaurant is any good, social media presents you with just about anything you can imagine. There is nowhere left to send anyone, because they’re already there.

This is one of the biggest shifts to hit marketing in a long time, and most of our industry has not yet adapted.

The death of the click

The numbers are quite something. Bain reports that around 60% of searches on traditional engines now end without a click to another site, and that roughly 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches. Organic web traffic across most sectors is down somewhere between 15% and 25%; a quarter of the traffic that used to power our websites is simply not arriving any more.

In other words, you no longer have to go looking for things on the internet; instead, you choose your preferred channel, and the thing comes to you. AI overviews, featured snippets, Google Maps cards, YouTube embeds, Instagram carousels… the answer arrives in your feed. The user has neither the desire nor the need to be led anywhere else.

The brands who do this well

Many smart brands worked this out years ago, and stopped trying to haul people off to their websites and started living where their customers already were.

Take Liquid Death, who sell heavy metal canned water with skulls on them. They generated $333 million in revenue last year, and their marketing strategy is essentially this: don’t make ads, make things people will share. Their head of marketing has gone on record saying shares are the metric they care about – not clicks or impressions. If a piece of content isn’t compelling enough that someone wants to send it to a mate, it isn’t doing its job. They have 14 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, and a marketing team small enough, in his words, to “fit in an SUV, legally.”

Or look at Duolingo. The language-learning app handed its dormant TikTok account to a 23-year-old graduate during lockdown, told her to experiment, and left her to it. Four years later they have 16.8 million TikTok followers and a green owl who is more famous than most pop stars.

Notice what isn’t in either of those stories: funnels, landing pages, “click here to learn more”, calls to action pointing somewhere else. The marketing isn’t a tantalising preview designed to lure you off to where the real content lives. The marketing is the content – right there, in the feed, where you already were.

The lesson for estate agency

Estate agency has been living in a zero-click world for years.

Rightmove and Zoopla are zero-click platforms. When a buyer scrolls a portal listing, the entire experience takes place within the portal – not once are they enticed to the agent’s website.

And yet most agency marketing still feverishly drives the consumer somewhere they don’t really want to go. We are, quite literally, optimising for a dwindling behaviour.

If we accept that the customer isn’t coming to us (and they aren’t), the question changes. It stops being how do I get them to my website? and becomes how do I be useful where they already are?

Which is a much better question.

Meeting them where they are

The first thing it requires is letting go of the idea that the website is where the marketing lives; it isn’t. It’s a credibility check – people will glance at it once to confirm you exist and aren’t terrifying, and then they will go back to whatever they were doing. This is not a put-down of blogs or websites; they’re both crucial tools in validating your credentials, and showing up in search results.

But what you do instead is give the value in the feed. If a vendor is wondering how the Renters’ Rights Act affects them, write the actual answer on Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever your audience actually is. Not a tantalising preview ending in “read more on our blog”, or a sneaky teaser followed by “click here for the full article.” Just the full answer – be it in a LinkedIn article, Instagram carousel, or TikTok video.

Trying to lead someone off the platform they’re enjoying, to a place they didn’t ask to go, in order to make them consume your content on your terms – that isn’t marketing; it’s an interruption.

The metrics have to change too. Clicks were a useful measure in a world where clicks happened, but they mostly don’t any more. Impressions, comments, saves, shares, direct messages – that is the new currency.

And then there is the new SEO. When Google’s AI overview describes choosing an agent in your town, what does it say? When someone asks ChatGPT for a letting agent in your patch, who comes up? That is the search engine optimisation that matters now, and it’s fueled by having fresh, consistent content in multiple locations across the web.

The point

There is a temptation, when reading something like this, to think of zero-click marketing as a new tactic to bolt on. A TikTok account here, some AI optimisation there. That isn’t really the point.

The point is that the old model – interrupt, capture, funnel, convert – was built for a world where the customer had to come to us, but that world has gone. The customer is in their feed, their inbox, their AI assistant, their map app, their portal. They are not, in any meaningful number, following your links, falling into your funnels, clicking on your ads – at least, not willingly.

The most effective marketing now isn’t pushy, and it doesn’t try to take you anywhere. It is just useful, on its own terms, in the place you happen to be standing.

Toby Martin is an industry marketer, consultant, trainer, and speaker.