Search Console’s Latest Update Is Another Signal of a Zero-Click Future

Google’s latest announcement regarding Search Console looks like another small but significant step towards a ‘zero click’ world.

Firstly, for those who aren’t familiar, Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) is the search engine’s resource for website owners.

It brings together metrics and tools intended to help website owners understand how their websites are performing on Google Search and to uncover potential issues.

Over the years, it has offered a bit of a ‘mixed bag’ of resources. On the one hand, it provides some genuinely useful information on impressions and clicks originating from Google Search. On the other hand, it used to delight in sending false positive error reports to anyone who cared to listen.

Back in June, I wrote about a new phenomenon within Search Console, dubbed ‘the great decoupling’. It concerned a trend that would see website impressions increase, whilst clicks resulting from them drop.

Google at the time would have told you otherwise, but it was almost certainly down to an increase in use of AI Overviews, the feature within Google Search that provides the visitor with a fully formed answer, directly in the search results.

AI Overviews, it appears, are inflating impressions for the websites that are mentioned, but they are not incentivising visitors to click.

Welcome to zero-click marketing

What this really means is, rather than creating a compelling headline and extract to post across various channels and expecting users to click to read more, you should work on the assumption that they aren’t going to click.

The concept of zero-click marketing is nothing particularly new. Followers of Moz Founder, Rand Fishkin, will be familiar with the concept; his firm SparkToro has been talking about it since 2022.

Fishkin has spoken about the concept as “creating standalone value in the platforms where people hang out”.

What this really means is, rather than creating a compelling headline and extract to post across various channels and expecting users to click to read more, you should work on the assumption that they aren’t going to click.

Why aren’t they going to click?

You’ll find lots of good answers to this question, but here’s my summary.

The systems that enable your audience to discover your content have a small and shrinking incentive to get them to click to visit you.

Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and any other social platform you choose to look at make more revenue when users stick around longer.

Say what they like, they have no commercial incentive to send clicks to your own property.

The same is true, in a slightly different way, for Google Search.

Google’s Search engine makes revenue the more people who use it. As long as it remains useful, people will keep using it.

AI Overviews, Google will argue, gives search more utility. It also insulates Google's ‘classic’ search model from a growing suite of generative AI platforms that can serve many of the roles search has historically taken care of.

Google Search Console

Getting back to Search Console’s latest feature announcement. On 8th December, Google announced that it will be introducing social media profile tracking within Search Console.

Taken at face value, that’s a very useful feature. It takes a disparate set of social media profiles that a brand ‘owns’ and brings them in line with a brand’s website.

You’ll be able to see where your content receives Google Search impressions, regardless of whether those impressions draw from your website or from one of your social profiles.

The best model I ever heard regarding how to view your brand’s social profiles was to think of them as embassies in a foreign land; I forget who told me that, but it goes back to around 2010.

If your website is your HQ, your LinkedIn Business Page is your embassy on LinkedIn.

It helps to think of it like this, because it shows the true utility of maintaining a set of social profiles. You have the opportunity to influence an audience and provide ‘official information’ in ‘different jurisdictions’.

Social used to be thought of as a way to drive clicks to your website, but that’s a mistake.

It’s about driving education, a brand message, or an insight to your audience.

This new feature in Search Console, I think, acknowledges this. It says to me that Google knows full well that users will be clicking less; instead, they’ll see your message wherever it happens to reach them.

That may well be via content on your website, repurposed via Google’s AI Overviews. It could equally be via a post published on social.

The new feature will be rolling out slowly to ‘select sites’, so we’ll wait and see if it becomes the norm.

I suspect it will.