It’s no secret that search is changing, fast. With tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and zero-click results becoming more common, traditional SEO strategies are being turned upside down.
In a recent episode of Performance Delivered, we sat down with our Head of SEO, Lindsie Nelson, and AI search expert Andreas Voniatis to talk about what’s really happening—and what marketers need to do to stay ahead.
Here’s what we uncovered.
Traffic Is Down—And That Might Be a Good Thing
For years, SEO success was measured in clicks, impressions, and traffic spikes. But what happens when people stop clicking?
“Traffic is down, but leads are up,” Lindsie explained. “And that’s the shift we all need to understand.”
Search is no longer just a volume game. It’s about getting your content in front of the right people—often before they even visit your site. AI-powered results mean your brand can show up without a click ever happening, and that’s not a failure. That’s a new kind of visibility.
Zero-Click Search Isn’t the Enemy—It’s an Opportunity
Zero-click doesn’t mean zero value. In fact, the fewer clicks there are, the more valuable each one becomes.
As Andreas put it: “If you play the AI search game right, you’re building brand awareness before the user ever lands on your site. That pre-sold customer is worth more—they convert faster, they’re less price-sensitive, and they’re easier to retain.”
But to win that game, your content needs to do more than just exist—it needs to be good enough to be recommended by AI.
Your Content Needs to Work Harder
Gone are the days when listicles stuffed with keywords could bring in results. AI is raising the bar for what qualifies as “good content.” Today, your content must:
- Provide actual value line by line
- Be contextually relevant to nuanced queries
- Earn its spot as a cited or recommended source
“If AI doesn’t think your content is worth learning from,” Andreas warned, “it won’t recommend it—and neither will users.”
Rethinking Attribution in an AI World
Here’s the challenge: even if SEO is delivering results, your current tools might not show it. Platforms like GA4 often miss the bigger picture.
Andreas offered a solution: models like Markov chains can help track complex journeys, showing how channels contribute to conversions even when they aren’t the last step.
And Lindsie emphasized the importance of integrating SEO metrics with CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce. “You can’t connect SEO to ROI using surface-level analytics alone,” she said.
It’s Time to Look Beyond Google
Here’s one of the biggest takeaways from the episode: SEO is no longer just about Google.From TikTok and YouTube to Reddit and podcasts, today’s organic discovery happens across platforms. If your strategy doesn’t reflect that, you’re already behind. And that’s not a threat—it’s an opportunity. The brands that adapt now will have a serious advantage.
Final Thoughts
This new era of SEO is more complex—but also more exciting. It requires smarter strategies, stronger content, and better integration with your overall marketing goals.If you’re still chasing clicks and measuring impressions, it’s time to rethink your approach. Because in the age of AI, success isn’t just about being found—it’s about being trusted, recommended, and remembered.
Episode Transcript
[0:10 - 0:23] This is Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Stefan Horst. Welcome back to Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets to Marketing Success, the podcast where we dive into what's driving results in today's marketing landscape. I'm Ximena. I'm the head of marketing here at Symphonic, and I'm subbing in for Steffen.
[0:24 - 0:35] Ximena: And today we're exploring something that's quietly shaking up the foundation of SEO, The metrics that we've long relied on, like CTR, traffic, or even clicks themselves, are starting to lose their meaning.
[0:35 - 0:46] Ximena: With the rise of zero-click search and AI Power results, we need to ask ourselves, are we measuring the right things, or are we stuck optimizing for a version of the Internet that no longer exists?
[0:47 - 1:01] Ximena: To help us reframe this conversation, I'm joined once again by two brilliant guests from our last episode. First, we have Lindsie, who's our head of SEO here at Symphonic, and she's very passionate about helping our clients adapt their KPIs to today's search landscape.
[1:01 - 1:14] Ximena: She's joined by Andreas, who's the founder of Artois and a leading voice in AI-driven search, performance measurement, and advanced analytics. Let's dive in, guys. What do we actually mean by zero-click search, and how is AI accelerating this shift?
[1:15 - 1:25] Lindsie: Yeah, I mean, I'll take that one. I'll start, and you can argue with me, Andreas, if you disagree on what this is. So I think this term is thrown around a ton right now, honestly.
[1:25 - 1:38] Lindsie: To some level of fear tactic that people aren't clicking ever at all anymore in Google. But what zero click means is just people are getting their information without having to get to a website as frequently anymore.
[1:38 - 1:50] Lindsie: So whether this is in chat GPT or using AI overviews, whatever it happens to be, people are gathering content and context without having to visit 10 sites to do it.
[1:50 - 1:59] Lindsie: So it doesn't mean that the entire Internet is going to zero click. it means that there is just a lot more zero-click actions that are happening in places like Google.
[2:00 - 2:20] Andreas : Yeah, I think following on from what you've just said, Lindsie, is that whatever clicks you do get are going to be of much higher value. 100%. So, yeah, there's just a lot of interaction that's going on within the walled gardens of search, you know, be it Google or LLMs.
[2:20 - 2:39] Andreas : and there's a lot of brand awareness. If you're playing the AI search game correctly, there's a lot of brand awareness that's being generated on your behalf and positioning you as a potential partner when the buyer is finally buyer-ready and ready to click through.
[2:39 - 2:51] Andreas : The value of that click is much higher, so there's a lot more to play for, there's a lot more at stake. Like, you know, AI is definitely picking out the winners and leaving out the losers in search.
[2:51 - 3:06] Ximena: And digging deeper into that, how do you think that AI is influencing the way that people are searching during the buy-in cycle? Like, not just at the start. Is it impacting how marketers think about content, discovery, and tracking?
[3:07 - 3:09] Andreas : Yeah, is it all right if I take this, Lindsie?
[3:10 - 3:10] Lindsie: Go for it.
[3:11 - 3:42] Andreas : Yeah, cheers. So the thing is, the nature of AI, we've seen prior to AI search coming to the fore, that there was a lot of noisy general SEO playbook guide content polluting the web, so much so the birds even wrote an article about how SEOs ruin the internet, which, although it took a bit of a derogatory tone, I think we can all accept there was some modicum of truth to it.
[3:42 - 4:00] Andreas : And I think what we're seeing now is the threshold quality bar for content has been raised a lot higher because people are typing in mini essays about what it is they want, how they want it, who they are, and therefore the answers need to be a lot more contextual.
[4:00 - 4:30] Andreas : But what it means is that in order to have your brand recommended by AI, your content really needs to line by line fight for its life in order to justify its inclusion and what I mean by that is it really has to provide that information game more than it ever did before if it ever did before and if you think about how AI now any content any brand that's going to recommend that content
[4:30 - 4:51] Andreas : what really needs to happen for you know AI wants to get smarter okay So that means that if you want your brand to be recommended, your content has to be good enough to make AI think that there's value to be added to its model for retraining in order to make its AI models even smarter than it was before.
[4:51 - 4:57] Andreas : And if you can achieve that, then your brand is going to be recommended all over the place for what you do, of course.
[4:57 - 5:30] Lindsie: Yeah, well, and I think just to build on that and say things more specific even is like, we need to just create great content for humans. We can't just create garbage. And I do think SEO for years has just been if we just write a listicle about anything, we're going to get traffic. and if we just do that over and over again we're going to win and our KPIs are going to just go through the roof because all we care about is traffic and this is kind of shifting what we're
[5:30 - 6:01] Lindsie: looking at and the traffic we're getting like you said is has to be fought for right it has to be good and I think it's also a re-education of our clients I had a conversation today with somebody that's like well our traffic is down and I'm like yeah but your leads are up double so that traffic that is coming is better traffic than what it was before like I don't care and that's you know a piece of that re-education of like it doesn't matter if the traffic is down.
[6:01 - 6:07] Lindsie: because that quality is really there so how do we measure quality versus quantity
[6:07 - 6:19] Ximena: right Lindsie and since you're even giving this great example of clients but also teams are still prioritizing traffic over CTR. So what should we actually be measuring instead of that?
[6:20 - 6:54] Andreas : Well, I thought that was a great example that Linda gave because something I saw and reported with a client recently is that we saw that although the overall site traffic was like 70% down, and this was across all of them, SEO, organic search, if you want to call it that, was only down by 25% so that means it's already achieved a bunch above benchmark and also the other interesting statistic which I thought was very telling was that the share of lead generation increased from
[6:54 - 7:25] Andreas : 2.52% to over 10.4% so that means we've 4x'd in one month the share of the channel share of leads generated in one month And that massive And you know I think you know looking at what benchmark is and looking at the the growth in you know the the share of leads contributed overall versus other
[7:25 - 7:30] Andreas : channels that two two very good metrics among many others i'm sure well i think we could even
[7:30 - 7:58] Lindsie: from a measurement standpoint look at it back to that kind of buying stage like okay where are we in that very high education piece, whether it's branded impressions, are we getting eyeballs where people can see us? Like that's all pretty light, but it tells us where we are in that kind of top of funnel in a lot of spaces. And then we get kind of in the middle, which is clicks. And I think we have to accept a new normal to some level of clicks and every client's going to have a new normal.
[7:59 - 8:31] Lindsie: And then there's what matters, which is like money in your pockets. Why are you, clients are not investing in SEO because it feels good. I mean, some of them are, I guess, but really they should do it because they need to make more money, whether that's leads or sales via e-com. We are trying to increase the bottom line of a business. So that is what we need to care about. And I think if you're working with an agency that's just reporting out on clicks or impressions, you're probably not getting the whole story and you're likely not getting the
[8:31 - 8:37] Lindsie: return that you could be if we were looking at it from that kind of end of the process perspective.
[8:38 - 9:00] Ximena: Do you think it would be helpful to also now, since we're moving into this new era, to sort of benchmark the data that we had before with this, with what we're getting now, which we know that we're getting less clicks. We know they're more valuable, but, you know, to do some sort of kind of comparison to moving forward? I think we would need to do it industry-wide, right? I think we
[9:00 - 9:37] Lindsie: would need to look at a market and try to understand where we are because clients are saying we're losing traffic. It's like, yes, but if we could look at it comparatively and say, again, industry-wide people are losing 70% theoretically and you're losing 40, we're winning. That sounds terrible to an executive. Nobody wants to hear that they're just losing less. But I think that's where we have to kind of benchmark is this type of business should be here and we are here and we just have to to realign with what that means and some of that is also
[9:37 - 9:43] Lindsie: trust in your partner that they're not just lying to because they're failing which we're not but
[9:43 - 10:15] Andreas : this is just the way the space is today yeah the metrics has definitely changed i mean from the top of final perspective uh you would be looking at how many impressions you're getting because we've established earlier that there's a lot more interaction within the walled gardens of search before people eventually click to to transact on your website and i i think you touched on a really good point earlier about you know if you're not investing in seo well look you know ai is already
[10:15 - 10:53] Andreas : here and agentic search is coming in the future so if you're nowhere today you'll definitely be nowhere tomorrow there's no reason and you know when you think about how ai has even more power than a traditional search engine to recommend your brand there's no more powerful customer uh than a pre-sold customer why because if they're pre-sold they'll be less price sensitive they'll buy quicker they'll decide quicker whether it's buy off you or not they're more likely to be retained longer they're more likely to be highly more enjoyable to work with um so if ai is doing
[10:53 - 11:12] Andreas : the pre-selling for you that's if you think of it think about it it's a scaled referral network you don't even have to know these people to have worked for these people for ai to recommend you i mean it's insane for people or businesses not to invest in geo or seo whatever you want to call it
[11:12 - 11:48] Lindsie: this is our moment. And if you're not doing it, somebody else is. And if we can get, I had a question at a presentation I did this last week about what if there was this combined effort where we tried to like control the conversation around a brand, how could we do that? And it's like, well, if you had SEO and PR and social, and we all like pushed this brand messaging about something totally new and different I think we could control what the AI parses out and tells [11:48 - 12:03] Lindsie: people and we could test it you know I think it's something where controlling the conversation is really powerful and something we can do if we do it right and we have kind of multiple stakeholders
[12:03 - 12:36] Andreas : on board 100 i mean if you think about what seo was doing it was kind of convincing search engines what the reality was the truth what the the reality was regarding your brand and its place within uh within the net on on its true value well you know this is the same thing with with AI and LLMs you're for want of a better word than poisoning AI you're influencing AI again
[12:36 - 12:49] Andreas : to the the true value of your brand versus the competing alternatives for what it is you do and why your brand should be recommended as opposed to all the other competing alternatives.
[12:50 - 13:08] Lindsie: So I guess I know we're we're here talking about zero click metrics that's our goal to to get to today and I think it would be interesting to hear your perspective Andres on like attribution of those pieces so if we are controlling the conversation how do we how do we track that
[13:08 - 13:39] Andreas : through the process and what's your perspective there yeah so when I've written and coded attribution models for radio or general pathway analysis the way it would work is it uses the thing called Markov mathematics which is used in weather prediction and it's basically conditional probability so it's like well if the weather, let's just take the weather for example so if it's sunny today
[13:39 - 13:58] Andreas : what is the probability that it will be sunny tomorrow or rainy tomorrow and so the way it works in attribution analysis is if I came from this channel what is the probability that I will use, or what is the probability I came from these other channels?
[13:59 - 14:36] Andreas : Or if I was on this landing page, what is the probability that I have been on other landing pages? And you calculate all of these conditional probabilities, and eventually, after a certain number of data points, Markov tends to perform well with 10,000, if not even better, 100,000 data points, because then you got a model that converges and generalizes really well for a future for an unknown future And effectively that the basis of a data attribution model that used in the sort of Analytics 360 if it still called that[14:36 - 15:05] Andreas : when trying to work out, you know, well, what is the true value of a channel because then eventually the probabilities all add up to a percentage assigned to each channel to sort of say, well, even if you did land from, you know, last-click attribution from a Google Ad, And we do want to give all of the credit to that because we can see that from all the different 100,000 pathways, 36% of that should have gone to display or the rest of it.
[15:05 - 15:24] Andreas : So I would imagine the same methodology would be applied to just include AI as a channel. We've just seen that Google Search Console are now dimensionalizing with discussions as a different type of search result.
[15:25 - 15:33] Andreas : So that's where the data source would come from to fit into that overall Markov-driven model.
[15:33 - 15:45] Lindsie: I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit. I am an SEO person that doesn't have extensive analytical or mathematical experience and I need to tell my CMO if we're being successful.
[15:45 - 15:51] Lindsie: How do I use attribution modeling in a more simplistic way to get to that information?
[15:52 - 16:23] Andreas : Depends of the size of your company. If you're Amazon, they'll sign it off. Okay, let's pretend they're not Amazon. Yeah, I think you're likely to end up paying, if you can secure the budget, for an impression tag-based solution and then hope for the best that that tag-based solution will have a data-driven attribution model[16:23 - 16:38] Andreas : to provide you the answers you seek. But, I mean, even when AI, even before AI came along, most companies wouldn't even invest in an impression-based attribution model.[16:38 - 16:47] Andreas : So, yeah, perhaps AI is going to force the hands of businesses seriously committed to measurement to make that investment.
[16:48 - 16:56] Lindsie: What's your opinion on the standard Google Analytics attribution modeling that is provided out of the box?
[16:56 - 16:58] Andreas : Does that include the data-driven version?
[16:58 - 17:04] Lindsie: just the standard what somebody would put on their website we're not paying for anything extra
[17:04 - 17:40] Andreas : yeah if it's not the data-driven version then i i'm not holding much hope if i'm brutally honest also the the kind of attribution model that i'm most interested in is not channel-based but more content-based where we can see how what the pathways were when people arrived on your website So they go on to an information guide that you produced and then two weeks later decide to go on a commercial landing page and then maybe 24 hours later decide to actually transact or not transact.
[17:41 - 17:43] Andreas : That is the kind of attribution that I think we're missing right now.
[17:43 - 17:53] Ximena: Are there any other tools besides analytics that are more AI-based that they claim to measure visibility when it comes to these models?
[17:53 - 18:13] Lindsie: I feel like there's a million of them at this point that claim that they will tell us all of what we're showing up for within chat or within perplexity or whatever. I am highly apprehensive of their ability to report on something that is not consistent, not reported out on.
[18:13 - 18:19] Lindsie: And so I am just very apprehensive that any of it is even close to accurate.
[18:19 - 18:34] Andreas : Yeah, I think we're a bit like in the Overture days, you know, with Google, Yahoo, when they were partnering with Yahoo ads. And, you know, it was a bit of a wild west.
[18:34 - 19:00] Andreas : And I feel like history is repeating itself. And eventually, you know, the technology will get better. I mean, you know, when you look at all the sort of tools that are coming out for that promise to measure your visibility and citations within LLNs and AI, you know, they're all coming up with methods like, you know, turning keywords into search phrases.
[19:00 - 19:12] Andreas : but these are not actual search phrases that have been used. These are just generated search phrases that people might use to find your content within LLM.
[19:13 - 19:26] Andreas : So, again, it's not perfect and it's not really, you know, it's a bit of a supposition. So, yeah, as someone who loves data, I'm not loving that.
[19:26 - 19:38] Ximena: Got it. All right. Well, you know, if we're talking about how clicks don't necessarily tell the whole story anymore, I'm going to ask a really important question for most people who are engaging in SEO practices.
[19:38 - 19:41] Ximena: So how do we connect SEO to ROI these days?
[19:42 - 19:58] Lindsie: I guess I'll start this, at least from I think we're what we're trying to to connect the dots more and more is you can't prove that with out of the box tools anymore. You can't just do it in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics even.
[19:59 - 20:15] Lindsie: You have to be integrated within a CRM. We deal a lot in the B2B space, and it's all lead gen. And it's like just because somebody fills out a form on the website, well, one, with cookie data, we maybe didn't get all those people.
[20:15 - 20:38] Lindsie: Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't. Likely not. And so we have to pull in things from whether you're using HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever the platform you're using, we have to start to tie the metrics we're tracking against, whether it's, you know, traffic, impressions, visibility with those dollar points throughout.
[20:38 - 20:51] Lindsie: And so we're building a lot of custom dashboards, helping connect these dots. And to some level, they're jumps. But to other levels, at least if we have all of that in one place, we can start to make reasonable assertions about it.[20:52 - 21:05] Lindsie: Whereas if we're just looking at, you know, Google Analytics, which I hear a lot of people just looking at Google Analytics, you're not going to get the full picture. And you're also never truly going to be able to prove that return on investment.
[21:05 - 21:17] Andreas : Yeah, I think that's quite right. In order to connect the ROI with organic search activity, it's a bit like how they teach probability at school.
[21:18 - 21:39] Andreas : So we're taught what are the desired outcomes divided by the range of outcomes or the total outcomes possible. And one of the interesting things I found when I was first introduced to learning about probability at school was, Well, although you may not have the answer to what the probability was, you do have the inverse probability.
[21:39 - 22:00] Andreas : What was the inverse probability that it didn come from organic search And from there you could probably work out what was the probability it didn come from organic search and therefore from the total you could work out the probability the ROI came from search and that's how I would that's how we are going about doing it for our clients
[22:00 - 22:24] Lindsie: that's interesting interesting way to kind of look at it and like I'm sure there's a lot of marketers that may be listening out there, you don't have to be scared about probability and numbers. Like it's all important. I feel like sometimes analytics and all of these pieces of tracking gets overwhelming and inundating to be able to do this if you've never done it before.
[22:24 - 22:36] Lindsie: One, work with good partners that can help you through it, but also it's not as scary as it sounds. And it is possible for people to kind of learn and explore this.[22:36 - 22:47] Andreas : It's definitely possible because the data is there. For example, you do have linked ROI through ROAS on paid social, paid search and other paid media.
[22:47 - 23:02] Andreas : You do have that direct link between other channels. So therefore, that leaves you with a degree of confidence and the low margin of error of what organic search is contributing from an ROI standpoint.
[23:03 - 23:28] Andreas : And again, this is arithmetic. this is not you know it's not a furrier transformation or differential equations or stuff used in rocket science or spacex this is stuff that is arithmetic right it's just really what it comes down to is you know inverse desired outcome divided by range of out total outcomes so we're good we can do it we got it we can do it we can do it marketers
[23:28 - 23:38] Ximena: and I think I can do it. There you go. There you go. So we have the ROI data linked.[23:38 - 23:50] Ximena: We more or less know of our attribution model set up. How do we use this data to present it to leadership in a way that we get buy-in to do the strategies that we want to do for SEO?
[23:51 - 24:02] Lindsie: I mean, I think the number one thing is what that return on investment is. And if we can set up, you kind of said that like, OK, we have it all done.
[24:02 - 24:24] Lindsie: Well, that's the hardest part, right, is having all that done. And if we can have that attribution build out, we can have those dots tied together. Again, at least in a strong argument of probability, getting that money is a whole lot easier when you can say, hey, if we invest X, the return is Y within X margin of error.
[24:24 - 24:38] Lindsie: Right. If we can give that and then track against that and be responsible for that information and reporting that out. I think it's hard to say no when you have that information.
[24:38 - 24:47] Lindsie: The hardest part is getting there and being confident in saying it and saying you're going to actually achieve that and track against it.
[24:47 - 25:30] Andreas : 100% and I think this comes to a point earlier about benchmarking when you're benchmarking across different sectors it means you've got a lot more sensitivity analysis as to what those range of outcomes could be when it comes to presenting an ROI and since we're talking about strategy it has to be presented against alternative options A to do it, A to not do it and what the alternative channels It reminds me of marketing mix modeling, which for the next dollar, which is the next channel that unlocks the most return relative to other channels?
[25:30 - 25:45] Ximena: We're nearing towards the end of our recording, but I think I'm going to ask a question that could be a whole other episode. So stay tuned for that. But I think we could tease a little bit about what can we do beyond search?
[25:45 - 25:56] Ximena: It used to be that SEO, you know, was very focused on just Google. But now we're pulling from blogs, from, you know, videos, from TikTok, from other podcasts like this one.
[25:56 - 26:06] Ximena: So, you know, what can we do? Should we be tapping into the broader ecosystem? Should we be staying more in Google's lane?
[26:07 - 26:08] Ximena: What do you guys think?
[26:08 - 26:22] Lindsie: I mean, if you're staying in Google's lane, you're going to fail at this point. I think that that is, it's becoming the most antiquated way to look at SEO is that we are working and we're shipping at the foot of Google.
[26:22 - 26:35] Lindsie: If we do that, we're going to fail. And so I do think that this is a whole broader conversation, but SEO cannot just be a single channel anymore of, and really I say SEO and I mean organic search.
[26:35 - 26:45] Lindsie: And that encompasses like what's happening in LLMs, what's happening in all these other places. and we have to consider all the inputs and not just a single input anymore.
[26:46 - 27:01] Andreas : Yeah, I think we've shifted from a ranking where there'll be lots of winners, some winners, no winners, whereas now it's win or lose with AI results.[27:01 - 27:12] Andreas : And the good news is if you can crush AI search, you can absolutely crush Google. and crush it in Google rather than crush Google.
[27:12 - 27:23] Andreas : You can absolutely crush it in Google and Bing. But that will require an extra level of resources.
[27:23 - 27:55] Andreas : It's not enough to produce content just for search. It's got to be something you would be seen alongside with sharing in your personal social channels, something that you would be proud to present to a journalist or an editor or to get people sharing it's got to be a lot more you know it can't be what is ransomware recovery um it's got to be something the world hasn't seen before to take that information gain tick box okay well lindsie.
[27:55 - 28:23] Ximena: andreas thank you so much for coming back and help us rethink about how we measure success in this new era of A-powered Serial Click Search. This is the part two of our AI and Search series, and we're just getting started. So if you're listening and want to help shape future topics, please send us your questions, your wins, and we want to hear it all so that we can continue shaping these episodes so that they work for you and all the questions that you have about SEO and AI.
[28:23 - 28:37] Ximena: So thanks, everyone, for turning into Performance Delivered. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe and leave us a review in your favorite podcast app and to learn more about Symphonic Digital, visit us at SymphonicDigital.com or an X at Symphonic HQ.
[28:38 - 28:41] Ximena: See you next time. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks.
[28:44 - 28:55]: Performance Delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital. Discover audience-focused and data-driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses at SymphonicDigital.com.
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