Traffic is a broken metric. So is usage. The spikes and dips that now characterize web analytics and reporting (driven by bots, AI crawlers, and a discovery ecosystem that increasingly answers questions without sending users to a site) have made the numbers we’ve long relied on as an industry unreliable as indicators of real value.

Beyond metrics, the publisher/journal site has been so much more than a content delivery mechanism — it’s where publishers communicate brand value and market positioning to authors, readers, and the broader scholarly ecosystem. So if no one’s going to the website, where does that leave your brand?

There’s been a lot of hand wringing recently over the effects of zero-click search (myself included, as evidenced by the forthcoming Platform Strategies session, “What’s your strategy if there is no platform?”), and though this does represent a seismic shift in the way that we’ve measured and communicated value in the past, I think in many ways it makes organizational brand more important than ever. Yes, we need to understand this trend so we can map the path forward, but as a marketer, in this moment it also presents a huge opportunity.

AI as Filter, Not Blocker

The crocodile effect (where appearance in AI search results rise while actual clicks drop) is very real, with some publishers reporting drops of up to 30% in web traffic in recent months. At the same time, there’s been evidence that users who click through from AI tools can have up to 30% higher engagement rates. So what if this shift is less about losing traffic and more about filtering it? What if the audience arriving at your site has been pre-qualified by the discovery mechanism itself? How does that change the way we think about our brand?

The researchers who click through from an AI response to a journal article were likely always going to click through to the version of record. They want to validate their sources. They understand what peer review means and they care about where research comes from. In other words, the audience that zero-click search is routing to your site is the high-intent, high-trust audience that every publisher should be building for anyway. This doesn’t make the traffic loss inconsequential — there are real downstream implications for discoverability and communicating the value of subscriptions — but it does argue for shifting the question from “how do we get traffic back?” to “how do we serve this filtered audience exceptionally well?”

The reports of marketing’s death are greatly exaggerated

Early on, marketing was widely predicted to be among the areas most disrupted by AI. But much to my delight, recent trends are showing the pendulum swinging in the other direction. Audiences are experiencing AI fatigue over the waves of content that all sound the same, all structured the same way, all optimized to the same algorithmic preferences. Anecdotal evidence and recent research point to this sentiment creating a renewed appetite for something that feels authentic and grounded in human experience. Turns out, the human is now becoming the premium. (Insert sigh of relief.)

Content written with an actual voice by an actual person, events that connect people to one another, and recommendations that feel curated rather than generated are becoming differentiators.

Beyond the organizational or journal brands you’ve carefully developed, this shift creates an opportunity for the personal brands behind the work. The voices of the publishers, the editors, and the authors are an extension of your organizational brand, and increasingly they’re how your brand reaches audiences at all. The algorithmic suppression of organizational profiles on LinkedIn and other social channels means that reach increasingly flows through individuals.

So what does it look like to invest in this as a strategy? To intentionally activate those people as brand extensions in a way that’s authentic rather than perfunctory? Activating individuals as thought leaders is a marketing function now, whether or not they’re sitting inside the marketing org (and don’t get me started on my soapbox that everything is marketing). Develop advocacy frameworks to support leaders and the broader organization in sharing key content so these efforts take root while staying both authentic and on-message. Seek out those who already enjoy things like thought leadership, social, or public speaking, and empower them with toolkits and amplification. It will go a long way.

First-party audiences as strategic moat

For years, marketers have worked the full funnel: attracting new audiences through SEO, social, ads, and more, while simultaneously deepening engagement with existing contracts through a variety of owned channels.

The flip side of zero-click is that publishers who have invested in strong direct channels are now sitting on genuinely scarce assets: direct email lists with high engagement, member portals with active communities, conference and event programs with loyal attendees. If you can’t count on search traffic, the one thing within your control is the direct relationships you have with your audience. This means doubling down on community building with those who are already engaged with you, particularly those who do click through to your site, having been pre-filtered by the various discovery mechanisms.

The organizations that have spent years building owned channels and nurturing their communities possess the kind of direct audience relationship that no algorithm change can disintermediate. Email in particular is having a quiet renaissance. A well-curated list of readers who have opted in to hear from you, who open your messages, who click through because the content is actually relevant to them, is a more valuable marketing asset right now than a strong organic search position, because it’s yours in a way that search traffic never was.

Rethinking what we measure

All of which brings us to measurement, and the phantom voice of your CFO asking about ROI. If traffic and usage are no longer reliable as measurements of success, how do we tell whether what we’re doing is working? Brand building takes years of consistent effort and even the best measurements can still feel largely vibes-based. Particularly in B2B marketing, however, brand building is absolutely crucial. The 95:5 rule means that the vast majority of potential buyers or subscribers aren’t in the market at any given moment, which means that the work you do today is building the credibility and familiarity that makes you jump to mind when they are. Trying to attribute that type of engagement to a single touchpoint is an exercise in futility.

But there are leading indicators, and you’re likely already collecting them: depth of engagement rather than breadth of visits, recurring engagement, multi-channel engagement, newsletter open rates, event attendance trends, and (real, verifiably human) social engagement.

What zero-click search essentially does is collapse the top of the funnel and the metrics that accompany it. It pre-filters down to the audience that was always most relevant. That doesn’t mean it’s not still painful to rebuild your measurements away from volume metrics and toward a collage of other indicators that paint a picture of your larger brand as it exists for your real, high-intent audience. (This is why marketers need support groups.)

What this means for the work

So what can marketers do to confront the zero-click future? Sure, we can continue work on SEO/AEO and try to maintain traffic coming in from general sources, but the challenge of how and whether content is cited in AI search is one that falls beyond the boundaries of just the marketing team.

For my money, marketing efforts are better spent deepening engagement with the audience that has already self-selected into your community. That means doubling down on thought leadership, on personalized engagement, on human-to-human touchpoints, on a better on-site experience. It means understanding and actively building your community. It means changing our metrics to look at engagement rather than the blunt object of traffic or usage. It means advocacy marketing and activating employees as an extension of your brand.

The zero-click future is still coming into focus, and researcher / user behavior has far from settled into a new normal. But maybe, just maybe, zero-click isn’t the doomsday knell it seems like? I’ll take quality over quantity any day. Obviously, yes, there are larger industry- and society-wide conversations that need to happen about trust and truth and data in all this, but from a marketing perspective, I’ll always prefer working closely with people who have opted in to engaging with us to give them the best and most useful experience possible than to try and shoehorn my message down the throats of those whose priorities and interests lie elsewhere.

Regardless, investing in your community and your brand is a choice that’s repeatedly proven disruption-resistant for an important reason: you own them.