Agencies are racing to offer zero-click analysis tools, but monetizing them isn’t easy

Software tools and solutions purporting to solve CMOs’ zero-click concerns have proliferated in the last 12 months, from Jellyfish’s Share of Model platform to SEO firms Ahrefs and Semrush, or AI startups like Profound to WPP’s Generative UI venture, built via a partnership with Google. While some businesses have incorporated them into their existing service packages, others have hung considerable price tags on the side; Jellyfish’s Share of Model tool had an annual floor price of $72,000 when it launched last year.

“They seem to be popping up every 10 minutes,” said AJ Ghergrich, global vp of AI at search analytics firm Botify which, as it happens, released its own AI visibility tool earlier this month.

Monetizing those tools is another challenge, however. Consider the case of Benjamin Houy, an app publisher based in London who spun up a zero-click monitoring tool of his own, Lorelight, in May as a project on the side of his main business.

Houy said the tool attracted attention from several brands and PR agencies in France in those months, although he didn’t name the clients. “On a superficial level it was doing great, with huge companies interested,” he said. But early attention didn’t translate into a sustainable business. 

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The problem? For a brand to remedy its zero-click search performance, it needs to improve either on brand awareness or earned media exposure, priorities advertisers already constantly work to address. That realization led clients to stop using the tool after their initial trials, presenting Houy with a critical churn problem. “They basically wanted a secret hack that would suddenly allow them to rank in ChatGPT,” he explained. Lorelight’s pricing model offered access to the tool for as little as $99 a month, ranging up to almost $69,000 a year for enterprise usage. “At the end of the day, they were doing the same thing they were doing before the [Lorelight] insights. There was no behavior change… Why pay for it?”

In response, Houy decided to call it a day on Lorelight; he shut down the business at the end of October.

Houy’s experience highlights a key challenge facing marketing agencies as they look to solve for clients’ zero-click questions. Tools like Lorelight can give them a window into the workings of ChatGPT or Gemini, but the remedies for those problems are the same advice agencies have been offering for decades. Clients need more insight, if they’re to shell out.

Some companies hope greater specialization will bulk out the value added by their solutions. Jellyfish, for example, recently debuted a tool called Agent Shopper, which aims to track how AI commerce agents like Amazon’s Rufus interact with client websites. It’s part of the broader Share of Model suite the company developed late 2024. The firm developed it in response to consumers’ increasing comfort with using AI search tools for shopping asks, said Natasha Wallace, chief solutions officer at Jellyfish.

“It’s such a competitive, costly environment, so [clients] want to know very quickly where they need to prioritize paid investment and resources for content optimization so that they can have the biggest impact,” said Wallace.

The idea is to help keep clients stay one step ahead of tools like Rufus (projected to generate $10 billion in annual incremental sales) and the solutions released by Google (including an agentic checkout feature) earlier this month. Clients need continuous monitoring, Wallace said, because AI agents are a moving target.

“We don’t just want to benchmark whether you’ve been successful, we want to understand the overall influences that are changing how agents go about their shopping journey,” she added. Jellyfish isn’t alone. Profound, for example, last week launched a Shopping Analysis tool that operates along similar lines.

The race between marketing services groups to bring tech monitoring tools to market is playing out as major players like WPP and Publicis Groupe attempt to stand up SaaS businesses of their own. 

The former released a creative and media platform intended for small business advertisers back in October.

Digitas is offering Model Sight either as standalone software or in a package with GEO-dedicated consulting hours; Seith Hassan declined to share pricing details or the number of clients using Model Sight.

The product took approximately a year of development, and incorporates an ongoing partnership with researchers at University College London. 

Seith Hassan said Model Sight’s depth, and the constantly changing environment it surveys, makes such a tool essential for clients — but noted that Digitas may change the way it charges for the tool down the line. The holding company’s flirtation with SaaS isn’t set in stone.

“How agencies and consultancies deliver AI projects is still a big ‘to be determined’,” she said.