B2B and DTC marketers find themselves on the zero-click search frontline

Consider the case of business travel company Amex GBT. To date, according to CMO Alisa Copeman, it’s relied heavily on paid search as a means of drumming up leads. Its customers — companies needing to arrange travel for staff on a regular basis — often do their research before committing, inevitably using search. “We have a buying journey that is very lengthy,” said Copeman.

As such, the viability of that customer path is now under question. “We need to evolve, as with everybody else, our search strategy,” she said.

The tide’s coming in, and marketers like Copeman are already up to their knees.

At B2B commerce SaaS firm Commercetools, CMO Jen Jones told Digiday that the company’s click-through-rate (CTR) had declined 20% from November 2024 owing to Google’s AI Overviews (the firm rolled out a core update that month). Reduced traffic was now the “new normal,” said Jones. Conversions held steady, however, indicating that the customers lost to zero-click results were those at the earliest stage of the sales process — and that the marketing funnel for search-reliant brands is fundamentally altered.

Zero click search is “totally collapsing the user journey,” said Geert Eichhorn, executive innovation director at Monks. And actions that secure an advertiser’s place in search rankings (whether within the black-box AI-generated results, or the squeezed organic search results) are becoming “existential” as a result, he added.

Though they must navigate a different customer journey than B2B peers, DTC marketers are also on the hook. They spend up to 20% of their media budgets on paid search, according to a 2024 industry survey, more than any other paid media channel. And they’re keeping an eye on rising AI search usage among consumers; a Capgemini Research Institute study published in January estimated that 58% of consumers had replaced “traditional” search engines (like Google or Bing) with AI tools of one flavor or another, while 35.8% of Americans now use ChatGPT on a regular basis according to eMarketer.

Nicole Penn, chief exec at indie full service agency EGC Group, which works with a number of DTC firms, said several of her clients had seen impacts upon both paid and organic search performance, depending on their category and target consumer. In some cases, Penn said that DTC clients pursuing consumers aged below 30 had seen CTR on paid search ads drop 5%, and organic search CTR drop 20% this year. She didn’t name specific clients.

To be clear, clients aren’t panicking. Mark Barker, co-founder at Craft & Commerce, a media agency that works with several DTC and challenger brands, told Digiday the situation warranted a “yellow” alert rather than red.

Still, Penn said that guiding their response to AI search was set to be a “big focus” of EGC’s work in the second half of the year. She said the agency had tried a number of adaptations for clients, including bidding less on “long tail keywords”, search queries which are more likely to prompt an AI Overview to trigger in Google, and more on narrower keyword searches.

Sam Piliero, founder of The Moonlighters, a performance agency working with DTC firms and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), said his agency has been engaging in similar exercises to “cut the fat out of your search terms.”

EGC Group’s also been “tweaking” the copy its clients run in paid search ads, to ensure it fits the context of a search for a product or service. And for organic search, it’s been focusing on increasing clients’ earned media exposure; due to the weighting that large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini give to information gleaned from media owners and news sites, she said, press coverage of a brand is taking on renewed importance.

Commercetools’ in-house marketing team overhauled the way the company’s website was structured, as well as the wording of its marketing copy and how individual pages were tagged, all in the hope of better influencing information held about the firm by LLMs and reproduced for AI-assisted user searches, explained Jones. She said the team was now measuring its success with new metrics, monitoring its “share of model” (the quantity of AI search mentions of the firm) and Google Analytics’ assisted conversions metric alongside CTR.

In some cases, such overhauls mean significantly bulking a brand’s web presence. Kamanasish Kundu, svp and head of digital and ecommerce at jewellery retailer Kendra Scott, told Digiday that the brand had added 8,000 new pages to its site since last June to induce better organic search performance.

“We are watching the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery very closely,” said Kundu. “That changes how we think about visibility conversion, even the role of our website.”

The pages (themselves created with generative AI, in partnership with startup Optiversal) collated products based on themes that might tally with long-tail search queries, rather than queries for specific Kendra Scott pieces. Kundu said that 27% of the pages now appeared on the first results page on Google searches, and that 5% of Kendra Scott’s annual web traffic now arrived via one of the AI-generated webpages.

At Amex GBT, Copeman said the brand was working with agency Droga5 London to review its SEO approach. Its paid search budget would be held steady while its team decides upon an updated approach, she said. “We still maintain a consistent level of investment in the channel. But we are also then wanting to see what else we can be doing, so that we’re not as reliant on it from a performance perspective,” explained Copeman.

One longer-term response among DTC and B2B marketers might be to turn toward brand-building channels. Changing search behaviors were one of the factors spurring on a brand awareness campaign launched by Amex GBT in April, utilizing TV, paid social, YouTube, experiential and OOH spend. (Copeman didn’t share the campaign’s budget.)

According to Copeman, the hope is that by “spreading the net wider” and boosting the business travel firm’s brand, it can broaden the moat between itself and its competitors. It’s the kind of brief that performance channels would already have been ill-suited for, but one made more urgent by the emergence of AI search.