Content used to be pretty simple — publish something useful, get found through search, get people to visit your site.
But some six in ten Google searches are no longer clicking through to websites. Now that Google is showing AI summaries, people click through even less.
That means the work of content has changed — and may no longer be about traffic.
We have had a version of this argument before.
For years, we argued that newsletters should carry the full text of articles rather than just headlines and links.
Marketing usually pushed back — they want click-throughs they can track — and marketing usually won and got their attribution reports.
But by optimising for a measurable action instead of audience value, they also trained readers that corporate newsletters weren’t worth opening.
Zero-click search is a bigger version of the same argument.
The trick is figuring exactly where the value is — if a reader gets useful information in an email and doesn’t ever visit your website, is that really a failure?
People still have questions and your organisation still needs to be a source of answers.
It’s just that now the answer is being assembled by an AI before anyone reaches your website.
That changes what good content looks like.
Now, content has to directly answer questions and be clear enough to survive being summarised.
This is not SEO or AI-EO or whatever acronym is being used this week.
It’s just editorial work staying true to its craft: what are people actually asking? What answer do we want to be known for? What is the cleanest version of that answer? What evidence makes it credible? Where does it need to live so it can be found and reused?
Some organisations are responding to the traffic decline by shifting from articles to video. That makes sense — YouTube in particular is highly visible in Google’s AI Overviews, and video can carry tone and personality in a way text often cannot.
But video still needs a written layer around it to be found, understood and shared.
Newspapers used to call this having multiple points of entry on each page — captions, breakout boxes, pull quotes and sidebars as well as the story.
It recognises that audiences need more than one way in.
So the best answer is not to give up on content just because your traffic is down.
It is to make sure the content is doing a clearer job of answering the questions the audience is asking.