If you’re seeing fewer clicks from search, you’re not imagining it.
Traffic is down for a lot of teams. Dashboards are completed but it’s harder than it used to be to point to a clean line between effort and outcome.
Most of the conversation right now falls into two camps. Either “SEO is dead” or “nothing’s changed, just adapt your tactics”.
Neither is especially helpful when you’re the one who has to decide what to do next.
Because lower clicks aren’t the real problem. They’re just the first visible symptom.
What’s really changed beneath the surface
People are still learning, comparing, and forming opinions. They’re just doing more of it before they ever click.
Search results now answer questions directly. AI summaries collapse options. Social feeds do more of the early shaping.
Which means influence often happens without a site visit, without a tracked session, and without anything neat showing up in analytics.
That doesn’t mean your marketing stopped working. It means the signals you relied on no longer tell the full story.
This isn’t just anecdotal.
Independent research from SparkToro has been tracking this shift for years, showing that a growing share of searches now resolve without a website visit at all.
That matters less as an SEO problem, and more because it quietly breaks the link between visibility and confidence.
When learning happens without clicks, traffic stops being a reliable explanation for whether marketing is truly working.
Why this feels more destabilising than it should
For years, clicks quietly did a lot of ‘results’ work inside organisations.
They stood for progress.
They felt like reassurance.
They acted as proof that something was landing.
So when clicks fall, it doesn’t just create a reporting issue. It creates a confidence problem about what to do next.
Suddenly the usual signals don’t help you decide. And when decision confidence drops, pressure rises.
The instinctive response is understandable, but risky
When teams see declining clicks, the instinct is to act.
Change tactics. Add more activity and content. Try something new. Move faster. (hello burnout).
It feels responsible. It feels proactive.
But in a zero-click environment, this is often where things start to drift. Because you’re intervening before you fully understand what’s actually happening.
You end up fixing symptoms rather than causes.
This is a decision problem, not a performance one
Lower clicks don’t automatically mean lower impact. They mean impact is harder to see.
That’s a very different problem.
It requires interpretation rather than optimisation. Judgement rather than volume. Clarity rather than speed.
Which is why the real question at this moment isn’t “what should we do next?”
It’s “do we really understand what’s working, what’s being remembered, and what keeps getting rebuilt from scratch?”
Without answering that, every new action is based on assumption. And assumptions are expensive.
In my work, I see this most clearly when teams come to me, because clicks are down but confidence in what to do next has dropped even faster.
Where a pause becomes the smartest move
This is usually the point where some teams stop pushing execution and pause instead.
Not to optimise channels. Not to redesign strategy. Not to add more noise.
But to run a PRES Audit.
A PRES Audit isn’t about fixing performance. It’s about understanding whether your marketing is learning, being remembered, and translating into confident decisions.
It looks at:
what parts of your marketing system are compounding
where effort is being rebuilt instead of reused
which signals genuinely support decisions, and which create noise
Teams tend to run a PRES Audit when they feel pressure to act, but don’t trust the explanation they’re acting on.
It slows the moment down just enough to avoid fixing the wrong thing next.
What zero-click really removed
Zero-click didn’t remove influence.
It removed the illusion that clicks were the same thing as impact.
And when that realisation drops, the answer isn’t to work harder inside it. It’s to make decisions from a clearer understanding of what’s going on underneath.
If clicks are down and you’re feeling the pressure to “do something”, this is usually the moment to pause before you move.
Because clarity, at this stage, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what stops you making the wrong call next.
Caroline Thomas helps leadership teams understand why marketing looks busy but underperforms, and how to tell whether it’s learning and compounding to be as efficient as possible.
