17:51Caleb Ulku · Tutorial
TRAIN Any AI To Recommend You (This Study Proves How)
How an Anthropic study on 250 documents becoming part of AI memory became a local-business content strategy.
June 12thThe argument in one line.
Search, social feeds, and AI answer engines increasingly resolve a buyer's question without ever sending a click, so founders have to stop measuring traffic and start building a public record of proof, trust, and recall across every surface where buyers already form an opinion.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- An early-stage founder or marketer who has watched search or social traffic flatten or drop despite publishing consistently.
- Someone who has to justify marketing spend to a CFO or board with something more credible than raw traffic and click counts.
- A solo founder without a marketing team who wants a simple weekly content system instead of a 12-month SEO bet.
- Anyone building a content strategy who needs a way to show impact without clean, single-touch attribution.
SKIP IF…
- Your business genuinely sells CPM or display ads, where raw traffic is still the direct revenue metric.
- You want line-by-line copywriting or hook-writing tactics rather than a measurement and strategy framework.
The full version, fast.
Impressions keep rising across search, social, and AI tools while clicks keep falling, a pattern the speaker calls the alligator graph: 58.5% of Google searches now end with zero clicks, Facebook buries 97% of posts with outbound links, and platforms like Amazon and YouTube have no incentive to send visitors anywhere. Attribution is also unreliable, since cookies, ad blockers, multi-device journeys, and dark social hide most of the real path to a sale, as Dropbox's own blackout experiments showed when causal ROAS came in far below attributed ROAS. The fix is a five-part operating system: publish native, standalone-value content on the two or three platforms your audience already uses; keep email as the one channel you fully own; drop traffic as a KPI in favor of a four-layer audience/reach/interest/sales framework tracked as correlation, not attribution; treat the public record (reviews, forums, AI citations) as something you actively shape, not something that happens to you; and run content operations like a service with a defined client, job, and success metric for every asset.
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00:00 – 03:10
01 · The Alligator Graph
Cold open naming the shift from the old measurable-marketing playbook (optimize signals, buy traffic, attribute to revenue) to a world where impressions rise and clicks decline across every channel at once.
03:10 – 07:04
02 · Search Is Everywhere, Mostly Zero-Click
Search isn't dying, it's growing, but it's now a behavior spread across Google, Amazon, YouTube, and AI tools, and 58.5% of Google searches end without any click to the open web.
07:04 – 09:01
03 · Traffic Is Shrinking, Attention Is Concentrating
Ahrefs and Bloom data show real traffic decline even for sites actively trying to grow, Meta buries links on Facebook, and SimilarWeb's top-5,000 panel shows Google alone rivaling the next 13 biggest sites combined.
09:01 – 11:32
04 · This Is Your Homepage Now
The real first impression of a brand now happens in a Google snippet, a ChatGPT answer, or a stranger's social post, not on the company website; platforms that suppress links reward native, standalone-value content with roughly 10x the reach.
11:32 – 17:18
05 · Part II: The Death of Attribution
Cookies, ad blockers, multi-device journeys, and privacy law have already broken tracking; dark social hides most peer-to-peer traffic entirely; and Dropbox's own blackout experiments show attributed ROAS wildly overstating the real, causal impact of ad spend (includes a short MicroConf event sponsor break).
17:18 – 19:15
06 · #1 Build on Rented Land, #2 Keep Email Strong
The first two moves in the framework: publish native value on the platforms your specific audience already uses instead of only posting links, and keep email as the one channel where reach and open rates have stayed essentially flat for twenty years.
19:15 – 23:09
07 · #3 Drop Traffic as a KPI, Measure What Matters
Traffic and revenue diverge, as HubSpot's 80% traffic drop with record revenue shows; replace it with a four-layer framework (audience, reach, interest, sales) and a correlation dashboard that tracks leading indicators against business outcomes over time instead of chasing single-touch attribution.
23:09 – 26:34
08 · #4 Search Captures Demand, Public Evidence Creates It
The real buyer journey runs through a LinkedIn post, a podcast mention, a newsletter, and a Slack recommendation before someone ever Googles the brand name; Reddit already outranks most B2B SaaS vendors, and one agency corrected a false negative narrative in AI outputs by publishing real data.
26:34 – 29:00
09 · #5 Treat Content as a Service (CaaS)
Every asset should have a named internal client and a measurable job to do, from case studies for sales to how-to guides for customer success; a 10-field intake brief makes this operational so nothing ships without a defined success metric.
29:00 – 31:14
10 · The Founder's Weekly Loop, Algorithmic Capital
A five-step weekly loop (pick 2-3 channels, publish 1-2 zero-click assets, repurpose into other formats, capture demand, review monthly) reframed through a banking metaphor: standalone-value posts are deposits, direct asks are withdrawals, and the healthy ratio is roughly five deposits per withdrawal.
31:14 – 32:38
11 · The New Job of Marketing
Closing thesis: marketing's job is no longer just to drive the click, it's to create understanding, trust, recall, and preference wherever the buyer already spends time, followed by a newsletter and podcast plug.
32:38 – 38:11
12 · Q&A: Cadence, Personal vs. Brand, Video vs. Text, AI-Assisted Content
Live audience questions cover how often founders should post on LinkedIn (2-3x a week, not daily), personal profile versus company page, why text still outperforms embedded video for reach, and how to use AI as an editor without letting it write the copy itself.
38:11 – 39:00
13 · Outro
MicroConf event sign-off and plug for the next conference dates.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- 58.5% of Google searches now end without any click to the open web, splitting into 37.1% zero-result sessions and 21.4% that turn into another search.
- Of the clicks a Google search does produce, 70.5% go to organic results, 28.5% go to Google's own properties like YouTube and Maps, and only 1% go to paid ads.
- For every 1,000 US Google searches, only about 360 clicks reach any website outside Google, and every site on the internet is competing for that slice.
- Traditional search engines still account for 81% of all searches, with Google alone at 74%, while AI tools like ChatGPT sit at roughly 3% of search volume but are the fastest-growing slice.
- 97.3% of US Facebook post views from 2021-2025 went to updates with no outbound link, and Meta's own Business Suite has advised marketers to move links into the comments.
- SparkToro consistently sees about 10x the reach on posts with no link compared to posts with one, across Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.
- HubSpot's organic search traffic dropped 80% after Google's AI Overviews rollout, yet the company's Q4 2025 revenue hit an all-time high, proving traffic and revenue are not the same metric.
- In Dropbox's month-long ad blackout experiments, mobile ads showed a 1.53x attributed ROAS but only a 0.70x causal ROAS, meaning the ads were destroying value, not creating it; search ads looked healthy at roughly 2.0x attributed but were still underwater at 0.92x causal.
- After reallocating $25 million away from low-incrementality ad spend, Dropbox improved its portfolio LTV-to-CAC ratio by 53%.
- In a SparkToro experiment sending 1,100 visits across 11 social networks, 100% of traffic from TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and Mastodon showed up in Google Analytics as unlabeled direct traffic, along with 75% of Facebook Messenger traffic and 30% of Instagram DMs.
- Reddit outranks every individual vendor simultaneously on 50-66% of shared B2B SaaS keywords, and 77% of that search volume comes from plain category terms, not review or alternative-branded searches.
- One negative review theme about high account manager turnover surfaced 67 times across AI outputs like Perplexity and ChatGPT before the agency published real retention data and got LLMs to stop repeating it after just two citations.
- Email open rates have moved from 30% in 2005 to 34% in 2024, and click rates have held between 2-4% for twenty years, essentially unchanged despite two decades of predictions that email is dying.
- The recommended ratio for content is five zero-click value deposits for every one direct-ask withdrawal, treating audience trust like a bank balance you build before you spend it.
- Google alone gets roughly as many visits as the next 13 biggest sites on the internet combined, according to SimilarWeb's January 2026 panel of the top 5,000 sites.
Traffic is the wrong scoreboard for a zero-click internet.
WHAT TO LEARN
Most searches and feed views now resolve without a click, so the winning move is to publish standalone value where your audience already is, own your email list, and measure correlation with sales instead of chasing attribution that no longer works.
01The Alligator Graph
- Impressions are rising while clicks are falling across search, social, and AI answers at once, so a flat or declining traffic chart doesn't automatically mean your content or audience is shrinking.
- The old digital-marketing system optimized signals for rankings, links, and buyable traffic and measured everything against sign-ups, sales, and revenue; that tidy, CFO-legible system is what's now breaking down.
02Search Is Everywhere, Mostly Zero-Click
- Search itself isn't dying, it's fragmenting into Google, Amazon, YouTube, and AI tools, and every one of those surfaces has its own incentive to keep the visitor rather than send them to your site.
- 58.5% of Google searches end with zero clicks to any website, and of the clicks that do happen, only 1% go to paid ads, so buying your way to visibility is a shrinking lever.
03Traffic Is Shrinking, Attention Is Concentrating
- Traffic decline isn't a sign your content is bad; large publishers and heavily-resourced sites using tools like Ahrefs are losing traffic too, which means the whole channel is compressing, not just your strategy.
- Platforms actively suppress links; Facebook shows 97% of its views to posts with no outbound link, so content built to require a click is fighting the algorithm instead of working with it.
04This Is Your Homepage Now
- Treat every social post, forum reply, and public mention as a version of your homepage, since that's genuinely where most buyers form their first impression of you now, not your actual website.
- Standalone-value, no-link posts get roughly 10x the reach of link posts on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, so the click doesn't have to be the mechanism that delivers value.
05Part II: The Death of Attribution
- Attribution tooling is fundamentally broken: only ~30% of users accept cookies, up to 60% of tech-savvy visitors block analytics, people average 3.6 devices, and privacy law limits what's legal to track in most of the world.
- Dark social hides real traffic sources; a controlled test found 100% of traffic from TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and Mastodon was misreported as generic direct traffic in Google Analytics.
- Don't trust attributed ROAS at face value; Dropbox's own blackout experiments showed mobile ads with a 1.53x attributed return were actually destroying value at a 0.70x causal return once the channel was turned off and measured directly.
06#1 Build on Rented Land, #2 Keep Email Strong
- Pick two or three platforms based on where your specific audience actually pays attention, not where you wish they'd click, since no two companies' marketing mix should look the same even within the same category.
- Keep email as your one fully-owned channel; open and click rates have been essentially flat for twenty years despite two decades of predictions that email is dead, and no algorithm can suppress it.
07#3 Drop Traffic as a KPI, Measure What Matters
- Stop reporting on traffic as a primary KPI; HubSpot's organic traffic dropped 80% after AI Overviews rolled out while its revenue hit an all-time high in the same period, proving the two metrics can move in opposite directions.
- Replace attribution with correlation: track leading indicators like no-link post impressions, branded search volume, and email growth against business outcomes over time instead of trying to prove single-touch causality.
08#4 Search Captures Demand, Public Evidence Creates It
- Map the real buyer journey, which usually runs through a LinkedIn post, a podcast mention, a newsletter, and a peer recommendation in Slack before someone ever Googles your brand name and gets credited as 'organic search.'
- Reddit already outranks individual vendors on 50-66% of shared B2B SaaS keywords, meaning buyers are forming opinions in public forums before they ever reach a vendor's own site.
- AI systems can amplify a single negative data point into a repeated narrative; one review theme surfaced 67 times across AI outputs until the company published real data and corrected it within two citation cycles.
09#5 Treat Content as a Service (CaaS)
- If a proof point about your business only lives in Slack, a finance report, or someone's head, it isn't part of the public record, and if it isn't published, it isn't helping you get chosen.
- Give every piece of content a named internal client and a specific job to do; a case study serves sales with a win-rate metric, a how-to guide serves customer success with a ticket-deflection metric, and content without a defined job shouldn't ship.
10The Founder's Weekly Loop, Algorithmic Capital
- Run a simple weekly loop: pick your channels, publish one or two zero-click assets, repurpose each idea into other formats, capture the demand it generates, and review the correlation dashboard monthly.
- Think of standalone-value content as a deposit and every direct ask as a withdrawal, aiming for roughly five deposits per withdrawal so you're earning attention before you spend it.
11The New Job of Marketing
- The job of marketing has shifted from driving clicks to building understanding, trust, recall, and preference across every surface where your buyer already spends time, which is a slower but more durable form of growth.
12Q&A: Cadence, Personal vs. Brand, Video vs. Text, AI-Assisted Content
- Post on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week, not daily; the algorithm intentionally tamps down virality in favor of higher signal-to-noise, and posting twice within 18-24 hours can throttle your previous post.
- A personal profile will almost always out-engage a company page since people want to engage with people, so use the company page as the news feed of record and the personal page for point-of-view commentary.
- Text-only posts can outperform embedded video by 8-10x in reach on LinkedIn, so if you're intimidated by video or just starting out, text is the lower-friction way to get content out consistently.
- Use AI as an editor, not a writer; feed it a finished draft and ask it to poke holes or flag weak examples, but keep the actual copywriting and voice as your own, since AI-smoothed content trains you to forget what genuinely good writing looks like.
Terms worth knowing.
- Zero-click search
- A search where the user gets their answer directly on the results page or in an AI response and never clicks through to any website.
- Causal ROAS
- The actual incremental return an ad channel produces, measured by turning the channel off and comparing sales to a normal period, as opposed to attributed ROAS which just counts touches before a sale.
- Dark social
- Traffic shared through private channels like DMs, Slack, WhatsApp, or Discord that analytics tools can't trace back to a source and instead log as generic direct traffic.
- Algorithmic capital
- The accumulated goodwill and trust a brand builds with an audience and a platform's algorithm by consistently publishing standalone value before ever asking for something in return.
- Content as a Service (CaaS)
- An operating model where every piece of content is treated like an internal service request, with a defined client team, job to be done, audience, and success metric before it gets made.
- Public record
- The sum of reviews, forum threads, third-party mentions, and search snippets that AI systems and human buyers draw on to form an opinion of a brand before ever visiting its website.
Things they pointed at.
03:10linkState of Search Q4 2025 report (Datos and SparkToro)
06:05toolAhrefs global traffic panel
07:04linkBloom's organic traffic paradox analysis
08:02toolSimilarWeb global panel, January 2026
14:52linkDropbox causal ROAS study (IEEE Access)
19:44productHubSpot traffic-drop/revenue example
21:40productDream Data employee advocacy program
24:07linkRoss Simmons / Foundation Inc Reddit ranking study
25:35linkWill Reynolds / Sear Interactive AI narrative case study
31:52channelAmanda Natividad's newsletter and Zero-Click Marketing podcast
Lines you could clip.
01:00
“The core problem now isn't that nobody sees your marketing, it's that more people see it, but fewer of them click.”
09:40
“This is your homepage now. A Google search result.”
14:52
“That means that their own mobile ads were literally destroying value, not creating it.”
23:09
“Search captures demand, but the public evidence creates it.”
26:04
“If your strongest proof points are tracked in Slack, in your finance reports, or they're in your head, then they're not part of the public record. And if they're not published, they're not helping you.”
28:01
“Stop optimizing for output. Start optimizing for outcomes. Content isn't a vending machine, it's a service.”
31:14
“The job of marketing is no longer just to drive the click. It's to create understanding, trust, recall, and preference wherever your buyer already is.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
Today, I want to talk about a problem that I think every founder in this room is feeling but might not have the words for yet.
You keep hearing that content compounds, SEO is a long game, and that if you just keep publishing, the traffic will come.
But if search sends fewer clicks, social media suppresses links, and AI answers your prospect's question before they ever reach your site, and more on that later, you can't just publish content and hope for the best.
So I'll show you what's actually happening on the web, why the old playbook is broken, and what you can do about it starting next week or when you whenever you get back to your desk. So I will start by painting a picture of the world that we all grew up in as digital marketers.
So for years, digital marketing's superpower was supposed to be measurability. For search engines, right, we would optimize signals, get rankings and clicks.
For social networks, you know, we used to post links to draw traffic. For, you know, news media and blogs, we'd pitch coverage to get links and traffic. For ad networks, we would just buy the traffic.
Now you measured all of it with traffic plus attribution to sign ups, sales, and revenue.
The squishy stuff like impressions, share of voice, that was for the channels where you couldn't really get credit.
Right? This was this was a tidy system. It was predictable, legible to your CFO.
But here's the problem now. We call this .
Impressions rise, clicks decline. The jaws keep opening.
The core problem now isn't that nobody sees your marketing, it's that more people see it, but fewer of them click. So if this looks like your Google search console, you're not alone.
So this is from the Financial Times. Right? Conde Nast CEO says, you know, well, major publishers are seeing the same trend.
Right? Impressions up, clicks down, across the board.
This is a structural shift in how the Internet works now, and it's not a problem with your content. So you might be thinking, well, search is dying and everyone is using ChediG and maybe this particular problem doesn't matter.
But search is not dying. In fact, it keeps growing.
So this is this is from the state of search q four twenty twenty five report by Datos and Sparktoro, my company.
So since about this time last year, traditional search, AI tools, and ecommerce search have all grown.
But and this is this is the important part. A bigger share of searches now end without a click.
The pie is getting bigger, but the slice that reaches your website is getting smaller.
And that changes what winning looks like. And when we say search, right, most of us picture Google, but search is now a behavior.
It's not a channel, and it's happening everywhere. Right? Traditional search engines still dominate, right, about 81 of all searches.
Google alone is, like, 74%. But look at the rest. Commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay, it's, like, 10%.
Right? Social networks like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, 5%. AI tools like ChatGPT and Clot, it's about 3% and scoring fast.
So that means roughly one in five searches is happening somewhere other than a traditional search engine.
And on every single one of these platforms, that zero click problem applies. Amazon doesn't wanna send you traffic.
Why would it? Right? They want you to buy in the platform.
YouTube doesn't want people to leave. So when I say zero click problem, I'm not just talking about Google.
I'm talking about everywhere people go to find answers. And when they do search Google, by the way, here's what actually happens. So in 2024 or yeah.
We looked at at over at SparkToro and at Datos, we looked at the clickstream data of 2024. We found what happened after American search on Google.
So out of every Google search, 41.5% resulted in one or more clicks. K?
Thirty seven point one percent resulted in nothing. The browser session just ended. The person googled, how old is Paul Rudd?
57. Can't believe it. He looks so young.
They don't need to learn more. Right? Twenty one point four percent resulted in another search.
But that means that fifty eight point five percent of all Google searches are zero click searches.
And so of the clicks that do happen, that 41.5% column there, 70.5% go to organic results, 28.5% go to Google owned properties like YouTube, maps, Google images, and just 1% goes to paid ads.
So put another way, for every 1,000 US Google searches, only 360 clicks went to the open web.
That's you and me, Bessie. That's us. Those are our websites.
Everyone in this room is competing for 360 clicks out of 1,000. And the traffic that does make it through, unfortunately, it's shrinking.
So this is from HREF's global traffic panel of nearly 75,000 websites. I think the good ish news is that traffic to these sites dropped only about 5% in the last eighteen months.
Paid and direct seem to be making up for some of the losses in search and social. But here's the thing. Pretty much all these websites are trying to grow their traffic.
Right? A lot of them have marketing teams using Ahrefs. So if these sites that are trying are losing traffic, imagine what's happening to everyone else.
Here's another angle. Same story. Now this is Bloom's analysis.
Zero click searches keep climbing. AI overviews have doubled, traffic is down 10%, meanwhile searches are up 15%, and somehow search is still the largest traffic referrer.
More searching, less clicking. That is the world we live in now. And it's not just search.
Right? This is Meta too. Now this is Meta's own data.
I just made the chart. This is from their most widely viewed content reports. So from 2021 to 2025, ninety seven point three of all US post views on Facebook go to updates that do not include a link that sends people out.
Right? Facebook is burying posts with external links. Their own meta business suite, they started advising business accounts to put links in the comments.
Yeah. My friend here is nodding. Yeah.
It did that. And here we thought that was just what the LinkedIn bros did. Right?
Link in comments. The platforms don't wanna send you traffic. They wanna keep people on platform.
So let me zoom out and show you what the rest of the web looks like. So this one is from SimilarWeb's global panel in January 2026.
Right? At SparkToro, we looked at the top 5,000 most visited websites on the web and grouped them into five buckets.
Google alone, that's the first bucket. They get roughly as many visits as the next 13 sites combined.
Those next 13 sites are like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X, Reddit, Wikipedia. All of them together roughly equal Google.
Then the third category, it's about a 170 more sites, and then about 1,300, and then the remaining 3,500 sites.
The concentration at the top is staggering. And most of us, we're in the bottom tier. Here's another way to see it.
Same data. It's Google versus literally everyone you think is big online. And this is the playing field.
This is where your startup lives. Somewhere in that long tail competing for the scraps. So if the old game was optimized for traffic, we have to acknowledge that we're now competing for increasingly scarce attention from increasingly dominant platforms.
But here's what I actually want you to take away from this data. It's not that the web is dying. It's that your homepage has changed.
This is your homepage now. A Google search result. This is where people find the they form their first impression of you.
It's not your beautifully designed website. Search snippet. This is also your homepage.
A chat GPT answer. Your prospect asks question, AI gives them the answer that may or may not mention you.
You didn't get a click. You didn't even get a visit. Your brand was either there or it wasn't.
Oh, and by the way, I saw our friend Cole from Formspree. I'm a customer.
I'm a customer via Claude. I I saw you in a Claude response.
I didn't go to your website. I mean, I did eventually to make my account, but I was just like, nope. Got it.
And Claude, I'm gonna become a customer. Right?
This is yeah. This is also your homepage. Right?
What you and your employees and your customers say about you on social media. Your founder's LinkedIn post about why you built the product, your customer's tweet about how you solve their problem. Right?
The point is your brand's first impression now happens across dozens of surfaces before anyone ever visits your.com.
Sorry, Cole, I have no idea what the forum spree website looks like. So you need to be present and credible on all these surfaces. That's the game now.
Our new zero click reality. Platforms suppress links because they want users to stay. Now, we at SparkToro, we consistently see about 10x the reach on posts that don't contain any links.
And this is true across Facebook, LinkedIn, x threads. Your content has to deliver value in the feed itself, not behind a click.
The new game is earning attention through resonance, not clickbait. And I'm not saying never share any links.
No. I'm saying don't make click your only mechanism of value.
We'll come back to this. Okay. So the web has changed, but there's a second problem that makes all of this even harder for startups, and it's about measurement.
For twenty five years, marketers convinced executives to invest in digital channels because unlike offline, we could precisely measure the ROI.
We trained our CEOs and our CFOs and our boards to believe that every conversion could be attributed to the channels and tactics in that buyer journey. That's over.
Here's why. Hey. Rob Walling here.
If you're watching this and thinking, I wish I could be in the room for talks like this, you can and you should. So much of the magic at our events happens in the hallway track. That's where you connect with two to 300 like minded founders who are trying to solve many of the same problems you are.
I hope you'll join us at our next event. Head to microconf.com/events to grab your ticket.
Our next one is in Iceland in September 2026, and then we'll be in Austin in April 2027.
Four reasons. I'll try to go fast. First, cookies.
Only about 30% of users accept cookies, and Safari rejects third party cookies by default. Your tracking's already missing most people.
Second, ads and analytics blockers. Somewhere between 2060% of browsers block analytics tracking entirely.
For tech savvy audiences, which I'm guessing is a lot of your customers here, it's my audience too, that's probably closer to 60%. Be honest here.
How many of you use an ad blocker? Yeah. Look at us.
We are the worst. We all do it. Third, multi device journeys.
There are about 3.6 devices per person worldwide. Forget about tracking individuals pre login across all those devices. Fourth, privacy regulation, GDPR, CCPA, LGPD.
What's possible and legal in The US is not legal most anywhere else. The compliance burden alone, that makes persistent tracking impractical for most of us here.
And that's before we even get to the really messy stuff like dark social. So last year, we ran an experiment at SparkToro.
We sent over 1,100 visits across 11 social networks and measured what Google Analytics reported. 100% of the traffic from TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and Mastodon, if you care, were reported as direct.
No referral information at all. So your analytics literally cannot see where those visitors are coming from. 75% of Facebook Messenger traffic was hidden, 30% of Instagram DMs, even LinkedIn hit it 14% of the time.
So if you have a Slack community, if people are sharing your stuff in WhatsApp, like in the microconf group here, if your product gets mentioned in Discord, you'll never see it in GA.
It just shows up as direct, and you have no idea what's working. And then there's the platforms themselves taking credit for the sales that they didn't create.
Now this is from a peer reviewed paper that was published in IEEE Access just last month.
This is the Dropbox study. Just curious. Who who knows about this study?
Oh, interesting. Breaking news. Okay.
So this is this is this couldn't have come at a better time. So Dropbox ran month long blackout experiments.
They turned off entire ad channels and measured what actually happened. So mobile advertising, this showed an attributed return on ad spend of 1.53.
Search engine marketing looked even better, about two x. And that actually this looks pretty healthy.
But when they measured the causal ROAS for mobile ads, it was point seven.
That means that their own mobile ads were literally destroying value, not creating it. It's not that dissimilar from their SEM performance.
Causal ROAS was point nine still underwater. Now that's the difference between a channel touching the sale and a channel actually creating the sale.
So when Dropbox, they they reallocated $25,000,000 away from low incrementality spend.
Their portfolio lifetime value to customer acquisition cost improved by 53%. Incredible. So this is a publicly traded company with rigorous methodology that attributed outcomes can overstate causal impact by two to 10 times.
Okay. So the web sends fewer clicks, the platforms keep the audience, and the measurement tools that we built our industry on are unreliable.
What do we do about it? This is the part where we talk about what we can do on Monday or whenever you get back to your desk.
Five things. Build on rented land. Yep.
I know for years we've been told, don't build on rented land. And I look. I get it.
Uh, my colleague, Rand He had over 462,000 Twitter followers built over sixteen years. I grew my account there to over a 130,000.
Then Elon Musk came along and you know the rest. I'm pretty salty about it. But here's the reality.
For every, like, one visitor to your website, a 100 people will get to know you on platforms that you don't control. That's where the attention is, and you have to be there.
Now what this means practically, practically, you need to publish native value on platforms where your audience you already pays attention.
Write posts that teach without requiring the click. And where you do this depends on your audience. Right?
Maybe it's LinkedIn, it's x, Reddit, YouTube. This is important. No two companies marketing mix should be the same even in the same sector.
Right? Because you have to figure out where your specific audience pays attention. Number two, keep one own channel strong.
And I would argue that that channel is email. Look at this data. Email open rates in 2005, 30%.
In 2024, 34%. Click rates have bounced around between 24% for twenty years.
Twenty years everyone's saying email is dead. Slack is going to kill email. Gen z doesn't use email.
But these stats are pretty much unchanged. Email is the one channel where you control the relationship. The algorithm can't suppress your reach.
The platform can't hide your content. I I mean, actually, you could get stuck in the Google promotions tab, which is not great, but hopefully, most of us are marketing to other business emails or maybe that's not as big of an issue.
I don't know. But you own the list. That's the point.
So, yes, build on rented land, but make sure every rented land effort feeds your email list.
Number three is about how you measure all this. Drop traffic as a KPI. Measure what matters.
Traffic can be a fine secondary metric, but it's a bad thing to optimize for unless you sell CPM ads. And I'm guessing most of us here don't sell CPM ads.
Here's one of my favorite examples. So HubSpot's organic search traffic dropped 80% after Google's algorithm updates and AI overviews rolled out.
This is the last year. 80%. It sounds catastrophic.
And yet, HubSpot's q four twenty twenty five revenue hit an all time high.
The stock jumped. Right? Traffic and revenue are not the same thing.
So if you're judging your marketing by traffic, you're measuring the wrong thing. So what do you measure instead?
Here's a framework. Across content platforms, search, social, and your website, track four layers, audience, followers, keyword volume, viewers, listeners, returning visitors.
Are you building an audience? Reach, impressions, visibility, views, minutes, email subscribers.
Are you being seen? Interest, engagements, product page views, comments, shares, branded search.
Are people engaging with you? And then sales, conversions and conversion rate. All the things above, these are all leading indicators that should eventually lead to sales.
Incremental sales lift, that is your primary KPI. Everything else should tell you whether you're on track.
Now you're thinking, how do I prove this to my board? Or how do I know it's working? You can't fully attribute, but you can correlate.
Track the leading indicators alongside business outcomes.
So here's a simplified example. Let's say your LinkedIn your LinkedIn impressions from no link posts went up 52% this month.
Okay? Well, did branded search volume go up? Did email subscribers grow?
Did demo requests increase? Right? You're looking for patterns over time, not single touch proof.
Did we did we do more of x this month, and did it did y go up? Right?
For us at SparkToro, we know that zero click social content for us is strongly correlated with sign ups over the next two to four weeks.
We can't attribute it in GA, but we can see the correlation clearly. Right? There's this other b to b SaaS company, Dream Data.
Right? This was maybe last year or two years ago, they started their employee advocacy program where employees were empowered to just post as thought leaders on LinkedIn.
They post about sales, you know, attribution, revenue, life at Dream Data. And since doing that, their number of demos booked increased by a lot.
Like, they don't they don't know, like, which post drove x amount of demo requests, but they know that this program has resulted in a lot more people reaching out to learn more about the product. So this is how you report to your board. And I think that this is a more honest way to do it.
It's more credible. And it also proves that your organic and brand teams are doing their jobs well. Alright.
Number four is the one that I'm most excited about. Remember that search captures demand, but the public evidence creates it.
This is so what I'm about to show you, this is a more realistic buyer journey that you're never going to see in analytics. Okay. Step one.
Someone sees your LinkedIn post. Then they hear you or your founder on a podcast. Then they read you in a newsletter mention.
Maybe a peer drops your name or your branded name in a Slack group. Then they Google your brand name and convert.
Google gets the credit because your analytics will say organic search, but steps one through four created the demand.
Google just captured it. So your job is not just to rank, it's to influence the public record.
Reviews, forums, discussions, search snippets, third party mentions, and the pages AI systems cite and summarize.
Because if you if you don't influence the public record, someone else will.
Okay. Two stories. First one, my friend Ross Simmons over at Foundation Inc, he analyzed b to b SaaS search results and found that Reddit outranked every vendor simultaneously on 50% to 66% of shared keywords.
77% of the search volume that Reddit won came from generic category keywords, so not best or review or alternative terms. And as queries got longer, Reddit's advantage grew even more.
So what does this mean for you? It means buyers are forming opinions in subreddits before they ever visit your website.
So if you're not part of that conversation, authentically, not spamming. Right?
You're invisible at the moment of decision. Second story. My friend Will Reynolds over at Sear Interactive.
He discovered that one negative review theme, it was high account high account manager turnover, that was surfacing 67 times in branded AI outputs.
Perplexity, ChatGPT, all of them are repeating it. And by the way, he's had his agency for, like, twenty four, twenty five years.
That was from one negative review, which at the time when he saw it years ago, he was like, oh, that's one person. But AI systems go deeper than humans do.
So AI treated that one data point as a trend and amplified it. Sucked. So what did SEER do about it?
They started publishing real employee retention data. And after just two citations, the LLMs stopped referencing the negative one.
Now I'll I'll admit that this wasn't super durable. Like, if they didn't refresh if they didn't refresh this data every, like, several weeks or so, LLMs would pick up the the old, like, negative review.
But the overall lesson is if your strongest proof points are tracked in Slack, in your finance reports, or they're in your head, then they're not part of the public record.
And if they're not published, they're not helping you. Number five, this is how we do it.
Treat content as a service. Right?
We're all SaaS cuties here. Hopefully, we like this, Cass. Now this is how I've run content teams across both b to b and b to c.
Every piece of content has a job to do and the client it serves. Case study, that's for sales. Success metric, win rate and cycle time.
A how to guide, that is for customer success. Metric, ticket deflection and feature adoption.
Benchmark report, that is for corporate comms and biz dev.
The metric is backlinks and speaking invites. If your content can't tell you what job it does and who it's it's not ready to ship.
So when I ran I used to run content over at Fitbit b to b. This shift was the real unlock. Because once we started doing that, sales started coming to us first instead of last.
And our output ended up going down because in having that tighter loop, we didn't have to create as much stuff, but impact went way up. There were like days, months where I only focused on creating case studies, which sounds kind of lame if you're a content marketer.
Right? But that ended up moving the needle a lot more because our biggest money came from enterprise accounts.
Enterprise accounts don't care about your how to blog post. Right? They want the case study that shows them that your product actually works.
So here's the intake form that's going to make this operational. Use this for every asset. 10 fields.
If you and your internal client can't fill this out, then you can't make the asset. Client team, so sales, CS, product, corporate comms.
Two, job to be done. Audience, so the role, the ideal customer profile, right, what stage they're at.
Number four, desired asset type, moment of use, desired action, you know, what you want your what you want the consumer to do.
Source material and subject matter experts. Success metric and target. Distribution plan.
Shelf life and refresh trigger. Right? This is a lot, but the point is this will help you optimize for actual business outcomes.
So if you can't do all this, you know, with your internal stakeholder, then you don't get to make the content. Now, let me tie all this together into something, you know, tightly actionable that you can start doing next week.
Here's a weekly loop. Five steps. One, pick two to three channels where your audience actually pays attention, not where you wish they would click, where they actually hang out.
Uh, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. You could probably create a Sparktoro account, um, that would tell you where your audience hangs out.
Anyway, step two, publish one to two zero click assets per week. Standalone value, no click required.
Three, repurpose each idea into multiple native formats.
So one insight, maybe it just starts with a LinkedIn post. Maybe you get some pretty decent engagement that causes you to think about other things.
So then you then flesh that out into a longer blog post. Then maybe you also repurpose that for your newsletter. And then maybe you also repurpose that for a podcast talking point.
Four, capture demand. Email sign up, branded search, demo request, direct traffic.
That's how you collect the value from all of that rented land activity. Five, review it monthly.
Look at your correlation dashboard. Repeat this weekly, review it monthly. Adjust channels quarterly.
This is something a founder with no marketing team can start doing on Monday. Now one more mental model before I close. Think of your content strategy as a .
Right? Every zero click post that delivers standalone value is a deposit.
You're building . Right?
Goodwill with the platform and trust with your audience. The insight, the data point, the story, the how to, the hot take, those are all algorithmic deposits.
And then every once in a while, you make a withdrawal. Subscribe to our newsletter. Book a demo.
Create a free account. That ratio is roughly five deposits for every one withdrawal. Earn the goodwill and then spend it wisely.
Don't make the click your only mechanism of value. Make the value obvious in feed.
Make the action obvious with the link. Let me leave you with this. The job of marketing is no longer just to drive the click.
It's to create understanding, trust, recall, and preference wherever your buyer already is.
The founders who embrace this early will grow faster because they will have started building influence across the services where their buyers actually spend time.
The companies that win will not be the ones clinging hardest to old attribution. They'll be the ones building influence across the modern discovery journey.
Alright. That's all I have. Best way to keep in touch is my newsletter.
QR code is there. I send it out every Tuesday, so you'll get tomorrow. That's where you'll also get updates on my zero click marketing podcast.
If you have any questions or want my slides or if you wanna send me hate mail, don't worry. I read them all.
You can email me at amanda@sparktoro.com. Is there too many calls to action on one slide? You have the cow rich children don't have shoes?
I apparently have too many shoes. So and I'm early.
So if you have questions
Amazing. The best marketer in the world, and she came to hang out with us. I love this for us.
The worst. And now I'm just gonna steal your shine because here I am with you all. Or wanna answer questions together?
No. We have time. But what I wanna know first, like, real quick because we only have time for three questions Okay.
Is when was the last time anyone in here, like, posted on LinkedIn as a founder? Like, within a week? This morning.
This morning? Of course. I mean, this Alex Boyd, everyone.
Uh, okay. It was, like, 10 people. So you need to be doing it all the time.
Right? Yeah. Cool.
Actually,
I have more to on this. Ideally, you'll be doing this, like, two or three times a week. I think people used to think, oh, LinkedIn, you gotta post twice a day.
No. Post less. Because LinkedIn, the way their algorithm works is they're trying to find they're trying to give the right content to the right person.
Like, they're trying they're kind of trying to tamp down virality in exchange for higher quality engagement.
And so part of that kinda means, like, high signal to noise. The other thing is if you post twice within, like, eighteen to twenty four hours, your previous post is going to get throttled.
So Yikes. You're if you're intimidated about LinkedIn, just think of it as, like, you only have to do it three times a week.
That's it. Yeah. And you signed up to do all of this.
Anyway, maybe now we only have time for two questions.
Uh, we have our question boxes. We have a question right there. Yeah.
Speaking of LinkedIn,
is it important or better to post as a person or as the business profile? Oh.
Which is most effective?
You know, it depends. Right? If if you are just looking for raw engagement, a person's page will always perform better.
Right? People want to engage with people, not brands. So the way I do it is I treat the company page as sort of like the news feed.
Everything the company does just goes on that page. And then my personal page is a little bit more of my perspective of that company news, if that if that kind of helps.
That way you kind of look at the company page as sort of the de facto, like, is the record of things. In your personal page, you don't announce everything. Right?
Like, you don't talk about every single blog post your company does, but it's a little bit more point of view led.
Nice. Who else we got? I got one here.
Okay.
Just a quick follow-up. Video or text?
Depends on the platform. Use the on the platform, like, the one that is video or text first.
Right? So, like, Instagram is probably going to prefer video and images.
LinkedIn, like I've been seeing that I mean, obviously, an embedded video will perform better than like a YouTube link.
But I will see that my reach on an embedded video is, like, 10 x lower or eight x lower than a text only post. So I would say, I think, especially if you're just getting started and you you just need to get it done, just do text because it's a lower barrier to entry.
Yeah.
Founders hate being on video. Has to be on video. The worst.
I hate it. Do we have one more? Do have one more?
Yes. Right here. Working on it.
Thank you, Justine.
Thank you. Do you have any recommendations on how to use AI to create content?
Like, I'm sure all of us here use it, but does it get deprioritized now by platforms, or is it more like people don't want to engage with that because it's built made by AI?
I I see it as I think the platforms are trying to be smarter about detecting what is and is not AI generated.
So I think it's like LinkedIn, for instance, they've been pretty big in talking about their algorithm is trying to reward high quality engagement.
And an AI seeming post that just kind of restates the post is not going to be deemed as high quality. So there's a little bit of that.
If you're asking too about, like, how do you create content or marketing stuff with AI, I would say with caution, but use it as an editor who can give you feedback.
Like, what I like to do is I'll give it like a finished a finished asset and be like, hey. Poke holes in this theory. Where do you think I need more examples?
Where do you think it gets confusing? And sometimes it'll point out like, actually, this is kind of weak. You need a you need a clearer example for this claim, stuff like that.
So I would say do that. But the copywriting itself is is you. Right?
Like Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
That's the big thing. I love that. I love that so much.
Yes. Yes. Copywriting has to be you.
I think the the dangerous thing is that if you start using AI to create good enough content, you're just going to forget what good actually is because it'll because it's supposed to please you.
Right? The LLMs are like, they're they're literally designed to give you the next, like, statistically likely word.
So it's supposed to look good. So it's important for me to maintain my voice and my IP and just use it as, like, hey.
Can you stress test this concept?
Thanks so much for saying that. I'll Venmo you later.
Also, hire Leanna if you need a copywriter. My god. What?
Where did they come from? The best copywriter
in the world, guys. Oh my She's here in the room with us.
This well, this has really worked out for me being up here. Can we give it up for Amanda one more time?
I've been running MicroCon for more than a decade, and the thing I hear from attendees more than anything else is I wish I'd come sooner, Not because of any single talk or tactic, but because they finally found their people. Founders who get it.
Founders who are building the same way they are. At our events, it's not just about the talks. In Portland, we organized waterfall hikes, food tours, happy hours, real time with other founders outside the sessions.
And those relationships don't end when the event does. They turn into the people you text when something breaks or when something finally works. If you've been thinking about coming, I hope you'll join us in Iceland and Austin.
Get your tickets at microconf.com/events. If you got something out of that talk, make sure you hit subscribe. We're putting out more of these every week.
And that wasn't the only great talk from Portland. Go watch this one next.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every founder has been told that content compounds and SEO is a long game, but the speaker opens by naming what's actually happening underneath that advice: impressions keep climbing while clicks keep falling, across search, social, and now AI answers.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:07model
What Happens After a Google Search
- 41.5% one or more clicks
- 37.1% nothing (session ends)
- 21.4% another search
SparkToro/Datos 2024 clickstream analysis showing 58.5% of Google searches are effectively zero-click, and of the 41.5% that do click, 70.5% go organic, 28.5% go to Google-owned properties, and 1% go to paid ads.
Steal forreframing a client or board conversation about why raw search traffic is the wrong KPI
08:02model
Five Groups of Sites
- Google alone
- Next ~13 mega-platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X, Reddit, Wikipedia)
- ~170 mid sites
- ~1,300 sites
- ~3,500 long-tail sites
SimilarWeb's January 2026 panel of the top 5,000 visited sites, bucketed by traffic concentration; Google alone equals roughly the next 13 biggest platforms combined, and most companies live in the long tail.
Steal forexplaining to a team why they're not losing to one competitor, they're losing to platform concentration
16:38list
Five-Step Zero-Click Framework
- Build on rented land
- Keep one owned channel strong (email)
- Drop traffic as a KPI, measure what matters
- Search captures demand, public evidence creates it
- Treat content as a service (CaaS)
The talk's core operating system for founders responding to a zero-click internet.
Steal fora content ops playbook or onboarding doc for a new marketing hire
20:13model
Four-Layer Measurement Framework
- Audience (followers, keyword volume, viewers/listeners, returning visitors)
- Reach (impressions, visibility, views, email subs)
- Interest (engagements, page views, comments, branded search)
- Sales (conversions, conversion rate)
A four-layer replacement for traffic-as-KPI, run across content platforms, search, social, and the website, with incremental sales lift as the one true north-star metric.
Steal fora monthly marketing report template that doesn't rely on broken attribution
28:01list
The CaaS Brief (10 fields)
- Client team
- Job to be done
- Audience
- Desired asset type
- Moment of use
- Desired action
- Source material & SMEs
- Success metric & target
- Distribution plan
- Shelf life & refresh trigger
A required intake form for every piece of content; if the requester and the internal client can't fill it out together, the asset doesn't get made.
Steal fora content request template in Notion, Airtable, or a Slack workflow
29:00list
The Founder's Weekly Loop
- Pick 2-3 channels where your audience actually pays attention
- Publish 1-2 zero-click assets per week
- Repurpose each idea into multiple native formats
- Capture demand (email sign-ups, branded search, demo requests)
- Review the correlation dashboard monthly, adjust channels quarterly
A five-step weekly cadence a solo founder with no marketing team can run starting the following Monday.
Steal fora recurring weekly content calendar block for a solo founder or small team
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
31:52newsletter
“Best way to keep in touch is my newsletter. QR code is there. I send it out every Tuesday... You can email me at amanda@sparktoro.com.”
Soft, low-friction close after a value-dense talk; QR code plus a personal email, no product pitch or hard sell.
Visual structure at a glance.
