For others, it’s coming soon.

Google Zero, a term coined by Nilay Patel, refers to a time when Google Search stops sending traffic to third-party websites.

Google’s Zero-Click era has been creeping up on us for a while now. The latest data from Datas/Sparktoro shows nearly ~60% of Google searches don't result in clicks to third-party websites. With Google’s shifting algorithms and AI Mode looming on the horizon, entire publishing industries are being decimated.

When AI can answer any question instantly, what does that mean for the rest of us? Is there anything web publishers can do?

👋 I’m Cyrus Shepard, and I write Zyppy Signal for people who want more visibility in Google and AI search. Subscribe for SEO and AI strategies, new data, and frameworks delivered each week. Premium subscribers get full access.

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Here’s the truth: traffic isn’t completely going away, and it likely never will.

Google still sends billions of visitors to websites each day: visitors looking for specific websites, visitors looking to buy things, visitors looking to connect with other humans, and visitors looking to solve a million unique problems.

At the same time, fewer and fewer of those visitors are looking for generic information.

The days when businesses simply “published a blog” trying to rank with only “content and links” are behind us.

We know for a fact that Google favors different types of sites now. Winning content tends to be proprietary, unique, and solves problems beyond providing information.

Looking at 100s of winning and losing websites, parsing Google guidelines, and reviewing Google statements about the future of AI search, we cataloged 17 content types that currently perform decently-to-excellent in the AI era when properly executed, and in our judgment, are most likely to survive the next few years and beyond.

• Many sites using these content types are positively thriving today.

• Others will most likely be stable for the next few years, given the moats they’ve built.

• Yet others will certainly see declines in Google traffic, but many may at least survive if they execute well.

This list of content types isn’t exhaustive. You’ll see other winning formats/strategies, but they generally share many of the same characteristics: winning content tends to be proprietary, experience-based, niche-focused, and allows task completion beyond merely providing information.

These 17 content types, in order to win, require those same characteristics.

These content types may look easy, but don’t be fooled into thinking that any of these are low-effort, at least when done well.

Before you hit publish—no, before you do any content strategy, consider where your content sits in one of these types.

Note: Please don’t consider these content types “get out of jail free” cards. When done with minimal or even above-average effort, you can still lose by producing a less-than-stellar output.

But they can help shape your content strategy in an increasingly zero-click world.

So instead, think of these content types as starting points for your most excellent, first-in-class efforts at content excellence.

Let’s explore each type. At the end, we've included a Pro Framework to adapt these content types to different business models.

1. Owned Audience

Very Strong | Highest Effort

“Owned Audience” is more of a content strategy than a format, but it’s also the gold standard. Owning your audience distribution channels means you don’t entirely rely on Google. Conversely, it often means more people actually search for you.

Most owned audiences these days operate via email, but they can also work via SMS, in-app notifications, or even snail mail catalogs.

The key, of course, is having content people want to subscribe to and pay attention to.

If you’re asking, “Why would anyone want to subscribe to our boring blog content?”, you should instead ask, “Why is my blog content boring in the first place? Who are we publishing it for?”

Examples: Morning Brew, Stratechery, Lenny's Newsletter

2. Transaction Pages

Very Strong | Highest Effort

Transaction pages are more than simple product pages (though these count, too). Transaction pages help users “complete” an action, such as booking a hotel reservation or subscribing to a service.

In the future, agentic commerce may see AI agents shop on our behalf, so users never need to visit a website. Even in that scenario, we still need transaction pages, and for now, they remain some of the strongest zero-click pages on the web.

Examples: Hipcamp, Chewy, Sweetwater Electric Guitars

3. Original Research

Strong | High Effort

Original research goes beyond publishing mere facts and data, as it must be unique and proprietary. This is research you originated, born of your own hard work.

It’s true, AI answers can cannibalize your original research, but they are much more likely to cite it, and users often want the original source.

Perhaps more importantly, original research is often cited by others—including journalists—and this can generate significant trust and authority signals for Google and LLMs alike.

Examples: ChartMogul Insights, Carta Data, Orbit Media Blogging Statistics

4. UGC Communities

Strong | High Effort

Forums and communities serve a dual benefit:

• Engaged members seek them out to connect with like-minded users, providing built-in Google Zero protection.

• They generate a lot of experience-based content, which Google currently favors.

Building a community is hard, hard work. But those that invest in their users have seen outsized rewards in the past few years.

Examples: Flyertalk Forum, Mumsnet Talk, Rick Steves Travel Forum

5. Creator Video & Podcast

Strong | High Effort

We live in a “Hot Ones” attention economy.

The point of Creator Content is not simply to pump out videos and podcasts on a topic. It’s about the host, brand, or format itself that makes the content unique.

My family used to listen to Car Talk on NPR, not because we cared about car repair, but to listen to the two cranky, funny hosts. When your creator content is so good that people search for you by name, you’ve made it.

Examples: Practical Engineering, @mkbhd, @Fireship

6. In-Depth Reviews & Tests

Strong | High Effort

We learned a lot from Google’s Helpful Content update, which saw many review websites lose significant traffic (though not so much for YouTubers). Google’s always been a little suspicious of commission-supported product reviews, but consumer demand is consistently high.

Winners in this category typically review products in great depth, with firsthand evidence, repeatable testing protocols, side-by-side comparisons, teardowns, and high-quality photos and videos.

AI answers can summarize these reviews, but they can’t replicate the firsthand evidence many users seek before buying

Examples: RTINGS: TVs on the Market, BabyGearLab Jogging Stroller, Tom’s Hardware CPU Benchmarks

7. Brand Pages

Strong | Low Effort

Most websites publish an “About” page, but in the age of AI, that’s hardly enough. While search engines, LLMs, and users can learn about you through third-party sources, what you say about yourself is often the most important.

Consider these different types of brand pages:

1. About: Company, Leadership/Author Bios

2. Trust: Editorial Policy, Legal, Values, Privacy

3. Social Proof: Press, Testimonials, Case Studies, Reviews

4. Contact and Support

These pages aren’t always sexy, and they don’t typically drive a ton of traffic, but they are absolutely foundational to establishing trust and defining your entity.

Examples: Buffer About, Bankrate Editorial Policy, Sleep Foundation Editorial Policy

9. Directories & Databases

Moderate | High Effort

We need to be careful here, because some people may hear “build a directory” and think they’ll rank easily.

Sadly, this is not the case.

As with everything else on our list, directories and datasets typically need to be supplemented with proprietary, first-party information. This is the AI moat. Freshness is another critical feature, as users typically want the latest information.

Examples: AlternativeTo, Clutch, Nomads

10. Expert Perspective

Moderate | Medium Effort

Moving from facts to opinion, audiences often seek out expert perspectives on important matters. Stripe’s Cheeky Pint interview with Google’s CEO, which we mentioned earlier, is a perfect example of this.

Expert perspectives can earn citations and boost your brand. They also work best when anchored with unique experience and insider information/data.

Examples: a16z News Content, Not Boring, Tom Tunguz

11. Templates

Moderate | Medium Effort

Reusable templates are frameworks that users can download or reproduce in order to get started, speed up work, or accomplish a specific use case. Consider Canva templates, which helped explode growth for the company.

Obviously, the harder the templates are to replicate, the more valuable they become. And templates tied to a particular software or physical product help with both lead-gen and retention.

Examples: Miro Miroverse, Airtable Templates, SlidesCarnival

12. Case Studies

Moderate | Medium Effort

We love case studies. Case studies typically don’t drive a ton of traffic, but they support conversions and boost the brand. A good case study shows how a product, service, or process got results.

One thing: most case studies we’ve looked at underdeliver. They tend to be more promotional than instructional.

To win, you want to display a clear before-and-after result, expose as many metrics as you can, and clearly explain the process.

Examples: Vanta Customers, Webflow Customers, Shopify Case Studies

13. Original Reporting

Moderate | High Effort

Reporting is a tough gig. News publishers have seen a steady decline in Google search traffic year after year. AI answers that summarize news events make things even worse.

That said, there’s still a place for original reporting in an AI world. AI can summarize commodity news, but original reporting that is fast, in-depth, or exclusive can still earn citations and visits.

To keep beating the same drum, like every other content type on this list, Original Reporting needs to add deep value beyond the same information that everyone else reports.

Examples: The Information, The Verge Tech, Reuters Technology

14. Support and Document Pages

Moderate | Low Effort

Support and documentation pages aren’t always sexy and don’t always drive a ton of traffic, but like brand pages, online product companies absolutely need them as a foundational layer for search and AI.

AI may summarize your API endpoints, but you want users to reference and seek out your canonical documentation. Well-documented help and support pages help LLMs learn about your product.

Finally, public support forums, like Adobe’s here, can be a great way to scale documentation

Examples: Plausible Docs, Mux Docs, Supabase Docs

15. Guides & Explainers

Weak | Medium Effort

On one hand, guides and explainer content are at high risk of being supplanted by AI summaries. ChatGPT can easily explain to me what a CRM is. On the other hand, niche explainers and in-depth guides often work when backed by brand expertise and proprietary data.

The key is to leverage differentiation to help users understand a topic. This differentiation can take the form of unique data (e.g., Examine’s Evidence Grades) workflows, comparisons, or expert content hubs.

Elevate your guides and explainer content in a way AI can’t replicate.

Examples: Nerd Fitness Start Here, Examine Creatine, HubSpot What Is CRM

16. FAQs & Glossaries

Weak | Low Effort

Definition, FAQ, and glossary pages are among the easiest to produce and to replicate with AI. That said, they still work well when you can establish them as the canonical definitions for an industry.

For example, if I’m learning DNS, I’m more likely to seek out and trust the latest from Cloudflare over an AI Overview.

FAQs and glossary pages also provide a surface for building reference hubs, adding internal links to important product pages, and paths to customer support.

Examples: Moz Glossary, Cloudflare What Is DNS, Agile Alliance Agile Glossary

17. Lists & Roundups

Weak | Low Effort

Curated “Best of” and “Top 10” lists have gotten a lot of flak recently, and deservedly so. Marketers are using fake lists, with themselves at the top, to manipulate AI-generated answers and recommendations.

But Google and AI answers generate a lot of lists and recommendations for a reason: people really want them.

Like every other content type on this list, the standards for winning with lists and roundups in Google search are incredibly high - especially for competitive terms. Google has shifted to favoring original testing, published scoring criteria, and hyper-niche focus.

Examples: ICAgile Project Management Software, Website Planet Builders, IRunFar Best Jogging Strollers

Pro Bonus: Content Frameworks for Specific Business Models

By this point, I hope we’ve convinced you to stop publishing commodity blog posts, but what should your specific business actually tackle?

To help, we created a publishing rubric for Pro Subscribers covering these content types with examples for many different business models/websites:

• Saas

• Affiliates

• E-commerce

• Local Services

• Media/Editorial

• Marketplace/Directory

These frameworks available via the link below can help marketing teams rethink their content strategies and plan more resilient, more purposeful content roadmaps.

Read more

17 Content Types to Survive Google’s Zero-Click Future

To help, we created a publishing rubric for Pro Subscribers covering these content types with examples for many different business models/websites:

• Saas

• Affiliates

• E-commerce

• Local Services

• Media/Editorial

• Marketplace/Directory

Read more

Use this scorecard to evaluate your site on quality.

The Importance Of Page Quality Scoring

As you may know, Google improves its search algorithms by working with over 10,000 human Quality Raters around the world. The raters manually evaluate both search results and individual web pages for quality.

Google regularly publishes its 100+-page Rater Guidelines, which instruct Quality Raters on how to evaluate web pages. According to the guidelines, raters ultimately assign two scores to every page they are assigned:

1. Page Quality (PQ): Raters assign a PQ rating ranging from Lowest to Highest, with many possible scores in between

2. Needs Met: Raters assign a Needs Met rating ranging from Fails to Meet (FailsM) to Fully Meets (FullyM)

While Google stresses that no single rating directly impacts a site’s ranking, Google uses the ratings to gauge the quality of its results and, perhaps more importantly, as valuable data points to train Google’s machine learning algorithms at scale.

Google says that understanding how Quality Raters work can help you to improve your content and do better in search.

So, to many SEOs and publishers, Google’s Raters Guidelines is a valuable document.

It’s also extremely difficult to use if you want to score your own site.

Because of my own part-time work as a Quality Rater, SEO clients occasionally ask for private evaluations of their websites, which I oblige.

The challenge is that because of strict NDAs, I can’t simply use the same forms and documents provided by Google to do the job. Years ago, internal Google scoring cards leaked online, but those are now far outdated.

If we only had something like this today, site owners could more easily evaluate their own pages against Google’s quality guidelines.

That’s why, along with Graphic Designer Dawn Shepard, we created a new Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard.

How The Quality Scorecard Works

This new scorecard is 100% based on Google’s own publicly available Rater Guidelines. It’s also organized into a format that makes it far easier to determine a Quality score for your web pages.

Read more

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If you sell anything online, chances are AI is changing how your customers find you, how you market to them, and ultimately how they make purchases.

Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and other platforms are releasing a flurry of new protocols to enhance AI product search, visibility, and may ultimately allow AI agents to buy your products directly.

Things are moving very, very quickly.

To get a grasp of these changes, I spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on “Agentic Commerce”. Tim Resnik led Product and SEO teams at Walmart and Wayfair, and in his role at Botify, advised some of the top e-commerce retailers in the world.

Tim has tips for everyone on AI shopping. Watch the interview here.

Here are the top takeaways from Tim’s interview.

1. Product Feeds and Catalog Enrichments Are Job #1

Traditionally, product feeds were left to the teams doing paid ads or pushed off to an agency. Tim argues that because feeds and new protocols are becoming a primary way for AI to understand your content, then optimizing those feeds and improving your catalog data becomes much, much more important.

Google is developing new protocols, such as Universal Commerce Protocol, along with feed attributes, such as Conversation Commerce (currently in limited beta) to expand AI capabilities, but these still rely on your core product feed as your base.

Here’s an illustration of how some of these updated capabilities work in Google Merchant Center (and will in the near future) to enable AI integration.

Action: Treat your product feeds like valuable, canonical assets. As AI companies develop new protocols, feeds become a source of truth that they can access easily and reliably. AI needs real-time information, and your feed can provide that faster than waiting for a bot to crawl your site.

Additionally, cleaning up your feed and making it as error-free as possible becomes a bigger priority. Most feeds in Google Merchant Center are riddled with errors, and this can lead to inefficiencies in surfacing your product.

2. SEO Basics Are Even More Important in an AI World

AI bots don’t all read your content the same as Google does, and can struggle with things like JavaScript-heavy sites. Slow load times, poor site architecture, and other basic SEO issues can prevent AI bots from even seeing your products in the first place.

Action: Focus on SEO basics before any new AI tactics. “Basics” may be the wrong term to use here, but making sure you have fast load times, good internal linking, and your site doesn’t rely too heavily on hard-to-parse JavaScript will go a long way in helping AI bots understand your product catalog. Pay those SEO folks!

3. Brand & Loyalty Play Outsize Roles

In an AI Shopping world, AI platforms have access to millions of data points, including information on your products and your competitors. This makes competing on things like price even harder. And if customers purchase on AI platforms instead of on your sites, your advantages erode even further.

Tim makes the point that Brand and Loyalty become increasingly important in these perfect information systems. To stand out, companies need good PR and a brand that stands out.

Action: Focus a little more on your Brand, and less on your keywords. We know that brand is important in SEO, but many companies sadly neglect it. Instead of pouring all your budget into ranking for “best mattress online”, try to get a little more attention for your company, “Mattress Kindom.” Invest in digital PR that showcases both your brand and your product.

4. True “Agentic Commerce” Isn’t Here Yet

Tim argues that while companies are rolling out new protocols, it’s far too early to call this the age of Agentic Commerce. While AI is changing how people discover and shop for products, almost all purchases are still via traditional routes.

We may soon have a future where our agents buy our batteries from Amazon without us thinking about it. That future is still far enough off that we’re not sure what it looks like yet.

According to Tim, the biggest winners in AI shopping are most likely going to be the companies that:

1. Possess operational excellence

2. Nails the SEO basics better and tighter than everyone else

3. Have a strong brand presence

The smart companies aren’t chasing shiny objects yet. But everyone is getting ready to play with new tools.

Important Links

• Tim Resnik on LinkedIn

• Flection i/o

• AI Brand Authority Index

Want to discuss AI Shopping or have questions? Join the subscriber chat.

Business owners reach out to us almost weekly seeking “traffic recovery.” Typically, they’re hoping for technical SEO fixes or quick wins to turn their traffic around in a couple of months.

In reality, it’s their business model, user experience, or content production that’s killing them.

Google simply wants to give that traffic to a different type of site now.

The data support this. While it’s true that Google has decimated entire categories of publishers, other studies show that overall traffic declines are probably modest, and for every website losing traffic, there is often a winner.

What do these winning sites do differently from everyone else? Importantly, can we learn any strategies from them to protect and grow our own traffic?

To answer this question, I analyzed over 400 winning and losing websites, revisiting many of the same sites covered by Lily Ray’s excellent analysis of Google’s December update.

You can see the full list with updated traffic stats.

These include some very big movers over the past year, with a mix of recognizable brands and smaller players. We analyzed traffic trends over the past 12 months and then classified them by business model, content types, creator profiles, and other definable characteristics.

When we analyzed these features against winners and losers, very clear patterns emerged.

In short, Google has moved beyond simply ranking “good content” to proactively rewarding what AI can’t replicate.

5 Website Characteristics of Winning Websites

After crunching the numbers, we identified 5 features that very strongly predicted whether a site was winning or losing Google over the past 12 months. Here they are with their Spearman correlation.

1. Offers a Product or Service - 0.391

2. Allows Task Completion - 0.381

3. Proprietary Assets - 0.357

4. Tight Topical Focus - 0.250

5. Strong Brand - 0.206

Let’s dive into each to understand what they mean.

👋 I’m Cyrus Shepard, and I write Zyppy Signal for people who want more visibility in Google and AI search. Subscribe for SEO and AI strategies, new data, and frameworks delivered each week. Premium subscribers get full access.

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1. Offers a Product or Service

Winning Sites: 70.2%
Losing Sites: 34.6%

Offering a product or service was the highest correlated differentiator in our dataset. Sites that sold their own products performed especially well (as opposed to third-party platforms).

Losers tended to be news, informational, and affiliate sites.

Most interestingly, winners didn’t always sell a physical product. Service-based offerings did well, too, such as subscriptions and digital goods.

Winning Examples:

• budgetbytes.com resembles other recipe sites but offers a subscription meal plan service.

• mathnasium.com is a math tutoring site that offers online and in-person tutoring.

Losing Examples:

• byrdie.com operates primarily as a fashion publisher with no real product.

• medicalnewstoday.com is a large informational publisher, not a service provider.

Google says your content should have an “existing or intended audience” that doesn’t rely on search traffic.

Make it actionable: If you can position (or shift) your business model to make a proprietary product or service a core offering, that seems like a smart decision. It also helps build your brand, which we’ll discuss below.

Many website owners ask me if they can simply set up a webstore on their site to sell easy digital downloads. The answer is probably not. Sites that we see winning offer products and services as a core part of their business, not a hasty add-on.

Yes, it’s a big ask. Huge, in fact, with no guarantees. Travel blogs might become tour guides and offer vacation planning. But what else will they do when the Google traffic dries up, if it hasn’t already?

Here’s the good news: even if you don’t offer a product or service, there are other avenues to winning on Google.

2. Allows Task Completion

Winning Sites: 83.7%
Losing Sites: 50.2%

Task Completion means the website allows users to ultimately complete the task they set out to accomplish by searching.

Most losing sites may offer great information on topics, but the user needs to go elsewhere to actually do anything with it. WalletHub, for example, produces great credit card comparison pages, but the application process for those cards happens off-site.

You might think task completion has a lot of overlap with “Offers a Product or Service,” and you’d be right. If someone buys a pair of jeans at Levy’s, then they’ve completed their task.

But importantly, sites don’t need to sell anything to allow task completion. Consider these examples below.

Winning Examples:

• mathisfun.com is a math tutorial site that offers interactive tools, quizzes, and workbooks, providing users a way to practice math.

• stockanalysis.com acts as a complete research platform for stock analysis.

• powerball.com allows users to check their lottery tickets from an authoritative source.

Losing Examples:

• fortune.com explains business topics, but it is typically not where business takes place.

• byrdie.com covers fashion products, but doesn’t offer a direct way to obtain those products.

Make it actionable: If you don’t sell products or services, offering useful tools and/or data is typically the next most effective step to help users complete their task. Examples include calculators, quizzes, searchable databases, and booking tools. The goal is to own the next step of the user journey.

3. Proprietary Assets

Winning Sites: 92.9%
Losing Sites: 57.1%

Proprietary Assets means owning something that other sites can’t easily replicate. This could be a unique product, special databases, user-generated content, software, reviews, or anything else of value that’s “owned” by the website.

Winning Examples:

• letterboxd.com - Popular, fast-rising site that uses data from its large user base to graph movie popularity.

• todaytix.com - Maintains an inventory of up-to-date theater ticket availability.

Losing Examples:

• lifewire.com - Offers mostly tutorials and explainer-style content with a few “owned” first-party assets.

• thespruce.com - Popular home and lifestyle blog, but with few first-party assets.

Make it actionable: For many sites, a good place to start is with the data and unique information you already have and turning it into an asset. This can mean original research, pricing surveys, aggregating reviews, original photo collections, or organizing your audience into a source of user-generated content.

4. Tight Topical Focus

Winning Sites: 75.9%
Losing Sites: 61.3%

When we originally analyzed “Topical Focus,” we found no difference between winners and losers.

But when we switched to “Tight Topical Focus,” the pattern became clear, because it seems Google is getting tighter with its selections, too.

Winning sites tended to be more niche, covering a single narrow topic more deeply and with more expertise. Losing sites, on the other hand, tended to cover topics broadly or only loosely related.

Winning Examples:

• minecraft.wiki - Like Wikipedia, except only for Minecraft. Very tightly focused.

• happiestbaby.com - Laser-focused on babies. If you are a baby, this is your site.

Losing Examples:

• businessinsider.com - Covers business, but also entertainment, culture, and parenting.

• newsweek.com - Perfect example of a broad publisher covering many verticals.

Make it actionable: Obviously, the play here is to become known as a go-to authority for a small handful of topics. It’s not uncommon to see hyper-specific travel blogs (e.g., “Vern Does Venice”) out-rank global travel brands. Specificity and deep topical expertise seem to be the way to win.

5. Strong Brand

Winning Sites: 32.6%
Losing Sites: 16.1%

First of all, what do we mean by “Strong Brand”?

Using Ahrefs data, we examined each site’s top 20 keywords and identified branded navigational terms. These are terms people use when looking for a particular site. For example, “mental floss” is an obvious branded search term for folks looking for mentalfloss.com.

We then scored sites as “Strong Brands” based on both the volume of branded navigational terms and the percentage of overall traffic they represented.

Sometimes a site can be highly recognizable, but almost none of its traffic is branded. These aren’t considered strong brands.

Winning Examples:

• zoom.com - Extremely high brand visibility and lots of traffic from navigational queries

• skims.com - A popular shopping destination that users seek out directly

Losing Examples:

• lifewire.com - Highly recognized, but not a destination people actively seek out.

• techtarget.com - A niche site known to many, but mostly attracts traffic from longer-tail keywords rather than people seeking it out.

Make it actionable: I could write an entire guide on building your brand in search (and I will - subscribe for updates!) Suffice to say, this often means shifting your marketing from keywords to your core assets: products, founders, company name, etc. Apple doesn’t advertise “computers”, but they know how to showcase a Mac. This is a challenging but essential shift, even for sites in boring industries.

The Additive Effect: Winners Possess More Core Features

Perhaps most interestingly, when we examined the data, we found that these features are additive.

Displaying only one feature wasn’t enough for a website to see the winner’s column; a site usually needed multiple features to win.

Offering task completion was good, but 1) offering task completion + 2) a tight topical focus +3) a strong brand was even better.

Here’s the win rate for various feature counts:

• 0 Features: 13.5%

• 1 Features: 15.4%

• 2 Features: 22.0%

• 3 Features: 30.7%

• 4 Features 68.1%

• 5 Features 69.7%

Other Features That Likely Help, But Didn’t Correlate

For this study, we also classified and studied a number of features we thought would be significant, but had no bearing on the data. These included:

• Demonstrating first-hand experience or personal perspectives

• Hosting User-generated Content (UGC) or community platforms

• Uniqueness of information

I hesitate to include this information for fear that people will interpret it the wrong way. I don’t think these things didn’t correlate with success because Google doesn’t reward them, but more likely, they were already baked into the algorithm long ago. I suspect a larger data study would reveal interesting patterns here.

What Should Publishers Do?

Commodity content is dying, but not all commodity content is dying equally.

A winning site going forward has these characteristics:

1. It often offers a unique product or service.

2. It helps the user do something: buy, download, search, or book.

3. It stays within a niche topic of expertise, and it does it well.

4. It owns proprietary assets that are difficult to replicate: datasets, products, images, and UGC.

5. It becomes a destination site by positioning and promoting its own brand.

If you have an established business model, changing your focus and approach can be difficult.

We don’t know what search will look like in five years, but if you can offer something unique and help solve people’s problems in ways that aren’t easily reproduced, you have a good chance of finding yourself in the winner’s column.

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It's a great irony that while AI answers can reduce clicks to our websites, AI output often relies on user-click data to produce more accurate results.

That’s what I learned after diving deep into user click signals from Google’s API leak, antitrust trial, and patent filings.

If algorithms like “RankEmbedBERT” sound boring, it was digging into how Google defines goodClicks and lastLongClicks that really deserve attention. These are seemingly fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithms, and, more importantly, marketers can influence these signals in the right direction.

During the recent US antitrust trial, it was argued that user data—what people click on and interact with—made up the majority of “Google’s scale advantage“ and that simply sharing these user interactions would allow competitors to “mimic Google’s ranking.”

In fact, Google records almost every action we take: what we search for, what we click, and how long we spend on a website.

We are all a giant Mechanical Turk, telling Google which results are good.

Importantly, it turns out these signals also play a big part in AI answers and in any AI output that relies heavily on Google (looking at you, ChatGPT).

So exactly what click signals does Google measure? Can we influence them?

First, some caveats. What we know about Google’s use of click signals mostly comes from the U.S. v Google antitrust trial, Google patents, and Google’s big API leak. Importantly, simply because something is patented or has an API endpoint doesn’t mean we know 100% if and how Google uses it.

That said, as these exact concepts are referenced across all three sources, including trial testimony, it’s a fairly strong indication of their importance.

So treat this post as a conceptual framework about how Google thinks about, collects, and uses click signals for ranking and AI citations. While we don’t have every nitty-gritty detail, we have overwhelming evidence to point us in the right direction.

Known Click Signals Tracked by Google

Google’s API leak exposed many of the specific data points it collects and uses for its algorithms.

While there are 1000s of attributes in the leaked data, many are used across multiple ranking systems. Importantly, several attributes closely match Google’s patent filings and metrics referenced by Googlers in the antitrust trial. Here are 5 of the most salient click signals:

1. impressions - When a URL appears in a search result. Importantly, Google seems to “test” different URLs in different positions in search results to determine which ones perform best.
   

2. clicks - When a user clicks on a search result. If users frequently click on a particular result relative to its impressions, Google may treat that as a positive signal.
   

3. badClicks - “...a short click can be considered indicative of a poor page”. E.g., if users click a result and immediately click back to the search results, it may be a clue that the page didn’t satisfy their question.
   

4. goodClicks - “...a long click can be considered indicative of a good page” and “historically, how long a user stayed at a particular linked page before bouncing back to the SERP.”
   

5. lastLongestClicks - “The number of clicks that were last and longest in related user queries.” Long clicks, where “the user doesn’t return to the main (search) page,” can indicate that the page satisfied their question. (Sources: 1, 2, 3)

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s how these concepts play out when a user searches Google. Credit to Dawn Shepard for the graphics.

How Click Data Informs AI Answers (Nerd Section)

We’ve known for a long time that Google uses click data to build and re-rank search results via algorithms like NavBoost and Glue.

In fact, Google calls clicks one of its “three fundamental signals” or “ABC” - Anchors (links), Body (text), and Clicks.

Now you might assume that answers from AI models (LLMs) wouldn’t need click signals, but this is increasingly not the case due to several factors:

1. Google grounds its AI answer with algorithms (FastSearch / RankEmbedBERT) that use “70 days of search logs plus scores generated by human raters.” (source) These search logs contain click data and help generate the reference links Google includes in AI answers.

2. Answers from Google AI Overviews and AI Mode often summarize top-ranking results (and top-ranking results of fan-out queries). Those top results are surfaced, in part, using click data.

3. Other AI platforms, like ChatGPT, rely on Google search results to generate responses. Even though OpenAI has access to Microsoft Bing’s search results, “it appears those aren’t enough to replicate Google’s accuracy at scale, especially for obscure or long-tail queries.” - Tom’s Guide

While Google files lawsuits to limit other AI companies’ access to Google results, the influence of Google click signals on ranking and visibility is everywhere.

Note: There’s a fair amount of debate about whether Google uses clicks as a direct ranking signal or more for machine learning and evaluation. There’s also evidence that Google can simply predict clicks without actual data. Regardless, you almost certainly want your webpage to “look” like the kind of result Google believes will satisfy visitors.

The Playbook: Optimize for Relevance, Engagement, and Satisfaction

From the evidence, Google is trying to answer three broad questions from user click data:

1. Is this result relevant?

2. Is the content useful to answer the question?

3. Does this completely satisfy the user search?

Let’s examine each in turn.

1. Prove Relevance - Earn The Click

The idea seems simple: Google displays a list of URLs it thinks are relevant to a search, then measures which results users actually click.

Get more clicks, rank higher. Right?

Not exactly. This is not a simple Click-through Rate (CTR) calculation.

Google itself says that clicks are very “noisy,” and factors like position and appearance can skew the data. They even have metrics that appear to punish “clickbait” titles.

So the goal is not “high CTR.” The goal is to earn good clicks by showing relevance to the user.

Your SERP snippet is your playground to accomplish this, and as marketers, we have a lot of ways to influence this appearance:

1. Intent - What exactly did they search for?

2. Promise - How does our content meet that need?

3. Brand - Who delivers that promise?

Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the goal is to improve CTR but not at the cost of relevance. Exaggerated or “clickbait” features may drive clicks, but they are not as relevant. Getting a high CTR without demonstrating usefulness and satisfaction (steps 2 and 3 below) can lead Google to associate your site with very bad signals.

So a high CTR is good, but it needs to be paired with other signals…

2. Prove Usefulness - goodClicks vs badClicks

The evidence is consistent: Google appears to measure long/good clicks by observing how long a user visits a result before returning to the search results.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple.

This isn’t exactly “dwell time” or “time on page.”

That’s because Google weighs each click time by query, user type, language, and country.

Then they can compare these scores with those from all other possible query-document combinations. One Google patent describes measuring the ratio of long clicks to overall clicks, and this click fraction “can be used to re-rank future search results.”

By using weighted clicks, Google understands that not every visitor needs the same amount of time for every search. For example, a user checking “how tall is Mount Everest” may only need a few seconds, while a question like “optimize investment portfolio for inflation” might take several minutes.

Context is everything.

The goal isn’t simply to improve time on site, but to demonstrate usefulness through engagement.

We can accomplish this with basic User Experience tools, but these practices often get lost in the realities of building web pages. Here’s what it can look like in practice.

You may think that answering the user query “quickly and obviously” isn’t the best way to earn “long clicks,” but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence across the industry that it often leads to better traffic. (This may be related to step 3 - lastLongestClicks, but for now, we’ll focus on engagement.)

Note: Google has repeatedly said “time on site” isn’t a ranking factor, which makes sense given the evidence. They obviously slice the data in much more complex ways than that.

That said, many, many studies have found a positive correlation between time on site and Google rankings. In one study, our friend Backlinko found that “increasing time on site by 3 seconds correlates to ranking a single position higher in the search results.”

And, my marketing friends, time on site through better engagement is something we can influence.

3. Prove Satisfaction - lastLongestClicks

Perhaps the holy grail of click signals: lastLongestClicks. Consider this user journey:

1. User asks Google a question

2. Clicks into your website

3. Engages with content

4. Gets the question 100% answered

5. Doesn’t go back to click another result

Congrats, you earned the last, long click!

Each step builds on the others. In addition to earning the click and engaging the user, you also want to be the last place they search.

How do you do this? You can start by:

• Answering related questions

• Show your evidence

• Providing the user with the next steps

The goal here is to anticipate the next user need to complete their task. I love this example from AJ Kohn:

“If you are a local directory site, you usually have reviews from your own users prominently on the page. But it’s natural for people to wonder how other sites rate that doctor or coffee shop or assisted living facility. My recommendation is to display the ratings from other sites there on your own page. Why? Users want those other ratings. By not having them there, you chase users back to the search results…” (source)

If the user requires additional information to complete their search journey, you are better off providing it when they need it rather than having them leave to search elsewhere.

Things to Know: Manipulation is Hard By Design

One thing we should note is that these click metrics are, by design, incredibly hard to “game.” Google employs multiple techniques to ensure click signals reflect genuine user reactions:

1. Navboost, one of Google’s most important algorithms, memorizes 13 months of user interaction data. This long timeframe adds stability and means changes happen slowly. (As noted above, FastSearch uses 70 days of data.)

2. Google calculates a “squashed“ value for many of its metrics, which presumably filters out spam, manipulated, and/or noisy signals.

3. Not all user interactions are equal. “Slicing“ weighs each user click against the ranking position, the query, the device, the user’s location, and a host of other factors.

That said, there is anecdotal evidence that click spoofing (employing bots or humans to click on your search results) can sometimes temporarily boost rankings, but the effect is generally short-lived and potentially risky.

Measuring Clicks By Proxy

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t share click data, and it’s nearly impossible to measure individual clicks with any granular detail.

That said, there are many metrics we can measure that correlate with click data and deliver independent value. The important part to remember is that, since you can’t typically see competitors’ data, you are essentially competing against yourself.

1. Click-through Rate

You can measure CTR in Google Search Console. It’s tricky because CTR changes drastically by position, and impressions from AI answers muddy the waters. It’s typically easiest to measure CTR across broad sections of your site using URL patterns. Tools like SEOTesting and SEOGets can help track CTR.

2. Engagement

My absolute favorite metrics to measure are Engagement and Time on Site. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) may be everyone’s least favorite analytics tool, but I believe GA4 did us a big favor with the Engagement report, which shows us “Average engagement time per active user” and other metrics. (Remember to filter by organic search traffic.)

For those with a budget, competitor engagement metrics can be determined using Semrush Traffic and Market or SimilarWeb.

Remember, “Time on Site” isn’t itself a ranking factor, but it seems to play an outsized role in how Google calculates other metrics.

3. Satisfaction

There isn’t “one” metric to track visitor satisfaction. We simply don’t know if a user returned to search results. But there are a number of metrics you should track, regardless, as measures of brand strength.

1. Returning Users: Available in GA4. An increase in users returning to you via organic channels or otherwise is typically a good sign.

2. Conversions: Especially relevant to e-commerce, but applicable to other verticals as well. If a user makes a purchase, it’s a pretty good sign that you satisfied their journey.

3. Brand Search: The Holy Grail of search terms. When a user specifically searches for your brand, their journey can both start and end with you. In fact, all marketers should probably report branded search. And with branded search filters now available in Search Console, we have no excuse not to.

And here, we’ve reached the end of our own search journey. How do you think you can improve your own user click signals?

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