Surviving the beige web

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Digital marketing has always been a game of surface area. Be everywhere, get clicked, map the path to conversion.

That logic may not hold for much longer. Zero-click news queries have jumped from 56% to nearly 69% in a single year, according to Press Gazette, while global publisher visits fell from 2.3 billion to under 1.7 billion.

Even publishers still topping the rankings — MailOnline, People.com, BuzzFeed — now watch their traffic drain away in the SERP. The clicks that once justified budgets have become the AI's raw material.

Search is no longer a hand-off but a holding pen: a closed loop of overviews, snippets, and "People Also Ask" boxes that answer questions without sending anyone away.

The window to make an impression is narrowing, too. The funnel has collapsed, discovery and decision sharing the same scroll. In that squeeze, distinctiveness thins — and brands that don't land instantly risk fading into beige.

The new value system

Lydia Eleftheriou, SEO Director at Harvest Digital, calls zero-click "not just another update, but a new value system." Rankings that once signalled credibility now only confirm you exist somewhere behind Google's velvet rope.

"Increasingly," she notes, impressions "mean your content has been referenced in passing, buried in AI answers or cited somewhere few users notice."

This is the beige paradox: dashboards can glow green while memory drains away. Bain and Company estimates 60% of consumers now rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time, cutting organic traffic by a quarter. You can tick every box and still dissolve into sameness.

Wrestling with the mirage

John Campbell, Head of Innovation and AI at ROAST, sees the problem in the pipes. "People should start to question search impression data more," he told us.

That scepticism proved prescient. Just days before this newsletter's publication, Google removed the ability to display 100 results per page — a change that has disrupted ranking data across Search Console and third-party tools. What once seemed like solid ground for measurement now shifts beneath marketers' feet. The tools that promised clarity about search performance suddenly report incomplete or inconsistent data.

It's compression by stealth: Google has literally narrowed the visible playing field while making the metrics that marketers use to understand their position less reliable. The beige paradox deepens — you can't even trust the charts that were supposed to tell you whether you're winning or losing.

Google's recent results page tweaks revealed how much noise comes not from people at all, but scraping tools and AI inflating the counts. Campbell went further: clients should be willing to "turn campaigns on and off, test creative ideas, even implement SEO changes on certain sections of a website while having a control group of pages." Too often, he added, people like the idea of experiments "in theory but getting tests conducted takes time — and the value in failed tests is harder to sell."

Christian Taylor, Managing Partner of Strategy at december19, takes that mistrust and rebuilds the frame. "Instead of measuring lifts in brand searches," he said, "we've been focusing on how brand advertising influences the ways in which customers discover the brand — metrics such as volume of direct and organic search traffic, brand share of search, and uplifts in new visitors to the website."

When they tested this on a B2B TV campaign, the framework showed "a 20% lift in first-choice consideration" and "significant lifts in direct traffic." A third-party causal impact study added another layer, showing a 39% uplift in online leads at statistical significance.

"This triangulation of effects gave the team the insight required to convince the c-suite to continue investing despite a challenging sales environment," Taylor adds.

He also warned of "double jeopardy" — the trap where brands chasing acquisition at the expense of memory end up losing both. Worse, they drift into an AI-compressed search world with nothing sticky to their name. Being top of mind, he argued, "will be even more important when the opportunity to find you is reduced to a few conversations with an AI."

Rewriting the scoreboard

We reached out to Harvest Digital to ask which metrics actually matter when traffic is falling. Mike Teasdale, Founder and Planning Director, laid out a simple weighting.

Share of Answer (40%) is the power play. Defined as "the percentage of non-branded search results for which your brand owns the most prominent zero-click feature — like a Featured Snippet or Answer Box," it's not visibility, it's authority. You're not part of the list — you are the list.

Branded search and direct traffic (30%) is where memory shows up. "People will remember your brand name even if they don't click," Teasdale said. The battle is won not when someone sees you in the SERP, but when they type your name unprompted.

Assisted conversions (20%) drag the conversation into finance. They capture the hidden influence of organic on sales journeys even when it wasn't the closer — the kind of evidence that reframes SEO from hygiene to demand generator.

CTR (10%) survives, but reframed. The single headline number is misleading; split by intent, it reveals what's really leaking. Informational clicks can fall without consequence. Navigational and transactional losses are where alarm bells ring.

The scorecard matters less than the narrative it builds upstairs. Each number pulls the conversation away from platform vanity metrics and towards resilience: proof you're not just being seen, you're being remembered.

Retention, not reach

"Clicks are no longer the end goal," Eleftheriou writes. "Today, they're just the start." The question is whether what follows — the scroll, the watch, the conversation — leaves any trace in memory.

And this is why she argues the battleground extends far beyond the SERP. Discovery now happens on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon. To treat Google as the whole funnel is like playing football on half a pitch and then wondering why the goals keep drying up.

Nick Ford-Young, Co-CEO at Boldspace, makes the case in hard numbers. Boldspace’s brand health studies show that "brands with higher Share of Search demonstrated materially higher levels of pricing power and resilience during category downturns."

Memory, in other words, keeps you off the discount rack. That link to pricing power is, as he put it, "what stops short-term budget cuts" when the traffic charts turn hostile.

Conversation as training data

Memory is seeded in culture as much as content. Every TikTok caption, Reddit thread and YouTube transcript doubles as training data for tomorrow's AI. Miss those conversations and you're absent twice: from human recall and machine learning.

The stakes rise as the visible landscape shrinks. With Google's removal of 100-result pages, the fight for the top 10 positions intensifies. But as traditional rank tracking becomes obsolete with AI mode rolling out across 180 countries, the game shifts from chasing positions to building authority that AI systems recognise and cite.

Ford-Young calls it spillover conversation — "the organic brand discussion that extends beyond owned channels." His team track it through BoldLens, its proprietary brand tracking and optimisation platform, correlating share of conversation and sentiment with monthly "pulse checks" on brand preference and NPS. It's not vanity PR; it's a feedback loop: talk today, retrieval tomorrow.

"Many brands lack the courage to move towards messaging that can drive talkability," he said. "Spillover demands an authentic emotional 'bold space' and consistent storytelling that gives people something worth discussing."

"I can't stress enough, it's not easy," he added. "So uniting brand strategy, advertising, PR and analytics functions is vital." Without that alignment, spillover fractures into one-off stunts — a hashtag spike here, a burst of PR there — but nothing that settles into memory.

The cost of playing it safe is even starker. "60% of UK B2B advertising generates no emotional response," Ford-Young said. "Yet emotionally impactful campaigns are 7x more effective at driving long-term growth."

And when brands do lean in, the effects multiply. Lovehoney's "Unbannable Ad" used household items to lampoon censorship and pulled 39 media pieces, 60m+ reach and 10k engagements. The Post Office's "Cash is a Lifeline" ran longer and hit harder: 2,188 media pieces, 55m Twitter impressions, 10k letters to MPs — and even a line in the King's Speech.

Spillover at that scale isn't fluff; it's memory made visible. Culture does the distribution, and finance teams feel the resilience when categories tighten. 

Compression, not decay

As Eleftheriou writes, "zero-click isn't the death of SEO." It's compression, not decay. Journeys haven't disappeared; they've collapsed into seconds and summaries.

Google's systematic reduction of visible search real estate — from removing 100-result pages to expanding AI overviews into task completion — signals a fundamental shift. The window for making an impression continues to narrow while the tools for measuring that impression become less reliable.

The brands that last won't be the ones glued to green dashboards. They'll be the ones that lodge themselves in memory — through spillover conversation, credible proof of influence, and attention that lingers after the tab is closed.

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Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor