How These Businesses Responded to Zero-Click SEO (And Captured 500% More Leads)

What do manufacturing, ecommerce, and SaaS have in common?

They’re all impacted by zero-click searches.

AI-powered search experiences, like ChatGPT and AI Overviews, have made it easier than ever for users to find what they need without visiting a website (which has meant declining traffic for businesses across industries).

While some companies chased vanity clicks (or stopped SEO altogether), others leaned in. RC Mowers, Enabling Devices, IGX Solutions, and Thompson Tractor have adapted to a zero-click SEO strategy — and seen their leads grow.

Discover their approach below:

What a zero-click SEO strategy looks like across industries

Learn what a zero-click SEO strategy looks like now:

Adapting analytics tracking

As David Oglivy once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s a scenario familiar to many businesses against the backdrop of AI search.

That’s why these companies’ approach to zero-click SEO started with analytics.

Within Google Analytics 4, a custom channel called “Generative AI” was created to track referral traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI platforms.

This adapted analytics tracking extended to RevenueCloudFX, which is a marketing automation and attribution platform provided to WebFX clients. One of the ways RevenueCloudFX helps businesses (especially lead-gen businesses) is understanding how marketing actions impact sales.

Enabling Devices (ecommerce) and RC Mowers (manufacturing) were both able to use RevenueCloudFX to better understand the quantity and quality of leads coming from generative search.

Note: Google Analytics 4 now provides a built-in “AI Assistant” channel you can use for your website.

Maintaining a strong SEO foundation

One of the most underrated steps these businesses took to improve their AI search and SEO visibility was continuing to build and maintain their search engine optimization foundation.

IGX Solutions (SaaS), for example, prioritized the following SEO updates:

• Building thematic internal links
• Tightening keyword alignment across pages
• Improving on-page usability through a table of contents
• Launching an llms.txt file

Even companies like Thompson Tractor (heavy equipment), which has practiced SEO since 2018 with WebFX continued prioritizing SEO optimizations to strengthen its zero-click SEO strategy.

Building an authoritative backlink profile

Similar to search engine optimization, another approach that’s remained relevant in zero-click SEO is building an authoritative backlink profile. With this profile, businesses can demonstrate to AI and search crawlers its:

• Trustworthiness
• Topical authority
• Industry reputation
• Brand positioning

Together, these signals help companies appear more often in relevant searches and conversations, whether as a citation, mention, or organic listing.

For perspective, these are the number of qualified backlinks that WebFX built for Enabling Devices, Thompson Tractor, and IGX Solutions as a part of their approach to zero-click SEO:

Please note when reviewing the above table that it’s provided as a reference vs. as a benchmark to reach. Link acquisition varies based on the business’s industry, content strategy, and team.

Producing citable content

Even though zero-click searches have reduced the number of website visits, content is still a core component to search marketing. Through original and authentic content, brands can get discovered in AI-powered search experiences.

That’s why these companies invested in content as a part of their zero-click SEO strategy, producing longform pieces that educated readers using the company’s expertise alongside WebFX’s specialized copywriting team.

By producing helpful and citable content, these businesses were able to distribute these content pieces with reputable publishers. Within a zero-click search strategy, this approach creates “seeds,” which multiply the likelihood of AI citing the content in relevant responses.

It’s important to note that this approach does not create duplicate content. Instead, the distributed content is credited to the original publisher (the business) with the appropriate canonical tag.

Refreshing content for AI citations

Content freshness is a long-standing strategy for improving a website’s organic visibility — and it’s a strategy that applies to zero-click SEO as studies have found AI platforms like ChatGPT prefer new or recently updated pages.

Companies can refresh content by:

• Incorporating new information
• Addressing trending questions
• Including team member insights, like through quotes
• Removing outdated references
• And more

Tailoring brand positioning

Within zero-click search optimization, brand positioning matters because it influences whether AI platforms mention or recommend your business within a conversation.

Those mentions and recommendations are based on your company’s:

• Website
• Social media
• Local listings
• Directory sites
• Reviews
• Online discussions

Based on this information, large language models (LLMs) determine whether your business is relevant to a user’s chat and to what degree.

As an example, WebFX revised IGX Solutions’ “Who We Serve” pages to better demonstrate the company’s target market, which contributed to a 30% increase in branded mentions for unique AI queries.

Understanding brand positioning is easiest with AI visibility software, which, in the case of IGX Solutions and the other companies mentioned here, was provided through WebFX’s OmniSEO® platform.

Implementing AI visibility tracking

Adapting analytics tracking for zero-click SEO is the beginning — not the end — to understanding a company’s performance across search experiences.

That’s why each of these businesses used OmniSEO® to:

• Track visibility across 10 AI search experiences, including AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Bing, and Perplexity
• Monitor competitor performance in AI search experiences
• Measure the company and its competitors performance over time
• Understand how LLMs perceive the brand and its products or services

Through OmniSEO®, these businesses (and their dedicated WebFX team) could make strategic decisions about their approach to zero-click search while also understanding their performance and position in the marketplace.

How these zero-click SEO strategies delivered impactful results

Altogether, these zero-click SEO strategies worked together to help these businesses achieve the following results (including a 500%+ increase in leads for two companies):

Adapt to zero-click SEO with WebFX

At WebFX, we’ve helped companies across industries adapt to AI search — and we’re ready to help your business do the same. Explore our case studies and AI search and SEO optimization plans today.

Or, talk with a strategist by contacting us online today!