The Zero-Click Era — Is SEO Dead?

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. This next person is someone I've had the pleasure of knowing for a long time, probably 10 plus years, and maybe more now that I think about it. In the world of tech and tech marketing and tech PR and reporting and media and all that good stuff.

I don't hold it against them that they're a Cleveland Browns fan, but I do want to just mention that upfront. But let me introduce you to my friend Clinton Karr. Clinton, how are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me on, Alan. Fantastic.

Hey, Clinton, I mentioned we go back a while. You've been a PR marketing professional for as long as I know. Give people a sense kind of your journey, and then let's transition from that into ProGEO.

Great. I've been working in cybersecurity for 20 years, and yeah, we go back about 15 years or so. I remember I was working late one night and found your "Network World" column, and I forget exactly who I was pitching you at the time, but I've worked with a lot of great cybersecurity brands over the years, and we connected, like you said, in spite of the fact that I'm a Cleveland Browns fan.

And I've worked agency side, in-house side, and now I've been consulting for the past 10 years, sort of fractional corporate communications and integrated content marketing, doing a lot of executive thought leadership and ghostwriting for really some of the biggest names in cybersecurity. Don't want to say who, to dispel that illusion, but. Otherwise, it wouldn't be ghosting, would it?

Yeah, exactly. Very cool. Talk to us about ProGEO.

Sure. So, and the topic of today's discussion is around how marketing professionals are using AI in their workflows, and so ProGEO is Generative Engine Optimization. And coming from my cybersecurity background, it's really focused on a data-driven approach, right?

That we're not just making assertions on what we think work, but we're doing the research to figure it out. And Generative Engine Optimization is really the evolution or extension of corporate communications, content marketing, and search engine optimization. You could think about it as the sort of earned media channels of corporate communications, the owned media channels of content marketing, and then the technical elements of SEO.

And then there's some elements of Generative Engine Optimization that are being studied and have possibly some new strategies and tactics involved. I think there'll definitely be new strategies and tactics. Clinton, I was just on a rant.

So I'm in studio right here in our Techstrong studio. We have three different sets. So down that way is the Techstrong gang set, and I was just there.

We just wrapped that show up at 12:45 my time. Mm. And we were talking about Google, right, serving up Gemini searches-- Not Gemini searches, Gemini answers.

"New York Times" ran an article, only nine out of 10 are correct. Which sounds- Right ... pretty good until you take it to the trillions of searches results- Right ...

that Google serves up, and you get millions of wrong searches. But more than that, fundamentally, Google has changed, which is the golden goose of their business, by the way, right? The search- Mm-hmm ...

results sponsored and all of that. They've changed the search business from, they used to tell you where to go to find information based upon what you search to find answers, to serving up answers within their own site, not sending you out. Right?

So they've gone from being a search provider to a content answer provider. And the beauty or hypocrisy of what they're doing is they're using my information to serve up answers to you without sending you to me to get those answers. And that was always the quid pro quo here is that- That's right ...

Google spidered our sites, indexed our sites, so that when people search for these things, if we did a good job on SEO, Google would send them our way. And for many of us in media and marketing, that was the bread and butter of our traffic, organic search traffic. Mm-hmm.

And now with this AI kind of serving up answers, Google has a no-click kind of mantra where they're not sending you out. Yeah. They're calling it the zero-click phenomenon.

Zero-click. Right. I said no-click.

And there was a Bain & Company research report from last year that said 80% of consumers are resolving 40% of their queries without even clicking a link. Yeah. And that was last year.

And the whole crawl-to-referral ratio thing, there's a Cloudflare Radar, it's a dashboard, and you can check it out. Google proper will crawl your site five times for every one referral it sends to your site. Anthropic crawls it 8,000 times for every one referral it sends to you.

Wow. But what's a poor boy to do, right? I need that organic traffic, whether it comes from Anthropic, Google, or somewhere else.

As a publisher, it's important to me, and I see it happening. Anyway, enough ranting. I ranted over there about it.

I'm ranting over here about it. Let's talk about this survey you did over at RSAC. Sure.

So, and again, coming from a cybersecurity background, definitely not my first RSAC, and not the first time I've conducted a survey at RSAC. Although usually we're looking at cybersecurity opinions. And so with this shift to AI, I was really curious about how marketing professionals are using AI in their workflows.

And so I surveyed 112 marketing professionals that sort of self-identified as marketing professionals. And I would say probably over 100 of them were conducted in the expo hall at the booth. So this is a largely representative sample of RSA exhibitors, right?

So it is maybe important to realize that these are going to be the sort of leading-edge companies, right? They've invested in RSA, so it likewise makes sense that they've invested in AI platforms. But likewise, I think this is then representative of the cybersecurity industry, and cybersecurity being an enterprise technology, this is something that you could extrapolate some of these adoption rates and usage patterns are similar to what you would see across enterprise technology companies.

Agreed. So, key findings. Thank you for providing me with the- Sure ...

cheat sheet on this. But 91, over a little over 91% of marketing professionals have an enterprise subscription. Well, that's not the $20 a month ChatGPT or the 200 a year Claude.

Yeah. It's- Or is it? probably somewhere in the middle, right?

It is the pro account, which ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro. It probably depends on enterprise subscriptions. There's a lot of discussion right now about if those enterprise subscriptions are getting priority in terms of the quality of the results and the tokens and so on and so forth.

But, yeah, it's somewhere in the middle. I think what's interesting about that 91% is there was an MIT study that came out in August that a lot of people were talking about. People really honed in on the fact that MIT was saying that 95% of enterprise AI adoption was failing, but also in that report was the fact that really the results of this survey were flipped.

It was 90% of users had a personal subscription to an AI platform, and only 40% of companies had an enterprise subscription, right? I see. So again, we are looking at a kind of specialized vertical here with the cybersecurity industry.

But we're now seeing 91%, nine out of organizations have an enterprise account, and almost half of them are using multiple platforms, and most commonly it's ChatGPT and Claude. And then- Yeah. No, I think then Gemini and then maybe Perplexity, and then I think Microsoft is...

And now, and rounding out the track. Yeah, exactly. 1% of marketing professionals have an enterprise subscription now, when it was 40% back in August.

And almost half of those, about 49%, have multiple platforms, and Claude and ChatGPT being the two most predominant subscriptions. Where was Gemini, Perplexity, and- Yeah. Gemini was- ...

Groq ... in the race. Perplexity was an other.

Copilot was other. Some people- What about Groq? noted Cursor and that sort of thing too.

Anybody mention Groq? XAI or- There was one mention of Groq, yeah. Well- Yeah ...

it makes sense. So I'm a bit of a freak. I'm sure I have every single one you mentioned.

And I got to tell you, I wonder what Agentics is going to, how Agentics is going to change that, right? Because- Yeah, because that's really, I think, the next level, right? Because what we did look at was marketing professionals and how they're using AI in their sort of daily workflows, and not surprisingly, content is king, right?

We're seeing that something like 83% of marketing professionals are using GenAI to brainstorm their content, at least once a week. And 82% are creating content, either their first draft content or editing their content, and 75% are repurposing content. So that's definitely the sort of most frequent use case.

And I also kind of broke things down between high-intensity and low-intensity users and kind of regardless, of course, some people are using it more frequently. But you can see, even among the low-intensity users, there's a pretty frequent use of GenAI for content creation. And I think where you see a sort of lower adoption is around things like automation, hooking into APIs for your HubSpot, your Marketo, your 6sense, right, for sales enablement or your email marketing campaigns.

And likewise, and this was actually surprising to me, was that a quarter of the respondents said that they're vibe coding at least once a weekWhich is kind of incredible. Now, we counted vibe coding as anything from creating HTML to custom scripts or custom tools. So it could be just the sort of thing that they're creating HTML for an email campaign or that sort of thing, but it's now the sort of thing where that's not a bottleneck.

If you're a marketing professional and you need to get something out the door, then you can create it yourself. Absolutely. Here's the thing, Clinton, we're in such a rapid inflationary phase, if you are using Big Bang terms, right?

When the universe, that spark of creation, and then it went into this rapid inflation that faster than the speed of light, they say, where the universe blew up. I think we're seeing the same thing through AI, with AI, where, yeah, when that MIT study came out, with 95% of people not seeing the ROI and only 40% using it, that was probably an accurate number. I think that's flipped on its head by now, and I think it flipped on its head around November.

November, December, that release of Claude and AI and ChatGPT really flipped the switch. I agree. Yep.

I think OpenClaude was, what, February? Mm-hmm. End of February.

And some of the things that have come out since then have flipped the switch on agentics, and you're going to see people deploying and coding and using agentics to not just brainstorm or create content, but to post content, to use content. I know for us personally here at Techstrong, we've been on a journey for the last month where got a few people using OpenClaude. Most of the team is on Perplexity Computer- Oh, okay ...

which is an agent. Game-changing. What we've put out.

Actually, Perplexity keeps a running website report for me of all the different projects we're using it for, and it's phenomenal. I can't even begin to start telling you. So I'm not surprised.

I think that number's moving. Yeah. It sounds to me like you guys are maybe leading the charge, because I did notice, being a cybersecurity conference, I couldn't help but ask both what sort of corporate usage policies looked like and how they were being enforced.

And there is a gap where 76% of the respondents said that their company has a corporate usage policy, but only 43% said that they're enforced with technical controls. And it is still early days, right? Yeah.

I think last year for me, also, when that MIT report came out and said 95% aren't achieving ROI, it's like, well, yeah, it's year one in a sense of this enterprise adoption, right? Well, yeah. Exactly.

I know 2026 is the year that people are really looking to get AI native, and I do think like that gap between policy and enforcement shows that there is still a lack of strategy. And likewise, I think that if you look at marketing, the same way that shadow AI is a risk in cybersecurity, if you just have a marketing team that's sort of doing ad hoc prompting, that's also a risk. So what you're doing is that same idea of sort of governance, right?

But for a brand voice, for an editorial calendar, and I think that's where we're going to see the next level of maturity materialize is around using MCP servers- Yeah ... Claude skills, Claude projects, custom GPTs, right? To create a centralized brand voice and ensure that sort of everyone's agents are working in unison.

So that's the nice thing about this Perplexity Computer is you do have this agent, and it has like 400 integrations out of the box. Right. Right?

And so it really hooks into everything. But then there's something called Perplexity Spaces that you get with the subscription. So now you and I, assuming you were on my team, we could share the same prompt, the same task, as they're called in Perplexity.

You don't necessarily get that with the OpenClaude. However, it's the difference when you're using raw open source versus sort of a commercial product where they're responsible for locking it down more and making sure of security. Our OpenClaude users here, we absolutely have a very-- I helped build it.

Our security policy on what it's allowed to do, what it's not allowed to do, how you use it, what it can have access to. It starts with a zero trust, and we build from there. And they all run on their own machines or in a VM on top of the isolated machine, so it's abstracted one layer higher.

What access to emails or files do they have? All of these things. But it's easy because we're not an enterprise, right?

15, 20, 25 people here. So it's a little bit easier to manage. I still think we're coming to grips with that.

I also think, Clinton, though, that the whole-- I've heard it called GEO, AEO, this whole idea of SEO for AI, right? Yeah. I know.

It's sort of like the Scooby-Doo meme where they pull off the mask and it's- Yeah ... still the same guy underneath. And I do think where with SEO, you had gurus who were publishingSearch Engine Watch and all these kinds of things.

It was more of a science. I don't know if GEO or AEO has reached science level yet. I think it's still artistic and a little bit fuzzy.

Yeah. Well, there was a Princeton study that was produced in 2023 that kind of coined the term generative engine optimization, and it did find some correlations with things like including statistics, adding quotations, that those had a higher correlation with citation in the models. But the thing is, that research was produced before the retrieval augmented generation, so it's not really reflective of what production environments look like today.

And that's the problem we live in today. As soon as these studies come out, in three weeks, they're obsolete. Yeah.

It's true. I do think that there are some people that are tracking it. Muck Rack- Yes ...

I'm sure you're familiar with. They put out what is AI reading, and that was, again, in December, so it's like who knows how much things have changed. But they also found that including statistics in press releases increases the likelihood that they'll be cited.

There's someone named Kevin Indig that publishes The Growth Memo, and he just recently did a very in-depth analysis of what's working for AI citations. And the fact of the matter is that it changes depending on your vertical. And so it's one of these things, and that's, I think, one of the values here of the survey that I produced, is because it shows that within the cybersecurity market, and again, if you want to extrapolate that to enterprise technology, people are using Gemini, or they're using ChatGPT and Claude.

And so if I was working on an enterprise marketing team trying to reach enterprise buyers, those are the platforms that I would be looking to optimize for first. One can make the argument, though, by optimizing for Gemini, you're picking up Google. Yeah.

Of course. And again, with every platform being different, one thing for Gemini is that it prioritizes YouTube because- Yeah. Of course it does ...

of it being a Google property. Yeah. And it can read all of the transcriptions into the model and that sort of thing.

So every model has its own idiosyncrasies, and every market vertical has its own idiosyncrasies. So there isn't really a one size fits all approach, and that's why we just wanted to kind of start benchmarking things now. It's like my grandma used to say, Clinton.

" So yeah. But I do think what you're going to see is... Well, certainly here for a company like Techstrong, but I think for most marketing people too, we can't afford to over-specialize for any one of these engines because we're going to need ChatGPT.

That seems to be the consumer choice. Claude for business. Gemini, of course, brings us Google.

As much as I am not a fan of the Copilot, I don't think it's up to snuff compared to the others, it does get you into that Microsoft world. This is why they race the horses. Clinton, is this survey something people could download?

It's not even something they can download. It's ungated. ai/research, I have a couple of different research reports I've produced.

Another one that I vibe coded a website scanner and looked at the Fortune 500 adoption rates of a few different technical signals. Very cool. Hey, man, keep up the great work.

I love what you're doing, Clinton. I'm sorry I didn't get to see you at RSAC this year. Hey, well, I'm seeing you now and watch you on Techstrong, so.

Well, it's not quite the same. You're here on Zoom with me, and we could have seen you in person, but that's okay. Maybe Black Hat.

Yeah, we'll see. And hey, at least it's not generative avatars talking to each other yet, right? How do you know?

Yeah. All right. Thanks for your time, Alan.

Thanks, Clinton, man. I appreciate you. You be well.

Keep doing what you're doing. All right, take care. All right.

Clinton Karr here on Techstrong TV. We're going to take a break. We'll be back with more in a little bit.