The Zero-Click World: How Answers, Overviews, and Agents Compress the Customer Journey

TL;DR: AI is compressing the customer journey and eliminating clicks. AI Overviews, answer engines, and agents now deliver answers and take action before customers ever reach a website. Traffic may be down, but intent isn't. In a zero-click world, visibility means being the answer, being cited, and being trusted wherever AI-driven decisions happen.

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If you're a marketing leader, you've probably been reading headlines about "changing," "non-linear" paths to purchase for years. But in 2026, the online customer journey isn't just getting shorter. In some cases, it feels like it's disappearing.

That's because AI-generated answers and AI agents are compressing what used to be a multi-step journey into a single moment of decision. And often, that moment doesn't include a click at all: McKinsey reports that unprepared brands may see traffic declines of 20–50 percent as AI completely reshapes how customers find and choose brands.

The result? Leaders see declining website traffic, conversion paths are harder to explain, and attribution models feel increasingly out of sync with reality. And this isn't a reporting issue or a temporary algorithm update. It's a structural shift in how discovery works — all driven by AI.

To navigate this change, it helps to understand the three distinct forces driving zero-click behavior today. Here's what's happening:

1. Google AI Overviews compress discovery inside search results

AI Overviews are changing what it means to "rank" on Google.

Instead of a list of links, customers increasingly see direct, synthesized answers at the top of search results. These summaries pull from multiple sources and often eliminate the need to visit a website.

Take a look at this AI Overview for "how to stain a deck."

Instead of needing to read through a series of blogs, articles, and/or product pages, the basic information is all there – no clicks necessary.

This is one of the clearest examples of zero-click search trends at work. Traffic declines, but intent doesn't. Customers are still asking questions; after all, people still want to stain decks. They're just getting their answers sooner.

For brands, the impact on SEO is real. AI Overviews reduce available clicks, shift attention away from individual pages, and make traditional ranking positions less predictive of performance. Visibility now depends on whether your brand is understood and cited by the systems generating those summaries.

This helps explain why Google traffic is dropping even when demand remains steady — and why many teams are seeing declining organic traffic in 2026 without a clear root cause.

2. Answer engines remove the journey almost entirely

"Answer engines" like ChatGPT and Perplexity go a step further.

These platforms don't summarize search results and then deliver a list of links below them. Instead, they give complete, confident responses in conversational interfaces. Customers ask questions. They get answers. Often, that's the end of the interaction.

As you can see, in this model, the only remaining click may be a transaction… but even that isn't guaranteed. (In this example, someone might simply go buy DEFY stain in person at a hardware store.)

The TL;DR: When the an alone satisfies the need, there's no immediate reason to visit a site.

This is why AI answers without clicks are really changing the attribution game. Discovery happens across tools that don't behave like traditional search engines and don't send traffic in predictable ways.

For marketers, this creates a new visibility challenge. If your brand isn't part of these conversational answers, it's effectively invisible — even if your content is well-optimized by old standards.

3. AI agents act on the customer's behalf

AI agents represent the most compressed version of the journey yet.

That's because agents actually make decisions on a user's behalf. They compare options, check availability, book appointments, and more. And this journey unfolds outside your site, beyond traditional analytics, and without the signals teams are used to measuring.

In this world, visibility means something different. It's not about pages or paths. It's about being the trusted option that an agent can understand, verify, and act on. And it has to start today.

That's not a failure of marketing execution. It's a signal that the system has changed.

What this means for marketing strategy and spend

Zero-click behavior isn't a "crisis." After all, people still ask questions, and they still make purchases. The intent is there. Capturing it just requires a shift in how brands think about organic and paid investment.

Strategies built around driving traffic to owned properties no longer reflect how decisions are made. Visibility now happens upstream — in AI summaries, conversational answers, and agent-driven actions.

In this reality, success looks like:

• Being present at the moment a decision happens, whether or not a human clicks.

• Having data that's accurate, trusted, and easy for AI systems to interpret.

• Understanding where your brand appears — and where it doesn't — across AI-driven and traditional surfaces.

To get started, click here to learn more about the three AI search visibility metrics you should be tracking today.

And if you're ready for more? Learn how tools like Scout help teams see how they show up when clicks disappear.