Pizza searches are up 20% year over year, according to PMQ’s 2026 Pizza Power. But clicks to websites haven’t kept pace: across industries, brands are reporting that clicks are decreasing.
But demand for pizza hasn’t gone anywhere. Customers are just making decisions before they ever reach a website, through driving directions, tap-to-call, menus, reviews, and increasingly, AI.
For Pizza Hut, that gap between demand and measurable clicks is changing how the team thinks about content, measurement, and discovery. Young Truong, who leads organic growth, content, and AI innovation, found that the answer isn’t a new trick. It’s building something genuinely useful – the Pizza Hut Pizza Calculator, which helps customers figure out how much pizza to order for a family dinner or a party of 50, is now earning citations across AI engines because of it.
In this episode of The Intelligence Brief, Chris Brownlee (SVP of Product, Yext) sits down with Young Truong (Content and Organic Growth, Pizza Hut) live from Envision in New York to discuss how brands can show up when AI sits between a craving and a purchase.
This episode breaks down:
Why search demand is growing even as website clicks decline, and what traditional analytics miss before the click
How a simple pizza calculator became a source of AI citations by being genuinely useful
Why AI engines are evolving from search engines into decision engines, and what that means for content strategy
Why optimizing for helpfulness outlasts tactics built around algorithm changes
How to use AI to analyze massive data sets while fact-checking its output to avoid hallucinations
If you’re a marketing or digital leader trying to understand where your customers are going when the clicks disappear, this episode offers a real-world look at how useful content, clean data, and a customer-first mindset keep your brand visible wherever people search.
Episode Links
Transcript
00:00:00 Chris (Host): Pizza searches are up 20% year over year. So where did all the clicks go? Young Truong, who leads content and organic growth at Pizza Hut, has a pretty clear answer and a refreshingly simple strategy for winning. In a world where AI is becoming a decision engine between a craving and a purchase. Today we're talking about why demand hasn't disappeared, even as clicks have, how a simple pizza calculator became an AI citation machine, and why putting the customer first has always been, and will always be the only SEO strategy that truly stands the test of time. Let's get into it.
00:00:41 Chris (Host): All right, let's start with a brief introduction. Your role, your organization, and what you're responsible for when it comes to customers finding you.
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah. Well, I'm with Pizza Hut. My name is Young Truong. I'm responsible for content as well as our organic growth.
Chris (Host): What's the biggest shift you've seen in how customers actually find and engage with businesses like yours over the last year especially?
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Oh. Great question. I would say like customer discovery has shifted significantly. And we see like you know, we hear about zero click. You hear about, you know, like folks in various industries you're losing 40, 60% of their clicks overall. But the thing is like the demand didn't just disappear. It's not like people didn't stop, like, hey, I don't want pizza anymore. As a matter of fact, Google actually, you know, came out and told us, hey, year over year, the search for pizza is actually growing 20% year over year. So where is all this demand going? Right. It's not showing on a website. What we're seeing is I think traditionally, if you're just tracking one part of it, like, you know, GA4 is post click, like, you know, like just after the click that's tracking. But there's so many things happening before the click that is not factored in. And that's where UX really comes into play. Right. You're talking about driving directions. You're talking about like tap to call, looking at menus or even reviews themselves.
Chris (Host): Yeah. So it sounds like you're thinking about a lot of this stuff much more interconnected maybe than you used to. How have you kind of approached that? Like not thinking about things as individual channels, but as much more connected strategy?
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): I believe that the biggest thing for us is that we tend to look at marketing and we look at other things as just like separate channels and everything. And you hear like the shift towards, like, omnichannel and then everything else. But with AI and just the power to analyze so much data. We have tons of data. You're talking about millions and billions of data points and everything else. Like, how can you just distill all this and then kind of wrap it all together to your point? You don't want to look at it disconnected, you know, silos or so. Like how can we weave all this in to give us just better decision making and more importantly for us, like at Pizza Hut, is just how can we make it as easy for the customer to find us to feed their family as possible? It doesn't matter where they're at. You know, whether they use AI, they call in, you know, like we are available. I think that's really important.
Chris (Host): Yeah. So walk me through how your teams actually responded then to this change. Like what did you change? What did you either add or stop doing? How did you adjust to such a pretty large shift?
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah, I'll say like the first thing is being able to be incredibly data literate, like, you know, really challenging the data because you have to make sure that you have good, strong, clean data, right. So we start with, hey, what is your source of truth? And then we go from there. If this is what we're seeing, like what is missing here? If Google is saying one thing or the industry is saying one thing, but then the clicks are not showing up. Like, where is that going? And we're seeing consumers essentially make decisions before they make those clicks. Right. And sometimes they might not even have to go on our website so they can just actually buy from a DoorDash or Uber Eats. That still goes to our locations. We still benefit from that. But again, we don't see that interaction. So being able to kind of recognize that, hey, things are changing quite a bit. Well, maybe the goalposts for measurement, you know, from 20 years ago might not work anymore. And then how can we get a bigger, a more holistic and a clearer picture? I think that's really important.
Chris (Host): Obviously you have no way to log in to ChatGPT or Gemini or anything like this. How do you influence how you then do show up when it's pre click? How do you make sure that Pizza Hut is there when someone's looking for pizza near me?
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): That's a great question. So for us, what we realize, and that's something that I actually, you know, mentioned and talked about a little bit, we created a pizza calculator. Right. So it seems very simple at first. And I think it's fairly straightforward. There were like other websites that might have a pizza calculator recipe, like Pizza Hut pizza calculator. It makes sense. Again, going back to that kind of core ethos that we have is, hey, how can we make it as easy for customers to feed their families? You know, pull together events, occasions, whatever that might be. So therefore Pizza Calculator comes out of that. We're seeing more citations just because it's useful. Like, you know, whether it's Google, whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude. They want to make it as useful as possible, but more importantly, they're getting to the point where, instead of a search engine, it's becoming that decision engine. Right. Because when you're looking and you're chatting back and forth, you're really trying to get to some sort of like, you know, endpoint, like, is it a purchase? Like, am I trying to feed a party of 50? Or am I just trying to feed, you know, my family of six? So creating those tools, getting citations and just making sure that the content is helpful, because you're not really doing content just to rank number one. Right. Like if robots are reading, the content is just terrible. Bottom line of everything is just like, hey, how can we make it as easy as possible for end customers anywhere to buy from Pizza Hut? That's really the core.
Chris (Host): Then the shift from SEO to AEO. It used to be very much about rankings, but I almost start to personify the AI myself, thinking like, well, it's actually answering as a person to a lot of these things and like, it's getting real questions from real people, and just trying to be helpful is such a great strategy. That's very different from what it has been for the last 20 years.
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah. And I think that's actually a really great point that you brought up. Right? Because SEO has really, I would say, morphed and changed, you know, quite a bit, like 20 years ago when I actually did, like, you know, SEO way back when. But the bottom line, if you really see the interweaving things, like, how can we make it as useful for searchers, and for us, how can we be as useful and as helpful for customers? I don't think that ever changes. Doesn't matter where they, you know, search, where they consume the content. But then if that's your underlying thing, as opposed to like, oh, I gotta like, hack my way to the top or something like that, right? It doesn't last, because the next update from Google, or, you know, when ChatGPT changes their citations and everything else, those, you know, castles in the sand are going to go. Right. Like when the next wave comes in, it's going to get washed out. But then if you have that underlying core focus of how can I be as helpful to my customers as possible, and you look at it from various lenses, like, you know, for me, I'm responsible for content. Hey, what are they searching for? Not so much that I want to outrank everybody. It's like, how can I be really helpful for these families? How can I be really helpful for folks that are planning, you know, a watch party for the Super Bowl, whatever that might be. Again, just really try to help them out. And then therefore, because of that emphasis, that customer first, it helps with every other thing that you have. And that doesn't change over 20 years, 50 years. If you put customers first I don't think you're going to go wrong.
Chris (Host): Yeah, totally. Love that statement. Absolutely true. I just absolutely love the way you're approaching it and thinking about it, because that is just such a great human, real customer-first way to approach it, too. So AI isn't just a marketing channel for marketers to manage either. It's also a capability that can help you do your job. What's your honest read on how well businesses, either Pizza Hut itself specifically or other businesses, are leveraging these capabilities?
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah, I believe that like all tools, you know, you're trying to leverage it as best as possible, but then you always have to have, like, you've heard the phrase, human in the loop. Right. You don't want to just let it go out there and just do like, you know, anything it wants to do, but it certainly helps. I think I mentioned earlier that there's just so many data points that you have. Right. And that's great for that. Like if you want to feed it a billion data points and say, how can you tell me a connective story about all this, or like, you know, now look at five different data sets and traffic that I'm seeing. What trends are you seeing? Right. There's like a million ways to kind of dice it up. It would take hundreds of hours, months or so to do all this. But then now, like, you break it down to, like, okay, what is it that the human in the loop, you know, actual humans, can do, which is kind of making some of these decisions. And then you kind of, like, almost outsource to the AI all this analysis and everything else. But you got to make sure you fact check all of this, right? Because you don't want it to be like, okay, this is, you know, what we're going after, but then it's hallucinating. Like what? What happened here? Like, you know, we did not bring in $3 trillion of revenue last year.
Chris (Host): Yeah, that's like the GDP of the US.
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah, absolutely.
Chris (Host): I'll even find myself, I'll make something with AI on a Friday. Come back thinking it's brilliant and genius. Close the laptop for the weekend. Come back on a Monday. And I'm like, oh no, this is totally wrong. But the technology is improving by leaps and bounds, incredibly.
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Yeah. That's the other thing that I am seeing: more personalization. I'm seeing that as you share more, it knows more. I think Claire mentioned, and Google also mentioned on the stage as well, that the more they know about you, your preferences and everything else, the easier it is to give you recommendations to get to a decision quicker, right? Because that's really what you want when you ask something like, okay, should I book this or that? Like, I was looking at concert tickets for my milestone birthday. Right. So then for me, I was like, okay, I want to look at, I don't know, like 50 listings or so. It's kind of funny because they don't connect to any of these different AI things, but I grabbed them. You know, I might have, you know, done a little bit of coding or something like that. So here are all the listings of people reselling the tickets. 200 levels, floor levels, 100 level. What is the view like for AT&T Stadium, which is down in Dallas for us. Right. And it literally combed through all the websites, all the reviews and everything. It did the work for me. And then this is the pricing. Like, where am I getting the bang for my buck? Right. So then for me, I mentioned before, for some people it could be very simple, five seconds. Like, you know, that's the response. AI might be like, hey, you are using up a lot of our bandwidth. It's like two minutes, three minutes, or one time I froze it multiple times, like GPT, because my query was getting so complicated, you know, for everything. But then that's the value, because I want to push the limit a little. And guess what? When I come back, it's like, wow, these are the best tickets that you can get for this section right here. And I'm like, okay, great. Track it. Right. And it'll just track these other things, things that people don't know about. Okay. Concert tickets, and then, you know, happy wife, happy life. Yep. It kind of works out. But then you can see that there's so many things that you can use and push. But then imagine applying that kind of emphasis onto helping customers, whether to order pizza, go to restaurants and everything else, because customers eventually will kind of move towards that wave where they're asking a lot of these questions and they just want to do one click and then all these things are in their cart. And if you do that, it makes it a lot smoother.
Chris (Host): Thanks for joining us, Young. Thanks for joining us here in New York for Envision as well. It's great to have you here.
Young Truong (Pizza Hut): Hey, thank you so much. And the pleasure's all mine. I really appreciate it.
Chris (Host): That's a wrap on this episode of The Intelligence Brief. If you found this useful, subscribe, leave us a review or send this to a colleague that needs to hear it. We'll see you next time.
