Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web is officially available for pre-order.

YOU HEARD RIGHT, CUTIES! I announce my and Rand Fishkin's upcoming book, explain why pre-orders matter, and tell you how to claim the pre-order bonuses.

Pre-order the book at zeroclickmarketing.co/book.

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

Marketers say they want good strategy. Then they optimize for whatever’s easiest to measure.

This episode is about why easy-to-see metrics like traffic, likes, attributed pipeline, and rankings can create false confidence. Instead, better measurement can look like this: off-platform sharing, stronger sales conversations, customer education, adoption of your language, and content that does more than one job. In a zero-click world, the easiest metric to report is not always the one that matters most.

Timestamps

00:00 Why marketers optimize for what’s easiest to measure

01:36 How SEO gets too much credit for capturing demand

04:23 The Fitbit B2B example and content as a service

06:09 Better ways to judge content quality

07:54 Why the best content does more than one job

11:12 What better measurement looks like in a zero-click world

You can do audience research with all kinds of tools and networks like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, Reddit, and of course, my employer, SparkToro. You can create an always-free account and get 5 reports per month on sparktoro.com.

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

For years, marketers were told to create the ultimate guide: one page that covers everything on a topic. That advice worked when the goal was to rank, earn the click, and keep people on your site. But that era is coming to an end. In this episode, I walk through new research on Google and ChatGPT that points in the same direction: broad, catch-all content is getting weaker, while focused, hard-to-replace value is getting stronger. I break down what winning websites actually have in common, why relevance now beats comprehensiveness, and how to rethink your content strategy for a zero-click world.

Research cited in this episode:

• 5 Data-Backed Features of Websites Winning Google in 2026 by Cyrus Shepard
• The Fan-Out Effect: What Happens Between a Query and a Citation by Kevin Indig and AirOps

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:21 The rise of the “ultimate guide” playbook
00:53 Why broad, catch-all content is getting weaker
01:00 What Google’s winners have in common
02:19 The difference between reading and doing
02:36 Why destination sites win
02:57 Brand vs. discoverability
03:52 What ChatGPT actually rewards
04:30 Why answering one question beats answering five
04:56 The new standard: defensibility + focus
05:55 How to rethink your content strategy
06:36 Why brand matters more than ever
07:00 Final takeaways

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

Best practices can help you avoid obvious mistakes — but they can also make your marketing forgettable. In this episode, I explain why the real problem isn’t best practices themselves, but using them without personalization, taste, or audience insight. Drawing on my experience at Fitbit, I’ll show you how audience research leads to stronger content, smarter channel choices, and more compelling marketing — plus a few practical ways to get started without spending much money or time. This episode is an expansion of my blog post, “Best Practices Are Meaningless Without Audience Research.”

Timestamps:

00:00 How best practices turn into beige marketing

01:27 The antidote: audience research

02:01 The Fitbit example and the real B2B challenge

03:43 Good marketers have always done some version of this

05:08 More examples: marketers, skincare, and sports betting

06:36 How to start doing audience research

07:40 How to spot patterns faster

09:38 Best practices only tell you the format

10:05 How audience research improves taste

11:02 Best practices get you on the field. Audience research helps you win.

You can do audience research with all kinds of tools and networks like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, Reddit, and of course, my launch sponsor, SparkToro. You can create an always-free account and get 5 reports per month on sparktoro.com.

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

Before someone clicks your website, they may already have formed an opinion about your brand from the public record — snippets, Reddit threads, reviews, and AI answers. So today, I’m sharing a 7-step playbook for shaping your brand’s public record. I’ll help you audit what’s visible, identify weak claims versus strong facts, publish more credible proof, make that proof easier to retrieve and cite, and track whether the public story around your brand is getting stronger over time. It’s a practical episode about reputation, visibility, and what marketers can still influence in a world of fragmented discovery.

This episode pairs nicely with the previous week’s “Why Better Attribution Won’t Fix Your Measurement Problem.” You might want to check that one out after this one. :)

Timestamps:

00:00 Why your brand’s public record matters

02:00 The 7-step playbook

02:35 Audit the story the internet is already telling about you

04:00 Treat third-party services as an extension of your brand

05:25 Separate weak claims from strong facts

07:22 Make your content easy to retrieve, cite, and summarize

09:01 Measure whether your public record is getting stronger

Resources:

• Wil Reynolds’s “GEO Experiment: How AI highlighted the 1 bad review we got in 24 years”
• Ross Simmonds’s “Reddit’s Impact on B2B Search” study
• Search Engine Land’s “Why your content doesn’t appear in AI Overviews”
• Alertmouse for brand monitoring
• SparkToro for audience research

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

A lot of marketers say they want better measurement. Usually, what they really want is cleaner attribution.

In this episode, I argue that those are two different jobs. Attribution tends to reward the channel that captured demand once the buyer was already in motion. SparkToro's latest research proves that influence happens everywhere. So what we really need is better measurement — to help us understand lift: are more people searching for you, remembering you, mentioning you, and showing up ready to buy? If you confuse the two, you’ll keep overvaluing what’s easiest to credit and underestimating what actually drives demand.

Timestamps:

00:00 The real problem: buyers are influenced before the click

01:41 Attribution vs. measurement: two different jobs

04:33 Stop giving the wrong channels all the credit...

05:10 ...because influence happens everywhere!

08:05 Why measurement needs to get broader and simpler

09:30 Why we (accidentally?) end up starving our demand creation channels

10:47 Measurement needs to grow up.

11:24 Next week: influencing the public record

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

Today I'm sharing my notes on recent news/research in the worlds of AI and Google Search. I'm breaking down 3 key pieces:

• Ross Simmonds of Foundation Inc shows how Reddit influences buyer discovery earlier than many marketers realize.
• Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy Signal argues that clicks still matter — not as a vanity metric, but as a signal of relevance and satisfaction.
• Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive offers a brutal real-world reminder that if you don’t publish defensible facts about your brand, AI may fill in the gaps with whatever scraps it can find.

If you want a more polished version of this episode along with a spiffy graph, read my blog post.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:27 Why these three studies belong together
01:05 Ross Simmonds on Reddit’s growing role in SaaS search
03:05 Cyrus Shepard on why clicks still matter
04:18 Zero-click does not mean clicks stopped mattering
06:10 Wil Reynolds on AI surfacing an old negative review
07:26 Why “the truth is out there” is not enough if it isn’t published
09:08 What marketers should do now

Big thank you to my launch sponsor, SparkToro, the makers of fine audience research software. Rand Fishkin/SparkToro did the research that also supports the ideas in this episode.

ZCM Field Notes are short reactions to news or observations of what’s happening in the field.

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

A lot of marketers confuse polished with effective. Or they confuse consistency with substance. But neither one guarantees the work is actually good.

In this episode, I make the case for a higher bar: usefulness. In a zero-click world, your content has to stand on its own. So before you worry about making it prettier or posting more often, ask whether the idea is actually strong enough to deserve attention.

New here? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is

Join us next week — I’ll break down why marketers overvalue what’s easiest to count.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:37 The tension between polish and volume
01:24 Why polish can signal care but not guarantee value
02:02 Why volume can create momentum but still say very little
02:38 The real bar: usefulness
03:15 Respecting your audience by assuming they’re smart
04:54 A simple test: strip away the design and ask whether the idea still holds up
05:20 What Amazon’s memo culture gets right
06:30 What to do when the idea itself is the problem
07:01 Three signs a piece of content is ready to publish
09:28 The hierarchy of useful marketing content
11:03 Why this matters even more in a zero-click world
11:46 The question to ask before you publish
12:15 Next week: why marketers overvalue what’s easiest to count

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com