How to approach the new reality of ”zero-click buying"

3VC: What are the best strategies you have seen in adjusting to reduced site traffic?This is so worth taking a minute to unpack. Research shows that in a few short years, 89% of buyers now use AI engines such as Chat GPT and Perplexity to research companies. This has created a new path to purchase known as ”zero-click buying." 

Rather than finding and visiting you through SEO rankings, buyers now let robots do the research and comparison leg work for them. Through that, they decide who to contact without ever clicking onto a company’s platform. (Thus, “zero click buying.”)

The downside is less traffic coming to your site. The upside is that those buyers who do visit are more educated and have much stronger buying intent. Think of this moment in time as a permanent shift from quantity of visitors to quality of visitors. 

3VC: How can startups best re-engage with these buyers to get their site traffic back where they want it?  Traffic will likely never go back to where it was before the answer engines. But to maximize exposure in the new model, the obvious answer is to become more visible in answer engine searches. 

By now, we’re all familiar with the term Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). It’s how to implement it that seems to remain the mystery.  

Step one is to understand if you’re visible or invisible to the answer engines. If you have a quick 30 minutes, you can run your own high-level test. 

Go to engines like Chat GPT and Perplexity, and prompt  questions your potential customers would ask. For example:

• What is the best product in [insert your category] for 2026?
• What are the top 3 (insert your category) to fix (insert problem you solve for)?

If you aren’t coming up in the answers the engines serve, then chances are very good that potential buyers won’t even know you exist when they are researching their next purchase.

3VC: It sounds like you’re talking about becoming digitally invisible, which isn’t something any startup wants to be. How do we keep that from happening?Certainly, AEO requires strategy and expertise. But it doesn’t have to break the bank. 

Armed with a little knowledge, startup leaders can ask informed questions and ensure they are spending wisely. A strong visibility strategy really comes down to repositioning on two core fronts: How you present yourself and how you differentiate yourself. 

Repositioning how you present yourself. Make sure your visibility strategy includes strategic updates to your site, content structure, and content strategy.

• Site: Remove JavaScript for robot readability, add schema markups for context cues, and scrub jargon and repetitiveness from your copy to build trustworthiness.
• Content structure: Present content without gating it and write in Q&A  formats, bullet points, and short, self-contained paragraphs and wrap it in basic HTML to make it easily extractable. 
• Content strategy: Thinks beyond traditional paid and organic in favor of user generated sites and trusted third party platforms, such as industry publications.

Reposition how you differentiate yourself. Product marketing can no longer be the priority. With AI tools enabling competitors to copy features overnight, carving out differentiation now requires brand narratives, thought leadership, and strategy-led sales conversations.

• Brand Narrative: Develop a value-driven brand that makes competitors less relevant and tell human stories that show buyers who you are, not just what you sell.  
• Thought Leadership: Prioritize original, expert insights that build credibility and trust with answer engines. Your content should focus on educating, not indoctrinating.
• Strategic Sellers: Orbit pitch decks and sales conversations around strategically creating unique value. AI engines have already told buyers your product story. 

3VC: Do you have any recommendations about where to start? The quickest fix is to restructure key pages on your site so AI answer engines can easily grab and cite your content.

• Identify 1-2 pages with the highest traffic. 
• Update your headers to use the language that matches what buyers are using in their searches. Then add corresponding schema to make it easily crawlable. 
• Add a simple FAQ section at the bottom of each page with 3-5 questions that offer insight and education for buyers.Again, wrap it in basic HTML tags. 

Pro tip: Do not use the same Q&A content on each page. It could confuse the engines. 

These few shifts should start to make you more visible in the engines. But quick fixes only yield short term results. Bigger shifts are required to keep and increase visibility gains over time. 

3VC: How should founders approach creating long-term visibility? For long-term visibility strategy, the most strategic and cost-effective approach is to build the value story and brand narrative foundation first, then rework site and platform content. If you try to do the site first, you’ll just end up rewriting the copy a second time once you have your narrative done. 

The other thing to consider is timing. Adopting early has a compounding effect. AI systems learn in a self-reinforcing cycle, so it gets more difficult to be considered a go-to, trusted source as time goes on. 

It can sound like a lot, but if leadership is engaged, these bigger shifts can be made quickly. We have fully repositioned clients and updated whole websites within a matter of months.

3VC: Shifting focus from what founders should do, what are the things that don’t work and should be avoided? Great question. In the scramble to reposition for the new buyer’s journey, there are plenty of missteps happening. 

• Abandoning SEO altogether. AI engines still look for key words when creating answers, so they do still play a role in ensuring your site is crawlable.
• Speaking in Jargon: Answer engines prioritize clear, everyday language that matches how real buyers ask questions. Jargon triggers mistrust and confusion.
• Overlooking sales insights: Your sales teams hear buyer questions first hand every day. Tap into these insights. They shine a light on the topics you want to build your content around.

Visibility strategies are undergoing massive change, but we view it as a good thing. It’s a chance to ensure the systems that underpin your entire go-to-market motion are set up to create long-term success. The shifts startups make today can change the trajectory of the way they scale tomorrow.