The rise of zero-click behaviour: what it means for university marketing and engagement
Key takeaways
Zero-click searches are increasing, reducing traditional website traffic as users get answers directly from search engines and AI tools.
Universities must adapt by optimising structured content, semantic mark-up, and natural language queries to remain a trusted source of information.
Performance evaluation should shift from page views to brand presence in search results, AI-generated summaries, and broader engagement metrics.
Expanding engagement beyond search, such as through email marketing, social media, and interactive tools, is crucial for maintaining audience relationships.
ContentEd+ courses provide the training to help your teams upskill to prepare for the challenge of zero-click engagement.
Ever popped that search query into Google and had the response that you need delivered right there in the search results page? Of course you have. It’s been a key development in search engines over the years. Alongside the rise of AI tools that can do our research for us, it’s all driving the growth of zero-click behaviour. And ultimately it might just stop people from visiting your school or university’s website.
So, what is zero-click behaviour?
Zero-click behaviour takes place when users get the information they need without ever clicking through to a website. It’s driven by changes in search engines and social platforms, which increasingly provide answers directly in search results. Google’s featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI-generated summaries mean that users can get answers instantly - without visiting a university’s website.
In fact, data reported in 2024 suggests that around 60% of Google search queries end without any clicks ever taking place. They’re simply answered within the search results themselves and the user goes away (hopefully) satisfied.
What’s driving zero-click behaviour?
This trend has been in development for many years, but it feels like it’s accelerating especially as AI platforms and search algorithms get more and more sophisticated. We’re currently seeing the drive coming from…
Search engines prioritising quick answers – keeping users on their sites by displaying direct answers in search results.
Growth of AI-powered tools – AI-driven search features, such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and AI assistants, aggregating and displaying key information without directing users to source websites. Okay, not everyone thinks it provides good results right now, but it’s evolving all the time.
Growth of voice assistants - the use of voice assistants like Siri and similar tools mean that people want instant answers, not to be told where they have to go to get those answers.
Changing audience behaviour – users increasingly expect instant access to information, leading to less patience for clicking through to full web pages.
Social media as a primary information source – Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are treated as information sources not just entertainment sites, making traditional website visits less essential to users, especially younger ones.
What does this all mean for university websites?
For universities, this shift in behaviour raises important challenges. And we’d be daft to ignore these shifts and the impact that it might have on our overall performance. It can lead to reduced website traffic and the subsequent difficulty in being able to measure our progress through engagement funnels. It might generate brand visibility but without the connection to a call to action and conversions. And, perhaps the most worrying of all, it can also lead to misinformation and inaccurate summaries being delivered to an audience that doesn’t have the desire or will to fact-check what they’re reading.
Whether we like it or not - and we most probably don’t like it - we must be laying the foundations with how we prepare our own content in order for us to win in this AI and algorithm-driven world. And that all comes down to having a robust content strategy.
And we absolutely must rethink the way in which we assess our own engagement performance.
Rethinking KPIs, measurement and performance evaluation
As zero-click searches rise, traditional metrics like page views and session duration become less reliable indicators of engagement. So, what should we be measuring instead? Or perhaps as well as. We might need to start looking at how we…
Measure our brand presence in search results, without the associated click throughs to the website
Track engagement over traffic, with new metrics that assess for the quality of an engagement instead of the quantity
Monitor AI-generated search summaries to check how our content is likely being used in AI generated results.
Some of these we might know how to do, but many we don’t yet have that knowledge or access to the data that matters.
What can universities do to ensure their content is prioritised and used properly by AI tools and algorithms?
This all boils down to taking a much more robust approach to your content strategy, and specifically embracing far better structured content and content engineering technics. This includes:
Developing a proper approach to structured content that clearly answers common questions in easily recognisable content blocks, modules or fields
Developing content clusters to indicate relevance and usefulness of content offered around high priority topics
Making sure that your content is fact-based and well-cited, so that it’s more likely to be used by AI tools
Use schema markup (for example, course details, event dates, faculty information) to help search engines categorise and display content accurately
Develop and roll out clear taxonomies to connect related content logically, making it easier for search engines and AI tools to interpret and understand
Write in a conversational tone aligning with how prospective students or your other potential website visitors might ask questions
Make content audits a constant process, building clear review, maintenance and archiving schedules into your content workflows to ensure that content always stays up to date or removed when it is no longer correct or needed. All too often content audits are treated as a project - often before a big web development initiative. Instead they should be business as usual.
We also need to make sure that we don’t just rely too heavily on search and our websites alone as key engagement tools. Instead we must be developing content strategies that take an omnichannel approach to engagement in a consistent and co-ordinated way. That includes:
Investing in email marketing and CRM strategies
Greater and more strategic use of social media and other community platforms
Creating content that truly adds value to our audiences’ lives instead of just providing them with information, so that they will want to keep clicking through and opening up the content that you provide for them.
Where to start?
Zero-click behaviour isn’t going away. It’s going to challenge us to work, think and measure ourselves in totally different ways in future. But the solutions that we’re discussing here aren’t just the answer to zero-click behaviour. They’re also the answer to just how to create great content, experiences and engagement in the first place.
What we can say with a fair degree of certainty though is that universities that proactively optimise their content for search engines algorithms and AI tools far far more than they currently do will be the ones that win visibility and influence in an evolving digital landscape.
So, get started by focusing on structured content, semantic mark-up, and engagement beyond website traffic. Develop that full and cohesive content strategy. Invest in it and stop tinkering or patching up digital estates and content structures that just aren’t fit for purpose in the way in which users expect to get their needs met.
ContentEd+ courses will help you get started
With a premium subscription to ContentEd+ you and your colleagues can dive into 18 CPD courses that offer expert-led content training. Our courses in content strategy, structured content, content modelling and taxonomy design provide the perfect foundation to upskill your teams in these ways of thinking right away. Learn more and join today.