Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad have opened pre-orders for Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web, a book described by its authors as a "tactical, occasionally unhinged, and aggressively footnoted guide" to earning attention without relying on website clicks. The announcement arrived on LinkedIn, where Natividad posted details of the project approximately one week ago, drawing more than 620 reactions and 89 comments from marketers grappling with the same structural forces the book is designed to address.

The timing is not incidental. According to data cited in the LinkedIn post by Fishkin, website traffic for the open web has declined 46% over the past three years. That figure puts concrete numbers on a shift that marketing teams across industries have been experiencing through declining organic search referrals, collapsing click-through rates, and attribution models that no longer capture how audiences actually discover brands.

From a phrase coined in 2022 to a 16-month writing project

The term "zero click marketing" did not originate with this book. Natividad coined it in 2022, initially as a framework for thinking about how content on social platforms performs better when it delivers value without requiring users to leave the platform. Fishkin began building on the phrase in parallel, using his research into web traffic patterns to document the structural reasons behind the shift. Three years of podcast episodes, newsletter issues, and audience research later, the two decided to turn the framework into a book.

According to Natividad's LinkedIn post, the writing process took 16 months. "16 months of blood, sweat, and so many tears," Fishkin wrote in his own response to her announcement, adding that the product "truly is fantastic." Pre-orders are live through Damn Gravity, an independent publisher. The book is scheduled to arrive in the fall of 2026. Formats include a hardcover, an audiobook, and an ebook. Pre-order buyers receive access to Zero-Click Summer School, a live online workshop series that Fishkin and Natividad will teach over the summer.

According to the publisher's product page, the hardcover and audiobook bundle includes a dollar-50 SparkToro credit, 50 percent off an Alertmouse subscription for one year, and a seat at the live summer workshops. A separate consulting bundle, limited to 25 buyers, includes a one-hour session with Natividad.

What the book covers

The book is structured around the argument that clicks - as a primary metric for measuring marketing effectiveness - no longer reflect how attention, trust, and purchase intent are actually built. According to the Damn Gravity product description, the book explains "why clicks cratered," covering the path Google took toward becoming what it describes as an "answer engine," how social platforms suppress links, and how AI tools including ChatGPT now function as discovery layers that intercept questions that previously sent visitors to websites.

It is explicitly not a growth-hacking manual. "This is not a 'how to go viral on TikTok' manual," Natividad wrote. "We hate those odds." The book is also, according to the authors, not written by or with AI tools - the Damn Gravity page specifically states it contains "prose that reads like AI (we didn't let spicy autocomplete anywhere near this)."

The framing addresses something concrete: the gap between the channels marketing teams know are working and the channels that are easiest to attribute in last-click reports. According to the publisher's description, the book is aimed at marketers who have asked "our traffic is down, but revenue is stable - what is happening?" and those who cannot prove return on investment on channels that are generating real demand because those channels do not produce trackable clicks.

The data behind the premise

The premise rests on a body of research that has accumulated over several years. More than half of Google searches now end without a click, according to the book's announcement. That claim aligns with data published by Datos and SparkToro, which PPC Land has tracked across multiple quarterly reports. The Q1 2026 State of Search report, published in late April 2026, showed that zero-click searches in the United States declined slightly, falling from 24.5% in December 2025 to 22.4% in March 2026 - the lowest level in the measurement period. In the EU and UK the decline was steeper, from 22.5% to 19.6%. While those figures suggest modest improvement, they still mean roughly one in five searches resolves entirely within Google's interface.

The longer-term picture is darker. According to Fishkin's commentary in the Q3 2025 Datos-SparkToro report, March through May 2025 recorded the lowest-ever percentage of Google searches sending external traffic. "While it's risen since then, we're still within a couple percentage points of that historic low, and the new 'normal,' promises to stay in the low 40s for percent of desktop searches that send traffic to anyone but Google themselves," Fishkin noted in that analysis.

Social platforms compound the problem. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube each have algorithmic or structural reasons to suppress outbound links - organic reach for link-bearing posts is systematically lower than for native content. Google's AI Overviews, which PPC Land has documented since early 2025, now appear on a large share of informational queries. Research from Ahrefs found that when AI Overviews appear, the organic click-through rate for the top-ranking page falls by 58%, compared with a baseline from December 2023. The combination of those forces - search, social, and AI - is what the book frames as a structural condition that marketing teams must account for, not a temporary dip.

News publishers have absorbed the sharpest losses. PPC Land reported in December 2025 that Google Web Search traffic to news publishers dropped from 51% of all publisher traffic in 2023 to 27% in the fourth quarter of 2025 - a loss of nearly 24 percentage points in two years. Google Discover, the personalized feed primarily accessed on mobile, grew to account for 67.51% of Google traffic to news organizations during the same period. Publishers that built their business models on organic search referrals now find that their primary Google traffic source operates on a recommendation algorithm they cannot optimize for in any conventional sense.

Who the authors are

Rand Fishkin cofounded Moz, the SEO software company, before leaving in 2018 to start SparkToro with Casey Henry. SparkToro is an audience research platform that maps where specific audiences spend time online. His first book, Lost and Founder, has sold more than 25,000 copies. Fishkin's research has been cited in the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust proceedings involving Google, in EU antitrust documentation, and in publications including the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He also cofounded Alertmouse, a brand tracking tool, and Snackbar Studio, an indie game developer.

Amanda Natividad is Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and the founder of the Zero Click Marketing podcast and consultancy. Before marketing, she worked as a tech journalist and as a test kitchen cook trained at Le Cordon Bleu. She has spoken at Content Marketing World, AdWorld, and MozCon, and guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the University of Washington. Her Twitter account grew from 700 to 100,000 followers organically in under two years - a detail the publisher's page highlights as a practical demonstration of the book's core argument.

The two have collaborated closely since Natividad joined SparkToro in 2021. The audience research the company produces, combined with Fishkin's long-running work on web traffic patterns, forms the empirical foundation underneath the book's arguments.

Community response and the irony noted by readers

The LinkedIn announcement generated an immediate response from marketing professionals, and several comments pointed to an obvious tension: a book about avoiding clicks required readers to click a link to pre-order it. Fishkin acknowledged the irony directly. "16 months of work on something this timely is worth every ironic click it takes to pre-order it," he wrote in one reply.

Britt Klontz, a public relations consultant, drew the comparison to the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic." Ashley Liddell, who is credited in a separate PPC Land article about SEO terminology for coining "Search Everywhere Optimization" - a phrase Fishkin publicly endorsed as a better alternative to AIO and GEO - was among the first to comment.

Other commenters brought specific data points. One described how Google Business Profiles now answer phone numbers, hours, services, reviews, booking links, and directions without users ever reaching a website - and cited the example of a medical spa receiving 400 monthly calls directly from its Google Maps listing while the associated website recorded zero sessions in Analytics. That pattern illustrates the book's central point in a local search context.

Remy Tennant, described in the comments as a tech, AI, and e-commerce entrepreneur, offered what may be the most representative sentiment from the thread: "Read Lost and Founder, and will read this too. Should help me come to terms with what is to me a frustrating new reality. Hopefully ZCM will grow on me. Right now it just seems like a whole lot of work. Years of 'free' SEO traffic made me lazy."

The phrase "free SEO traffic" matters here. Organic search was never free in any strict sense - it required content investment, technical optimization, and ongoing maintenance - but the returns were large enough relative to the inputs that many businesses built their entire acquisition models around it. Those returns have compressed sharply. According to Fishkin's commentary in the LinkedIn thread, "website traffic for the open web is down 46% in the past three years. People are still reporting vanity metrics just hoping the bad dream ends."

Shipping costs and the UK market

One practical issue surfaced repeatedly in the comments: international shipping costs. Multiple commenters from the UK and Australia noted that the base shipping fee for a hardcover from Damn Gravity - which ships from the United States - runs to approximately 35 British pounds, roughly the same as the book itself. One commenter wrote: "I REALLY want this book and I really want a book - not an e book. You know, pages and a cover and you store it on a 'bookshelf' but the book is £24.00 and the basic shipping to the UK is £35.00."

Fishkin responded by pointing readers toward the ebook and audiobook bundle, which carries no shipping cost and includes the same pre-order bonuses, with a suggestion to pick up the hardcover later through Amazon or other third-party retailers when the book launches at end of summer. Audiobook pre-orders are available directly from the Damn Gravity store at damngravity.com/products/zero-click-marketing.

Why it matters for the marketing community

The book arrives as a significant portion of the marketing industry continues operating on attribution frameworks designed for a click-driven web. Last-click attribution, Google Analytics session counts, and organic traffic reports remain the dominant metrics in most marketing dashboards - even as the channels generating genuine brand awareness and purchase intent increasingly operate outside any click-trackable framework.

PPC Land has covered the downstream consequences of this gap extensively. Google's Network advertising revenue - the AdSense, AdMob, and Google Ad Manager products that distribute revenue to publishers - declined 1% year-over-year to 7.4 billion dollars in Q2 2025. That decline reflects a structural pattern: AI features retain users within Google's interface, reducing the traffic that once reached publisher pages where network ads generate revenue. For marketers, the same dynamic means that paid and organic strategies optimized for traffic generation are operating in a shrinking market.

The Q4 2025 Datos-SparkToro report, published January 28, 2026, documented that traditional search still accounted for roughly 10% of total desktop activity, while AI tools remained under 1% - suggesting that users have not stopped searching, but that the outcomes of those searches increasingly resolve without a click to an external website. The gap between search activity and website traffic is widening. That gap is what the book is built around.

For performance marketers and media buyers specifically, the March 2026 SparkToro analysis of 41 websites found that Google accounts for 73.7% of all desktop searches across the domains studied - but that the click-through rate from ChatGPT to external websites stands at approximately 1.3%, compared to Google's 29.2%. AI tools are handling a growing share of informational queries. Almost none of that handling produces a referral that appears in any standard analytics dashboard.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, and Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and founder of the Zero Click Marketing consultancy and podcast, are the authors. The book is published by Damn Gravity, an independent publisher.

What: Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web is a book now available for pre-order. It covers the structural decline of click-based web traffic driven by Google's shift toward on-platform answers, social media link suppression, and AI tools absorbing informational queries. Pre-order bonuses include live summer workshops, a SparkToro credit, and an Alertmouse discount.

When: Pre-orders opened approximately one week before May 14, 2026, following 16 months of writing. The book is scheduled for release in fall 2026, with wide distribution through Amazon and third-party retailers arriving at end of summer 2026.

Where: Pre-orders are available through Damn Gravity at damngravity.com/products/zero-click-marketing in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook formats. The announcement was made on LinkedIn by both authors. The book will later be available through Amazon and other third-party retailers.

Why: Website traffic for the open web has declined 46% over three years, according to data cited by Fishkin. More than half of Google searches end without a click. Social platforms suppress outbound links algorithmically. AI tools intercept informational queries that previously drove visitors to websites. The book argues that marketing teams still measuring success primarily through traffic and last-click attribution are using a framework built for conditions that no longer exist.

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