B2B & Zero-Click: How Do You Reach Buyers You Can't Track?

Your next customer already knows who you are. Maybe they saw an ad or an article. Maybe they asked ChatGPT about their problem and it suggested you as a solution. Maybe they skimmed a Reddit thread comparing you to your competitors. Maybe they Slacked a colleague asking if they’ve used your product or service. Maybe they did all of that — but your CRM has no idea who they are.

B2B buyers are still going through the same basic journey: unaware, curious, evaluating, deciding. That hasn’t changed. What’s different now is where that journey is taking place. Marketers are still optimizing for a world where buyers announce themselves through clicks and form fills — where they move linearly through tidy funnels, content can be neatly categorized, and tracked from one stage to the next. As a result, we’re leaking leads and missing opportunities. Attribution is dying.

Over the past few years, research from a handful of experts has shed light on just how much search and discovery have changed. In 2023, Rand Fishkin and Steve Lamar ran an experiment observing how Google Analytics was categorizing referrals from social platforms. They found that major social networks were obfuscating their referral traffic — instead of seeing visits from TikTok, Slack, or Discord as referrals, marketers were seeing them lumped into Google’s “Direct” bucket. This is known as “dark social” — where marketers can’t easily identify what content is driving engagement.

But that’s not the only way platforms are distorting the picture. In 2022, Amanda Natividad coined the term “zero-click marketing” in response to how the internet was changing. Algorithms across platforms were beginning to prioritize native content over outbound links. Google searches ending without a click have gone from 25% in 2020 to 57-60% in 2025-2026, and website traffic for the open web has dropped 46% over the past three years. Zero-click marketing is “a strategy where you optimize for impact that can happen without a website visit… by creating standalone value where your audience already is.” If LinkedIn is going to deprioritize posts with links, you need to find ways to engage your audience natively on that platform. More on that shortly.

A third shift is AI. In 2025, Brianna Miller of Protenus wrote in MarTech that “AI search is collapsing the B2B buyer journey“ — exploring how AI allows buyers to ask more complex, nuanced questions and get answers far more personalized to their specific problems. And just this week, Google announced the biggest redesign of Search in 25 years, replacing the traditional search box with an AI-powered interface. If you needed a sign that this is the direction things are heading, that’s probably it.

The result: buyers are researching privately — in AI tools, in Slack and Discord, on social platforms optimized to keep them there. The answer isn’t better tracking. It’s showing up consistently where your buyers actually are, creating genuine value without asking for anything in return, and accepting that some of the most important marketing work you do won’t show up in your dashboard — at least not directly.

If buyers are forming opinions before you ever see them, the job of marketing changes. It’s less about capturing intent and more about building presence. Here are the four shifts I’d make.

Zero-click isn’t just something happening to your traffic. It’s actually a strategy. If buyers aren’t clicking through to your content, stop asking them to.

So if the old playbook of driving traffic to your site isn’t working — because people are consuming information natively and platforms are suppressing outbound links — what’s a marketer to do?

In a March 2026 episode of her podcast, Amanda Natividad explored four areas where zero-click marketing is thriving: social feeds, video platforms, online communities, and AI answers.

Awareness tends to feel like the least glamorous stage of marketing. It’s hard to track, hard to attribute, and easy to deprioritize. But being known is half the battle. Zero-click marketing is all about that — except it takes it a step further. You’re not just getting your brand’s name out there. You’re becoming known for something. You’re influencing. You’re providing value.

As Natividad puts it: “Instead of sending people out of the app, you deliver the value inside the platform. When someone finds that valuable, they remember you. They follow you. They trust you. Then later, when they need a product, service, or recommendation, they search for you directly.”

And how do you offer that value? You take the content you’d normally gate and you put it out there — your insights, your data, your reports. By sharing that information freely, you’re building an audience that’s genuinely interested in what you have to say. AI is going to find an answer and cite a source one way or another. You want to be that source. But you can’t be if your best content is stashed behind a form.

A few other things worth doing:

• Share actual opinions and takes, not just links to your blog

• Write LinkedIn posts that contain the full insight, not a teaser that says “click here to read more”

• Contribute genuinely to Reddit threads in your category. Be helpful, not promotional. Redditors can smell an ad from a mile away.

When an LLM answers a question about your category, it’s not pulling from your homepage. It’s pulling from Reddit threads, G2 reviews, LinkedIn posts, and industry publications — places where other people are talking about your brand.

Here’s something worth knowing: even if you’re ranking #1 on Google, you can still be invisible to AI. The logic is completely different from SEO. Keyword density, backlink profiles — none of that translates. It’s about citations, off-site presence, and content format. AI isn’t citing your website. It’s citing what’s being said about your brand elsewhere. And with Google now moving toward an AI-first search experience, this isn’t just a ChatGPT or Perplexity problem anymore. It’s quickly becoming the whole game.

A good example of how much this matters: in March 2026, Will Reynolds and Nick Haigler of Seer Interactive wrote about how LLMs kept surfacing a single negative review about their company — one bad review out of 24 years of work. They set out to understand why, and what they found was striking: “Your brand narrative is being written right now in AI systems, by whatever sources those systems find most relevant and recent. A good brand narrative has balance… and the AI models seek out that balance.” You don’t just want to show up in AI answers. You want to show up well.

This is where Shift 1 and Shift 2 connect. Zero-click distribution is actually how you earn AI visibility. The mechanism looks like this:

1. You publish a survey or original research

2. You share the most interesting findings as native LinkedIn posts

3. People engage, share, and comment

4. The data gets picked up and referenced in other articles, Reddit threads, and industry newsletters

5. AI starts to associate your brand with that finding

Your website hosts the full report for credibility and as a source of record. But LinkedIn and other channels do the distributing. The reach happens through zero-click content, not through people finding your site.

A few other things worth doing:

• Actively manage your G2 or Capterra profile — reviews are heavily cited by AI

• Get mentioned in industry publications, even small ones. Third-party mentions carry more weight than anything on your own site.

• Be genuinely active on Reddit and LinkedIn — not promotional, just consistently useful

Not all paid is created equal, and in a zero-click world the differences matter more than ever. Paid search, paid social, and newer approaches like person-based advertising are doing fundamentally different jobs. Conflating them is how budgets get wasted.

Paid search is still valuable, but its job description is narrowing. According to Seer Interactive’s ongoing research into AI Overviews, paid CTR on informational and discovery queries has dropped dramatically since mid-2024. The buyers still clicking on paid search ads tend to be high-intent — they already know what they want and they’re comparing or ready to buy. That makes paid search increasingly a closing and defensive tool: protecting brand terms, showing up during active comparisons, capturing buyers who are already warm. Asking it to do awareness work is expensive and getting less effective.

For awareness, paid social — and LinkedIn specifically — is doing a different job. The goal isn’t to boost gated content for lead gen anymore. It’s to amplify your best zero-click content to the right audience, keeping your brand present with the 95% of your market that isn’t ready to buy yet. Paid social works best as an amplifier of organic presence, not a replacement for it.

And yes, LinkedIn is expensive. But the “too expensive” complaint usually comes from measuring awareness spend against lead gen metrics, and that’s always going to make it look expensive. The more useful question is whether you’re consistently reaching the right people. If your ICP is well-defined, LinkedIn’s targeting precision makes the cost defensible.

The most interesting development in paid right now, in my opinion, is person-based advertising — which takes ABM one step further. Traditional ABM targets accounts. Person-based advertising targets the actual humans inside those accounts. If you’re already running ABM, going person-based is the natural next step, and it’s where paid starts to feel less like a broadcast and more like an actual relationship. The most accessible version of this is LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences: upload a list of specific contacts from your CRM and serve ads directly to those named individuals. No fancy tools required. If you want to go further and reach the same person across LinkedIn, Google, and Meta simultaneously, dedicated platforms now exist to do exactly that.

A few other things worth doing:

• Use LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms if you’re going to capture leads through paid — keeping people on platform converts 2-3x better than sending them to a landing page

• If you do send them somewhere, make the destination worth it — ungated content that’s genuinely useful, not a form asking them to work for it

• Don’t rely solely on job title targeting. Matched Audiences lets you reach specific people, not just personas.

Every channel we’ve talked about so far has something in common: you don’t own it. LinkedIn can change its algorithm. Reddit can close a community. AI can stop citing you. Your email list is the one direct relationship that nobody can take away.

But there’s a difference between an email list and a lead list. Most B2B marketers have the latter and think they have the former.

A lead list is people who gave you their email to get something. An email list is people who gave you their email to get more of your thinking. The difference sounds subtle. The engagement rates are not.

So how do you build an email list in a zero-click world where you’re not gating content? You share freely, then invite people to go deeper. Your zero-click content earns the trust — they can see you have the perspective and the point of view. The newsletter is where they get all of it, not just the useful nuggets you shared on LinkedIn. The ask shifts from “download this in exchange for your email” to “if you found this useful, I go deeper in my newsletter.”

The critical part: your emails have to be genuinely better than what you post publicly. Write it like a publication with a real point of view — not a last-minute compilation of blog posts and links to press releases. Pick a specific focus. Send it consistently. Write it like you’re talking to one smart person in your industry, not a list of personas.

A couple of other things worth doing:

• Don’t gate content to build your list — put a newsletter CTA at the end of your best zero-click posts instead

• Email isn’t just top of funnel. It’s how you stay present with existing customers, potential expansions, and future buyers who aren’t ready yet

So how do you report on all of this? You can’t exactly tell your CFO you’re marketing on vibes now.

For those in desperate need of numbers — and most of us are — there are still things worth tracking: paid performance, email engagement, pipeline influence. Tools now exist to monitor LLM mentions and track where your brand is showing up in AI answers. That’s worth setting up.

But a lot of it is going to live in more qualitative territory. Share of voice in your category on LinkedIn and Reddit — are people mentioning you in conversations you didn’t start? Are those mentions positive? And if you haven’t already, add “how did you hear about us?” as a plain text field on your demo request form. That first-party data is gold and it’ll tell you more than most attribution models.

Some channels are going to need a budget based on trust, not ROI. Decide in advance which ones those are so you’re not fighting for it every quarter. And get comfortable with the idea that some of the most important marketing work you do right now won’t show up in your dashboard — maybe ever.

The brands that win in this environment aren’t the ones with the best tracking. They’re the ones that showed up consistently, in the right places, long before their buyers were ready.