What the Zero Click Era Means for Your Brand: A Conversation with Dan Dawson
TL;DR
- Data presented at the Zero Click by Profound New York event shows 50% of B2B software buyers now start research with chat, and 8 out of 10 choose from the options surfaced in that first session.
- Less than 3% of data influencing AI search results comes from gated tier-one publications. Open web content, industry blogs, and platforms like Reddit and G2 carry the weight.
- Your website is the right place to start your AEO work. It's the one surface you fully control, and the discipline of making it citation-ready sets the standard for how your brand presents on every other surface that matters.
Part 1: Mason and Dan Dawson’s key takeaways from Zero Click by Profound New York event
I was in San Francisco for Profound's first Zero Click event a few months ago. When Dan Dawson, a marketing technology veteran who's spent his career bridging enterprise IT and marketing execution, came back from Zero Click New York and walked me through what he heard, a few things stood out as worth putting on record.
The headline stat from G2's Tim Sanders deserves to be said plainly: 8 out of 10 B2B buyers select from options presented in their first AI chat session.
Dan told me he heard that, and it "slapped him in the face." I get it. It’s a brand visibility issue that indicates if you're not in that first response, you're not in the consideration set, regardless of how good your product actually is.
The supporting data makes this more concrete. Fewer than 3% of results influencing AI responses come from gated publications like the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg. Your PR strategy, if it's built around earned placement in paywalled outlets, is largely invisible to the models doing the shortlisting.
The website matters more than most people realize right now
A brand's website is no longer primarily a destination for human visitors. It's a source document for AI systems building answers. That shift changes how you should think about it, even if your site isn't generating the citation volume of an open review platform or a high-authority industry publication.
The teams getting this right treat owned content as the place where brand clarity gets established and tested. How you structure pages, write product copy, handle FAQs, and think about schema and content freshness: all of that becomes the foundation for how your brand presents on every surface where AI systems might describe you. Dan put it directly:
"Your website and owned content destinations have become more critical than ever. They serve as both destination and source."
For most brands, it's the right place to start, not because it will drive the highest citation rate, but because it's the one surface you control completely. Getting it right sets the discipline for everything else.
This is core to how we approach AEO and Visibility Engineering at Edgar Allan: brand clarity and site architecture are upstream of everything. If your brand isn’t differentiated and specific, and if the content on your site that presents that brand to the world isn't clear enough for an AI to summarize accurately in one sentence, adding more of it won't fix the problem.
What Ramp’s agent-only experiment tells us about gaming the system
One of the more memorable presentations Dan flagged came from Ramp. Their team built landing pages with Cloudflare workers designed to intercept bot traffic and surface special offers exclusively to AI search agents, invisible to any human visitor. The results differed sharply by platform: ChatGPT initially ignored the content but eventually started driving additional traffic, Claude flagged the approach as potential prompt injection and created negative visibility for the brand, and Perplexity showed almost no response either way.
"If you've got Claude thinking that you're doing prompt injection, that's going to tank things really quick," Dan noted.
The broader point from Tim Sanders at G2 tracks with this: the days of black-hat SEO tactics that could be exploited for months before penalties arrived are gone. In the AI era, consequences arrive so much faster. Experimenting is fine, encouraged even. But you need your finger on the dashboard while you do it, and you need to be honest about what you're trying to accomplish.
Unsolicited editorial is a problem most brands haven’t named yet
This was the concept from the event I found most useful, and credit goes to Profound for coining it. When you prompt an AI with something like "What's the best low-cost domestic airline?", you don't get a one-line answer. You get paragraphs, tables, pros and cons, and additional context the model decided to include on its own. That extra content is unsolicited editorial, and it shows up whether you want it to or not.
The catch is that models don't distinguish between content published last week and content published two years ago. They weight by relevance and authority, not recency. So when a prospect asks which vendors to consider, the model might recommend you accurately and then add context about your pricing or positioning that's 18 months out of date. Nothing in the response flags it as old. The prospect reads it as current.
Southwest Airlines is a clean illustration. A query about budget carriers returned a recommendation for them, along with a note to "arrive early because Southwest doesn't have assigned seats." Southwest moved to assigned seating in 2025. Old data surfaced as helpful context, delivered at scale, with no input from their marketing team.
Profound's Fact Check tool is designed to surface exactly these discrepancies, comparing how AI systems describe your brand against what you've actually said about yourself. It's worth paying attention to as a category of problem, regardless of which tool you use to catch it.
The marketing engineer role is real, and it’s going to matter
Profound has been advocating for a role they're calling the marketing engineer: someone who understands go-to-market strategy and can also build workflows, run tests, and engineer solutions using AI tools. The reaction Dan observed at the event was almost universal recognition. People heard the title and said, "That's the job I couldn't quite explain that I needed."
Figma has already posted for a role like this. The real indicator of mainstream adoption will be when mid-market companies start posting for it, and when organizations need more than one. Dan's read: "Even using agents, building workflows, it's still something where there's going to be a lot of building that's happening, and it's led by a human." The role scales the work and doesn't remove the need for strategic judgment.
Who might fill these roles? Dan identified several natural candidates:
- AEO/SEO specialists who are deeply data-driven and run detailed tests on how search engines score content.
- Marketing operations professionals who already bridge strategy and technical implementation.
- MarTech specialists with experience enabling technology adoption across organizations.
The common thread is the ability to be strategically minded while technically capable, understanding both the "why" and the "how" of modern marketing execution.
Profound's announcements signal where the whole category is heading
A few product announcements from the event are worth knowing about, less as a Profound rundown and more as a signal of where AEO tooling is heading.
Reddit and G2 are now doing more work in AI search than most PR strategies
With gated media largely out of the picture, user-generated content is doing more work than most marketing strategies account for. Reddit's Rob Gage put the platform's influence plainly: you can’t own a Reddit thread, and trying to will backfire. The platform rewards genuine participation, not brand-managed presence.
The more structured side of UGC, platforms like G2, where verified users from real companies leave reviews, carries built-in credibility signals that AI systems respond to. If your review strategy hasn't been updated to account for AEO, that's a gap worth closing.
The question nobody has a clear answer to yet
Attribution came up as a topic at the event, but didn't get resolved, which feels about right. When a buyer never visits your website before making a decision, the traditional measurement model breaks. The full attribution picture in a zero-click environment is still forming, so teams should expect the measurement methodology to shift, and should be cautious about anyone claiming they've already solved it.
Your owned content is still the fastest path to AEO traction
Dan's practical guidance from the event is worth repeating because it's genuinely useful and not dressed up:
- Begin with the content you own.
- Write honestly about your products, including where they're not the right fit.
- Invest in AI measurement so you're not flying blind.
- Use date stamps and clear structure so agents can parse and cite your content accurately.
- Scale production with agents while keeping humans in the strategic decisions.
Dan's broader point was that we're still early enough in AEO that moving now carries a real advantage. He compared it to the brands that built outsized positions on Facebook advertising when the cost of entry was still low, before everyone else caught on and prices reflected the opportunity. Those brands won because they moved first. The same dynamic is playing out in AI search right now, and most brands are still deciding whether to pay attention.
If you want to know how your brand shows up when AI systems are asked about your category, that's exactly what our AEO audit surfaces. It's a great place to start.
Next up: We’ll speak more about attribution in a zero-click environment, what scaling requires, and why more content isn’t the answer to all of your AEO problems.
FAQs
What is zero-click search, and why does it matter for B2B marketing?
Zero-click search refers to queries where users get a complete answer from an AI system without clicking through to any website. For B2B marketers, this matters because buyers are increasingly completing significant portions of their research, including building shortlists, without ever visiting a vendor's site. G2 data from Profound's New York event shows 50% of B2B software buyers now start research with chat, and 8 out of 10 select from options in their first session. If your brand isn't in that first response, you're not in the consideration set.
What is unsolicited editorial in AI search?
Unsolicited editorial is the additional context AI systems add to their responses that goes beyond what the user asked for. When someone asks, "What's the best project management tool?" the model doesn't just name one. It adds context about pricing, use cases, limitations, and other details it decided were relevant. That additional content can include outdated information or inaccuracies, which is why brands need to actively monitor how AI represents them, not just whether they're being mentioned.
Why doesn't placement in major publications like the Wall Street Journal help with AI search?
Less than 3% of data influencing AI search results comes from gated tier-one publications, based on data G2 shared at Profound's Zero Click New York event. AI systems can't access paywalled content, so placement in those outlets has minimal impact on how models build their answers. Open web content, industry publications, verified review platforms, and UGC sites like Reddit carry significantly more weight.
What is a marketing engineer, and does my team need one?
A marketing engineer is a role Profound has been advocating for that sits at the intersection of marketing strategy and technical execution. The person understands go-to-market fundamentals and can also build AI workflows, run tests, and engineer solutions using marketing technology. Figma has already hired for this kind of role. For most organizations, the real indicator of whether you need one is whether your current team can both interpret AEO analytics and build the workflows to act on them. If that gap exists, the marketing engineer role is designed to close it.
How do I know if my brand is showing up accurately in AI search?
The most direct approach is to run queries as a buyer would and read the full response, including any editorial context the model adds beyond your brand name. Profound's Fact Check tool automates this by comparing AI responses against your known brand information. At Edgar Allan, our AEO audit includes a visibility and accuracy assessment that covers how AI systems are describing your brand, your competitors, and your category. Most brands that run this check find at least one meaningful inaccuracy in how they're being represented.
Is it too late to build AI search visibility if my brand hasn't started yet?
No, but the window is narrowing. The brands building AEO traction now are doing it at lower cost and against less competition than will exist in 12 to 18 months. Dan Dawson's comparison at Profound's event was to early Facebook advertising: a small number of brands built outsized positions because they moved before everyone else did. Starting with unique owned content and a clear brand position is still a real advantage. Starting with a vague or inconsistent brand position and hoping content volume will compensate is a trap some teams are already falling into.