235: Your Website Is Your Source Of Truth, Not Your Traffic Source with Amanda Natividad, Co-Author of Zero Click Marketing

[00:00:00] Your website is your source of truth. You're not gonna spend all your time there. You're probably not even going to update it once a week. But that is your source of truth. That is the record. Everything else just points to it

[00:00:14] That was Amanda Natividad, the person who named zero-click marketing, and now her book that she co-wrote with Rand Fishkin called Zero Click Marketing is out. I wanted to ask her one thing: If nobody is clicking, what is your website for? And she came with examples. She bought clothes she found through ChatGPT without needing to see the brand's homepage.

[00:00:39] She signed up for a tool whose homepage, by her own account, would have put her off, and she still thinks your website matters more than ever. This is No Hacks with me, Sani. Nobody asked any of us if we wanted to see the internet change so much, so I check what AI is actually doing to it, the good, the bad, and the pointless

[00:01:01] Amanda, welcome to No Hacks. A huge pleasure to have you on and, uh, talk about zero-click marketing

[00:01:06] Yeah. Happy to be here, Sani. Let's do it

[00:01:09] Let's do it. So a few days ago, you wrote about this on your LinkedIn.

[00:01:12] You wanted to buy a, a clothing item, but you didn't want to do a traditional Google search buying journey. Can you explain why?

[00:01:22] Yeah. So over the past year, year and a half, I've gotten more into the idea of, you know what, just trying to reduce microplastics in my environment. I've been, you know, trying to purge my wardrobe a little bit, and, and shop less, right? But if I do buy something new, I do want it to be made from natural fibers whenever possible.

[00:01:44] And one thing I realized that I didn't have that I felt I needed was just really comfortable loungewear. My existing loungewear was just random hand-me-downs and swag over the years . So I figure, you know what, I can buy some cotton pants. That's okay. And, you know, I didn't wanna buy from like... I definitely didn't want to buy from like Temu or Amazon, right?

[00:02:07] I wanted to buy just, you know, like a reasonably priced cotton brand, right? And I didn't want to search for it in Google because I already had the distrust, right? I already thought, "If I search for it here, I'm just gonna get a bunch of brands who bid on the keywords, like cotton, organic, sustainable," right?

[00:02:29] Like I, I want an actual brand that, that sells the thing that I'm looking for. And so I ended up asking ChatGPT to find like three to five brands that focus on manufacturing clothes that are made of natural fibers. And Pact, P-A-C-T, was one of the ones that came up. And so I went to the website, immediately saw everything was pretty reasonably priced.

[00:02:56] All of it, or at least mo- the vast majority of it is made from organic cotton. My clothes don't have to be organic, but, you know, natural fibers, right? So I was like, "Great. These pants are only $30 or $40. That's, that's not too bad," and bought them right away, right? So that, I think, is... I think that's an interesting case study in and of itself of how people are discovering things, right?

[00:03:20] And in my case it was, I knew exactly what my pain point was, what I wanted to buy. Like I knew, I knew what solution I wanted, and so I was very fast to convert. And I don't think I'm alone in this, right?

[00:03:35] You're not-- Uh, I mean, the, the, the primed user that is arriving to the website ready to buy, convert, do whatever, and that is so different compared to those boring ads or even Google search. Like when you see a list of 10 results and which door should I knock? Like what's behind it? Using this kind of discovery/research, you land on a website and you already know what they have.

[00:03:59] It's just a matter of do I wanna buy from them or not? So, so a way, website is, uh, the entire website is now checkout page in that journey.

[00:04:09] That's interesting that the entire website is... Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think the funny thing too is that I didn't need their homepage, or I didn't need, I didn't need that full experience to convert. It was I needed the, the couple quick details of, oh, this, this, this. Yes, got it. Um, I do have another example which I think is differ- is kind of interesting, but I do wanna ask you first, what was the last thing you bought?

[00:04:38] The last new thing that you bought, and how did you, how did you get to that purchase?

[00:04:44] people are making fun of me already because every time I talk at a conference or a, a webinar, I had a webinar two days ago, it's always running shoes. It's always running shoes. And I was doing the same research. That's the thing I have in my, my conference talk and in the webinar I did. Doing research through Claude or through any LLM and the information that's not passing through because it's not loaded properly.

[00:05:07] I'm more of a technical, uh, website optimization person because they didn't use JavaScript to load what the shoe drop is, what the weight is, availability, all this stuff. So it's-- my answer is always going to be running shoes for buying stuff online. Absolutely. Because y- you get, get better deals that way

[00:05:25] It's true. So do you have, do you buy the same shoe over and over again?

[00:05:29] No. No, no,

[00:05:29] Oh, you get a different one

[00:05:31] Oh, no, no, no. It's, it's always something else because, uh, uh, the ShoeTube or YouTube for shoe reviewers or the ent- that entire sub-segment, it, it's a magical place. You watch the videos, you decide what you want, you ask ChatGPT, you read the reviews online, you go to Reddit. You know how the journey goes.

[00:05:47] I mean, you, you called it pinball in the book, like, uh, uh... I think that's a, a disservice to pinballs because they're not that messy. Like, a pinball is a wonderful structured place compared to user journeys online. Like, that- that's hell, and we have no idea what's happening when people are buying from us. um, I think similar to you, yes, uh, you go to the website ready to buy or ready to be disappointed and go somewhere else. But it's not like, "Oh, I need to see what they have. I need to see what this brand is about." And, and that is so different compared to the last 30 years of, of doing things online 

[00:06:24] oh, the other example I wanted to bring up, I think this is interesting because this was entirely driven by the AI tool. So I was building the zeroclickmarketing.co website. Well, I was working with Claude. Claude helped me vibe code it. By the way, I'm okay with that in the sense that it is a s- it is essentially a static website, right?

[00:06:45] I'm not passing private information through it. It's just a plain website.

[00:06:49] No one's judging.

[00:06:51] Someone might be.

[00:06:52] Right? For that kind of website. And it's also just me. I'm the only one running it. Anyway, so I'm, I'm making the website, and I realize, oh, I want to, I want to include a contact page. So, which means I want to embed a nice contact form.

[00:07:05] And sure, like, you know, there were a couple of existing, um, like, websites or brands that I knew of. But I knew those all require you to include that, the, the, that company's branding, and I was like, "I don't, I don't want that." But at the same time, I don't know if I want to pay for this yet, because I'm not...

[00:07:25] I know that I'm not going to get a high volume of contacts, right? So it was a little bit of, like, I'm gonna get, like, 10 a month. I don't feel like that's worth paying money for, and I'm sure there's a service that will provide that. So I asked Claude. I was like, "Look, here's what I want. I want a free tool, or at least there's a free option.

[00:07:44] I also want it to be something simple that will just go to my email inbox, and that we can re-skin in the look of the Zero Click Marketing branding." And so Claude said, "Great, you should use Formspree.io," right? And I was like, "Okay." And I was like, "Well, is it easy to use?" Right? Like, I don't, I don't... I'm not really good at coding.

[00:08:06] Is it, can I actually use it? And it was like, "Yep, all you need is this, like, ID number. We'll embed it right in the code. I have the page ready. All you have to do is make an account." So I thought, "Great." I think it even gave me the, the product page to go to. So I just clicked on that, went to the, went directly to that product or checkout page, transacted, got my code, put it in.

[00:08:28] Perfect, right? It works beautifully. If you go to zeroclickmarketing.co/contact, it just looks like my website, right? And it works just as expected. Love it. And it was only, I think I told a friend at... You know what happened, actually? I talked about this on, at the MicroConf event. It's for, you know, SaaS indie founders, and it came up in Q&A.

[00:08:56] And the Formspree founder or co-founder was there, and he said, "Did you go to our homepage?" And I, I sat there. I was like, "You know what? No." Like, I've been a very happy user, probably going to become a paying customer soon for, like, two to three months now. I'm like, "I never seen your homepage." He showed it to me, and it is very dev focused.

[00:09:19] It's very dev focused. It's, like, you know, for any programmer or for, for every developer. And I was like, "Wow, if I went to your homepage first, I never would've become a customer because I don't code. That's not my world." I would just be like, "Oh, this looks too hard for me. I'm just a marketer." But it ended up...

[00:09:41] That part is so interesting though. I never thought about it. By the way, I use Formspree as well, the same way.

[00:09:47] Oh, yeah. It's the best.

[00:09:47] Yes. I mean, I, I, I had heard of them before, but they, they, they're, they're incredible. Absolutely. The fact-- the, the thing you said there, the design of the website is not-- it looks dev-oriented.

[00:10:00] And yes, this is a dev o- in the past, this was a dev-oriented product. Now anybody can i-i-implement it easily like you did. I never thought of that. Like, and, and I think that's the interesting part because, like, one of the things I love to talk about and, and, and think about is the visual layer of the website and what does it mean now compared to what it meant in the past.

[00:10:19] And, and, and I, I always say I love designers. I have a lot of designer friends. I'm not saying they don't-- should not have a job. They should. We need good design everywhere, not just on websites. the-- that visual layer of a website, which is what we used to start with when building websites, is now the last thing that needs to be put on, on the structure and, and, and if you want it to be discovered through an LLM or even Google, like the, the, the visual layer is less and less important.

[00:10:51] That, that's my opinion, but I, I'm almost ready to die on that hill

[00:10:55] That's an interesting point of view because, becau- do you, is this because also be- or, or is this opinion also informed by the idea that fewer and fewer people are actually going to your website and spending time there and trying to... Yeah.

[00:11:13] By the time they get to the visual layer, they already have an opinion.

[00:11:14] Yeah.

[00:11:17] Uh, yeah. I,

[00:11:20] I mean, exactly what you described there. Yet you would not sign up for Formspree if it was, "Hey, there's a link. Go there and sign up."

[00:11:27] Yeah

[00:11:27] This made it easy. Like, this is exactly what I need. Maybe they're not communicating it in a way that I would understand, but this is, this is the product for me. So I think that is changing so much. That's changing the whole dynamic online.

[00:11:41] It is

[00:11:42] I love that example, especially because it happened to me exactly the same way. Like exactly the same way

[00:11:48] Yeah. We should send this episode to the Formspree people. I'm sure... I hope, I hope they would like it. 

[00:11:53] Let's talk about the website. If, if, if the website is, like if, if the clicks is, are not there the zero-click era, zero-click marketing era, what exactly is the role of a website?

[00:12:06] Oh. The... You know what's funny is I actually feel like it is more important than ever to have your own website. You know, I think people might be thinking, "Well, you know, if nobody clicks, what's the point?" That might be the, you know, the naysayer side, oversimplified naysayer side. But it's more important than ever because it is truly the only channel that you 100% own.

[00:12:33] It is your website, right? You are the one putting the content there, you maintain it, you have full control over it, and it's, it just matters differently than it used to. Like, yes, I think that the tried and true, you know, SEO content marketing strategy of h- finding high volume keywords, low competition, creating content, ranking, growing traffic, it doesn't work the way it used to, right?

[00:12:57] It used to be pretty predictable by how much you could grow your website. Not so much the case anymore. But now, your website is still being accessed, right? It's just that it's more likely to be accessed, or I think it's more likely to be accessed by AI, search and AI tools, the ones that are finding information, crawling the web, extracting it, and putting it into their platforms.

[00:13:23] So if you have your website where you fully own your message, right, the systems will crawl that, and as people query this, these systems to find their answers, that's part of how you show up there

[00:13:38] Hmm. Nothing to disagree with there. I, I fully agree with that take. I, I just, I just told you design doesn't matter, which is kind of a similar way to say what you described there. It matters, but after all these other things,

[00:13:51] Yeah

[00:13:52] You're saying everyone should have a website. Is that different compared to 15 years ago when also everyone needed to have a website, but most people didn't? Like how, why is it now different?

[00:14:03] Oh, I love that question. I think it's different now because of the way people use the web, because of the way the systems use the web, because of the fact that it is increasingly more and more the only place you own. You know? Like, that kind of just becomes your last castle, so to speak, right? And it's, you know what?

[00:14:29] If, if you're not getting, like, thousands of views to your website, it's not really the point. The point is, like, that's your castle. That's yours, and no one else can control that, you know? So it's... Even just w- when it comes to, you know, the, your s- your social media profiles, right? People... It's popular to just, to put your link in the bio, but it's also popular to have a Linktree or something similar that guides people where you can show in the interface all your different links.

[00:15:01] I'm even gonna say, like, no, it's even more important to put that on your website. Like, I would rather go to your, to someone's crappy website that h- just has a page of links and it just says in text, "This is the link to my blog. This is the link to my YouTube channel." Like, that, I want that, right? And the systems are gonna find it anyway.

[00:15:23] This is not nostalgia speaking. This is how it should be.

[00:15:25] Yes.

[00:15:28] Yeah. A- and the systems are gonna find it anyway, obviously, you know, assuming your website is set up correctly, which is not difficult to do.

[00:15:38] It, easy now, let's be honest. Anyone can set up a website and, and it costs what? $20 a year to have a

[00:15:45] Yeah

[00:15:46] host it on Cloudflare for free or whatever you want. It, it's super easy. I'll quote something from, uh, this is a podcast episode you did with another former guest of the podcast, Wil Reynolds. Uh, check out that episode, episodes actually, not, not just my episode. First, somebody has to care. For somebody to show up and do, do all that, how do you sh- how do you influence that caring?

[00:16:12] Does, does websites do the, the influence? Is it third party services? Like how do you work on that? How do you get people to care enough to go on that journey where you are the solution in the end?

[00:16:23] How do you get people to care? I mean, everybody has, everybody has problems, right? And your goal... Everyone has problems. Let's sit with that. No, but, um, as a marketer, it's your job to find the people who have the problem that you're solving, right? So in that sense, it's simple, right? They already have the problem.

[00:16:49] How do you get them to care? Well, that comes through audience and customer research, right? Understanding what drives those pain points. What are the fears behind them? Are they... Is the big objection they have to purchasing from your brand the fact that you don't have front and center that your clothes are made from natural materials?

[00:17:14] You know, like, if, if that's the, if that's the problem you're solving, put that front and center, right? People will... The right people will care about that. And then when I'm talking about, like, where, like, where do you do, where do you get people to care, it's unfortunately everywhere. Right? It's all the places in which your audience shows up.

[00:17:32] And yeah, this is where the audience research comes into play because it's not just, oh, go to every single social network and have a presence there. It's, no, go to the social networks where your audience already hangs out, but also where they might also be receptive to your problem, right? Because it's not enough to say, like, I think Facebook, right, is probably the most popular social network in terms of users

[00:17:59] popular? Okay. Okay.

[00:18:00] No, in terms of like how many accounts created.

[00:18:03] I know what you meant. I know what you meant

[00:18:06] But it doesn't mean you should do all your marketing there, right? It's,

[00:18:09] Absolutely

[00:18:10] your audience receptive to your message there? No. In the case of B2B, that might be or that is most likely LinkedIn. Okay, so go on LinkedIn, right? But then maybe the other layer to this is do you as a marketer or like does your team, do you want to spend time there?

[00:18:30] Are you capable? Are you competent? And I'm saying this as it's a little bit of a, a light luxury or privilege, right? Because some teams might not have a choice. They have to be on YouTube because they have to be on YouTube. But if you do have a choice, it's do you have the resources, willingness, I don't know, charisma to be on YouTube?

[00:18:54] Or is the path of least resistance just doing text-based or starting with just text-based posts on LinkedIn? You know, so I do kind of push people to choose the platform where you already have a little bit more competency because, because you, you're going to have to create there maybe, what, three to five times per week?

[00:19:15] Or it doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be every day. So you're there several times a week. If you're absolutely miserable and incompetent on that platform, it's not gonna go well, right?

[00:19:26] That, that is absolutely true. I mean, yes, yes. Uh, one, one thing I-- of my pet peeves is people going for the default option that's recommended to them without even checking that default option. Like for example, you ask-- you mentioned LinkedIn, and yes, LinkedIn is usually for B2B. That-- I mean, because there's nothing else, if we're being very honest. you need to check if that really is what you should be doing. Like, if someone tells you, "Yeah, all the, all the business stuff is on LinkedIn," but maybe there's a YouTube, may- like you said, maybe you have a charisma, may- all that. Just research. Don't go for the default because defaults rarely work

[00:20:05] Yeah, you're right, because a default tends to be just the average, right?

[00:20:11] a-and we have LLMs for

[00:20:12] Yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true. In the case of YouTube, right, I mean, YouTube is also a really, really good B2B channel, and especially if you're in the market of being able to educate your audience, that's exactly where they would go, or at least I think. 

[00:20:28] There's one thing that you did an experiment with, how did you hear about us dropdown.

[00:20:33] So the example you're bringing up, Sani, is it's in, it's in the Zero Click Marketing book. I believe it is chapter 23. So there's a lot of talk, right, about, well, you should just include in your drop-down or, like, in the, somewhere in your post-purchase survey, how did you hear about us, and include, you know, several o- several options that people can select.

[00:20:55] You can do that, but proceed with caution, right? And this is where especially my co-author, Rand Fishkin, is extra, like, "I really don't think this is a good idea." And a lot of this, uh, this particular anecdote comes from his experience. He was consulting with a brand, and it was a, it was a D2C culinary brand.

[00:21:18] And so what he had them do was in their drop-down, he had them put, uh, ex- they had an influencer marketing, um, option where, you know, that was one of the options. And so he had them include influencers who have never mentioned the product, right? So he basically asked them to include a decoy option, right?

[00:21:40] But that sounded likely.

[00:21:43] likely, but com- they ... And then they verified, made sure this person or these, these, um ... They were celebrity Am- American TV chefs, like never talked about the brand. And so what happened was nearly 50% of the respondents credited those influencers with how they heard about the brand. So the problem is you can include this in your post-purchase survey, but it's

[00:22:09] You might get data like that, which is a lie, right? Obviously, it's, it's not that your customers are out and out lying to you, right? It's they don't remember. They, they probably thought, like, "Oh, yeah, I s- I sw- I'm sure this person talked about this brand. Like, that sounds right to me." It could have been their friend who mentioned it, could have been a social media post.

[00:22:31] We don't know, and we'll never know.

[00:22:34] That is so, uh, uh, it's so risky. But how do you measure what's happening and what's working when there's no click? 

[00:22:41] So, uh, what's difficult to answer here is that it looks very different

[00:22:46] Hmm.

[00:22:47] every business, like just based on how much revenue you have, how much spend you're doing, right? Because I think in a, in a m- ideal... an, an un-ideal kind of scenario, it is incrementality testing and turning off or shutting down, or sorry, turning down or shutting off your ads, right?

[00:23:08] So we talk about this in the book as well. Dropbox did a study on this published in March 2026, published in IEEE Access, where they l- they, they tested Um, sorry, they, they did some blackout weeks of certain ads, right? So they, they turned off or turned down whole channels. So in this case it was search engine marketing, SEM ads, and, uh, I believe mobile advertising.

[00:23:37] And so, you know, the baseline or the before, right, was everything was return on ad spend positive. Everything looked good. It might have been even, like, 2X. But then once they did the blackouts and then looked back at what was actually happening to their bottom line, they found that both of these ad programs were underwater, right?

[00:23:59] It was something like, you know, for every dollar they spent, they were getting, like, 70 cents or 90 cents back, which is not good, they ended up putting, I believe it was $25 million towards, like, better performing channels, and it improved lifetime value to customer acquisition, right?

[00:24:19] That's a great example of that. Sh- so that's a, that, there's a version of that that smaller businesses can do, too, which is turning down your ads. You can try that for a week or two, seeing how your business performs, um, in the meantime. You might not get the perfect, exact, like, "Okay, we spent X amount, we got this amount," right?

[00:24:41] You might not always get that perfect stuff. But you won't get the perfect number and attribution anyway, right? The thing you will know f- the thing you will know for certain is whether or not something is working, right? So then at least you would know, oh, for sure, you know, the influencer or creator marketing, oh, for sure this is working for us.

[00:25:03] Great. Go keep doing that, right? Or we see, okay, social media advertising is not working for us. We have to fix this strategy, right? So we're not even saying, "Hey, don't run ads." We're saying, "Hey, the only thing you can really... The, the best, most reliable thing you can do is to withhold some of the spend, see what happens, go back a week later."

[00:25:26] Right? I think that's one of the most ideal kind of scenarios. In addition to or instead of that, I, we strongly recommend looking at A myriad of metrics, right? Looking at things that are related to awareness/exposure, so these are going to be the things like impressions of a social post, impressions or views on a YouTube video, right?

[00:25:49] Those metrics that are like, "Okay, great, we know that, like, an average video for us gets 700 views," that's the baseline, right? There are... Then we also recommend looking at your engagement metrics, right? These are gonna be things like subscribers, followers, um, likes, comments, time spent on a page, right?

[00:26:12] Things that show the actions people are taking. And then finally, the business impact, right? Look at things like how many leads are you getting this month? Has pipeline grown? Have people done repeat orders? Has average order value increased? Right? This is basically, like, what's happening to my business.

[00:26:32] And okay, you might not know, right, the next day whether, whether or not something worked, but you will get a sense of the overall health of your business, and that's ultimately what we all want, right? Healthy, healthier businesses.

[00:26:49] Absolutely, yes. We all want that. The platforms, the big walled gardens, I'm not sure they necessarily want that to happen. And you wrote, you write about them in a really good way in the book. What- the over-reliance on the dashboards provided by Meta, by Google, just spending money on ads because that's what everyone does, that's what we have to be doing Do we? If you're not testing it, if you're not making sure... I don't like the fact that this is has to do it, and then they give you ROAS in the beginning, and it starts going down, and you just spend more. And I wish those platforms didn't have all the power that they have, and I'm sure there's a future where they don't. I, I'm, I, I'm positive I believe in that. The last question, let's say someone has been asleep for two years, you're talking to a person in 2024, and there's this shift that's about to happen, and, like, what should they do be ready for, for the re- reality we have today?

[00:27:44] Your website is your source of truth. You're probab- you're not gonna spend all your time there. You're probably not even going to update it once a week. But that is your source of truth. That is the record. Everything else just points to it

[00:28:00] But it cannot be implied. The truth cannot be implied. You need to be so clear, painfully clear in what you're trying to say on your website. And you just-- And you, you need to repeat the same claim everywhere, all that stuff, because people get confused and machines get confused even more when they're reading information. Oh, this was amazing.

[00:28:19] The book is out now by the time this episode is out. So, everyone listening, "Zero-Click Marketing", Amanda Natividad and Rand Fishkin go and get the book. Check out the book. Follow Amanda on LinkedIn as well. Follow her blog, her podcast.

[00:28:34] The links will all be in the show notes. Amanda, this was such an honor, and wishing you the best with the book. Change the world, please. Make people care about this.

[00:28:42] Thank you so much, Sani. This was so much, so much fun. Thank you for being so thoughtful 

[00:28:47] So what's your website for if nobody clicks anymore? You heard Amanda's answer. It's your source of truth. You will not spend much time there. You might not update it every day or even every week or every month, but it's the record, and everything else should point to it. Now, three things from this conversation stayed with me.

[00:29:08] She bought the clothes from a brand she never heard of before, found the brand through ChatGPT, bought it on the same day without seeing the homepage. She signed up for a tool whose homepage would have put her off because she would think that this is not for her, because an AI sent her straight to the sign-up page, past the homepage.

[00:29:31] And then the survey with the made-up TV chefs in the dropdown, it got the credit from nearly half the customers because the results seemed plausible. Your website still has a job. It's just not the job it had.

[00:29:46] Zero Click Marketing is out now. The link is in the show notes. If you want to listen or read No Hacks every week, you can subscribe at nohacks.co/subscribe. Talk to you next week