How Will You Be Remembered in a Zero-Click World?

This is from our latest IADAS newsletter, from Webby Group Executive Director Jesse Feister .

One of the questions we’ve been asking internally at the Webby Group is deceptively simple:

How will people discover who you are and what you’ve done?

The way this works online is changing fast.

I was recently catching up with IADAS members Georgios Athanassiadis and Kasper Kuijpers , leaders of the Amsterdam-based digital branding agency Your Majesty. They’ve been digging into this very question with some of their European clients. They pointed me to a stat that’s stuck with me:

According to a recent Bain & Company study, 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click. 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” AI summaries for at least 40% of their searches.

You can read the full report here.

In other words, more users are finding answers without ever visiting a website. Chances are, you’ve contributed to this shift yourself. An AI summary gets a quick answer, and you move on. Traffic drops and credit is ancillary at best. A system once built on search, click, and conversion is now one of direct answers, synthesized from across the internet, sometimes without attribution. Even when sources are cited, they’re usually peripheral, not primary.

Despite overall search volume increasing YoY, Bain estimates this change is already contributing to a 15–25% drop in search traffic. And let’s be real, this trend will only accelerate. I'm most interested in what this means moving forward, and how we can harness the shift to build a better Internet.

Kasper is building out a report based on an analysis of Your Majesty — Part of Infinum 's client data that lays out what’s actually happening, and why optimizing for AI visibility now requires something deeper than metadata. It’s about meaning, context, and cultural presence. I’m excited to amplify and share this analysis when it’s published.

This isn’t just a brand challenge. It’s also a people challenge.

How will your work be remembered when AI interprets what’s out there? What happens to your professional identity when an algorithm interprets your accomplishments?

We’ve been thinking about this deeply as we look ahead to Webby 30. More soon on that front, but for now, I’d love to hear how you're seeing this shift in your own world.

Thanks, as always, for being part of this community.