From clicks to citations

I was out walking with Sien through the village, trying to decide on a grain-free food for her itchy paws. Into Google went “best grain-free dog food for sensitive skin”, and the answer came straight back in a summary box at the top. No click needed; I read it, picked a brand and put the phone away.

Only later did it occur to me that I’d just done to a handful of websites what I’d hate for someone to do to mine. Somebody wrote the pages that summary was built from, and none of them got a visit from me.

That’s what people mean by ‘Google Zero’, or zero-click search: the answer turns up on the results page, and the sites behind it don’t see the traffic. My colleague Alexander Klug wrote on LinkedIn that SEO is dead and GEO comes next; Generative Engine Optimization, in other words, where the aim moves from ranking for a blue link to being one of the sources an AI answer is built from.

I’m not sure ‘dead’ is right. But when I went back to Sien’s question and phrased it a few different ways, the same few veterinary sources kept turning up in the summary. They’d been picked, and not by me.

So what do I do with that for cdit-works.de? I’m still working it out, and what I’ve got so far is fairly plain. Write pages that answer a question someone actually asks, with that question in the heading. Put my name on them and say where a claim comes from. Write from what happened (Sien had itchy paws, we tried a food, this is what we noticed) rather than from what’s ‘generally recommended’; a model can produce the general stuff on its own, it can’t produce my week. And keep the useful pages up to date instead of chasing a new post every week.

None of that is new, it’s what decent SEO advice said before AI summaries existed.

The other thing I keep in mind is that these answers aren’t reliable. A Tow Center study found AI search engines got their citations wrong in more than 60% of the queries they tested. Being cited and being represented correctly are two different things, and I can’t fix the second one from my side.

For now I’m checking a few questions every couple of weeks, the ones a client might actually type, and noting who shows up in the answer. If it’s not me I’d like to know why. If you’ve found something better than checking by hand, I’d honestly like to hear it.