• by Ayse Altunisik , Yesterday

 I've spent the last year learning how AI is disrupting our industry. What I rarely hear is what any of this actually means for the customer journey.

Clicks have been on their way out for years. For as long as digital media has been around, clicks have been a default metric for reporting. They were never a complete measure of behavior.

Are we saying AI killed the click? No. It just pulled the plug -- pretty aggressively.

The Rise of The Zero-Click Web Experience

Ten years ago, the way we moved through the internet was dramatically different. Search, click, explore, decide. Today, it's far less linear. The customer journey experience has shifted from a decisive navigation journey to a more passive one. 

More than 60% of Google searches end without a single click. With AI overviews and LLMs answering most of our queries, users get what they need to move on. No click. No visit. No metric to track. 

Our zero-click reality goes well beyond being a Google problem. Apps and sites favor content that keeps you within their platform to increase time and user engagement, deprioritizing off-platform content. Instagram keeps shoppers in-app. TikTok pulls answers in comments. The customer journey is getting harder to see, while brands are still measuring a journey that doesn't exist anymore.

The Measure Became the Target

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. -Goodhart's Law

That's the inconvenient truth about clicks. They became the target everyone was trying to hit. But people don't move cleanly from awareness to consideration to conversion. The click is just one moment in a long, complicated journey.

But clicks were never the real problem. It was the expectation that a single, nuanced metric could do all the heavy lifting. 

Context is Everything

Clicks are not universally dead. What IS dead, is the way we've been measuring them. They're useful in one context, completely irrelevant in another.

A click still means something in lower-funnel, high-intent channels. Direct response, email, retargeting, they all tell us where someone is in the journey. This gives us a real signal to act on.

But in upper-funnel awareness campaigns, regardless of whether or not someone clicks at this phase, it's nearly impossible to understand why. That's how brands optimize for the wrong thing, and why reporting can hide the actual business outcome. 

What We Can Do

1.  Clicks are just low-funnel: Using them as a universal performance metric is not a measurement strategy. Upper-funnel campaigns are designed to influence, not convert. Measuring them with a lower-funnel metric tells the wrong side of the story.

2.     Interrogate vendor claims: When a platform tells you clicks don't matter, they're selling you a different metric that benefits them. Ask what they gain when you stop looking at clicks.

3. There's no silver bullet metric: The absence of a perfect metric isn't an excuse to measure nothing. Layered measurement isn't as clean as a click, but it's closer to the truth. 

Clicks were never the enemy. They just weren't the full story. And the sooner we start using them correctly, the sooner our measurement will reflect the world where our audiences are actually living.