Zero-click marketing sounds abstract until you see it. The idea, which Amanda Natividad of SparkToro named in 2022, is simple: create content that delivers its value right where people see it, with no click required. Here are seven brands that do it well, and the lesson I take from each.
1. Gong: data people want to repeat
Gong, the revenue intelligence company, built much of its brand on LinkedIn with data-driven posts from its own research. The posts give the finding outright, such as when to bring up price on a sales call, instead of teasing a report. Foundation's breakdown found one employee post analyzing 304,174 sales emails earned 275 comments and more than 1,200 interactions. Gong's blog posts even end with "follow us on LinkedIn" instead of a demo request.
Lesson: If you have proprietary data, publish the finding in the feed. The chart is the content.
2. SparkToro: the brand that named the idea
SparkToro practices what it preached. Its team shares full frameworks and research findings on social platforms instead of posting links and asking for clicks. The audience learns something in the feed, remembers who taught it, and searches for the brand when they need audience research.
Lesson: Teach the whole thing. People do not resent a brand for being too useful.
3. Semrush: a complete idea, no link
Semrush shares posts on X with no link at all, explaining that SEO now spans many discovery surfaces and naming them. On LinkedIn, it promoted a course with a checklist that is still useful if you never click the call to action.
Lesson: Write the post so it stands on its own. If the value disappears when the link is removed, it was an ad.
4. Netflix: same news, native to each platform
Netflix announced the same release date, for season two of "The Gentlemen," three different ways: a performance clip on X, a carousel on Instagram, and a corporate story on LinkedIn about its co-marketing campaign with AB InBev. Same news, three formats, each built for how people use that platform.
Lesson: Do not paste one post everywhere. Translate the idea into each platform's native shape.
5. Refine Labs: proving it worked
Zero-click only survives budget season if you can show it works. Refine Labs popularized self-reported attribution: asking every lead "How did you hear about us?" in their own words. In one example it shared, software attribution credited podcasts with 0% of closed-won revenue. The self-reported answers credited podcasts with 53%, about $11.4 million.
Lesson: Add the open-text field to every form. It finds the influence your analytics cannot see.
6. LinkedIn link posts: the data behind the tactic
This one is a finding, not a brand, but it explains why the brands above post the way they do. A MagicPost study of more than 560,000 LinkedIn posts, cited by Semrush, found posts with a link preview had a median of 414 impressions, versus 795 for posts without one.
Lesson: Put the link in the comments, or leave it out, and let the post do the work.
7. Answer-first pages that get quoted by AI
The newest form of zero-click is being the source an AI answer quotes. Seer Interactive found that brands cited inside Google's AI Overviews kept roughly twice the organic click-through of brands that were not cited. I have been rebuilding pages on sites I run so each one opens with a direct two-sentence answer to the question it ranks for. It is the same zero-click idea, applied to search: give the answer, earn the mention.
Lesson: Your website still matters. Write it so AI tools can quote it.
How to start with one example
Pick the one closest to your situation. If you have data, do what Gong did. If you have expertise but no data, do what SparkToro and Semrush do. Whatever you pick, add the "How did you hear about us?" field first, so you can see what is working.
For the strategy behind all of this, read what zero-click marketing is, and for the search side, Google AI Overviews and B2B.
Give the whole idea away where your buyer already is, make it unmistakably yours, and measure the demand it creates with branded search and "How did you hear about us?"
