Your Brand Needs a Memory: Building Brand Recall in the Era of Zero-Click Searches

With 13.6 billion searches every single day, Google is handling more queries than ever before. But while search volumes are generally up, traffic is showing the opposite trajectory. This is largely due to Google’s introduction of AI overviews in 2024 and zero-click searches even earlier than that.

So, if you’re experiencing an uptick in the search volumes of your industry’s major keywords without a proportionate increase in click-throughs, you might be confused as to what’s happening to search. In this article, we’re going to help you understand how to leverage the rising popularity of AI overviews and zero-click searches to increase your website’s traffic.

All the tactics and best practices that we’ll outline have one thing in common: they’re all designed to increase your “brand recall.” In very simple terms, it refers to the practice of increasing your brand’s presence through AI overviews and zero-click searches. As we’ll show you, not only is this possible, but it might even be more effective than ranking on SERPs!

Let’s dive in.

Building Brand Recall for Zero-Click Searches: Table of Contents

• Why Brand Recall Matters More Than Ever
• The AI-Ranking Playbook: What Makes Content “Worthy of Recall”
• How to Build Brand Recall for Zero-Click Searches
• Achieve Peak Brand Recall with Lean Summits
• Brand Recall for Zero-Click Searches: FAQs

Why Brand Recall Matters More Than Ever

Before we explore the best solutions to creating effective brand recall, let us first understand the problem. What exactly is happening in the world of SEO, and why should it concern you? Simply put, searches are up, but traffic is down. There are a few reasons behind this: 

• In 2025, more than 50% of all Google searches end without a single click.
• Google now shows an AI Overview for nearly 50% of all searches.
• Organic traffic has gone down by an estimated 15-25%. 
• 8% of Americans now use ChatGPT as their primary search engine.

So, if you’re operating a brand or working as a marketing/sales executive, you might have to realign a lot of your strategies to ensure that you’re not hit by the falling trends in SEO. The good news is that AI overviews and zero-click searches haven’t killed searches. 

While they have made it harder for your brand to gain visibility, they’ve also increased the rewards of being noticed and indexed by AI search engines. For example, ChatGPT now refers traffic to 30,000+ domains every single day, up from just 10,000 in 2024. This means, as more and more people are using ChatGPT, it is also creating a rebound in traffic. 

Here’s an even more encouraging statistic: if your brand gets mentioned in Google’s AI overview, you can generate 17% more store visits. To get this nearly 20% increase in store traffic, all you have to do is create brand recall: you have to ensure that your content meets AI-friendly standards so that it appears in overviews, snippets, as well as on the SERP.

Let’s find out what these guidelines are.

The AI-Ranking Playbook: What Makes Content “Worthy” of Recall

To implement a strategy that promotes brand recall, you must first understand the standards you need to meet. Let’s find out how AI decides these standards: 

1. AI Prioritizes Context Over Keywords

The very first thing that has changed is that algorithms now prefer context over hyper-specific keywords. Even if your content doesn’t contain as many keywords as your competitor’s content, as long as you’ve offered easy-to-understand context, you might appear on AI overviews, while they may not.

This is because AI doesn’t just match keywords in queries with keywords in content. It now relies on understanding the semantic content of questions and searches. It means your content needs to reflect topical depth rather than just using a keyword X number of times.

2. Authority and Trust are Non-Negotiable

Remember that time when Google was saying that there were cats on the moon? They’ve moved quickly to ensure that such hallucinations don’t repeat or embed themselves in their algorithm. One way they’ve done this is by increasing the importance of expertise and trustworthiness of the content. 

So, trustworthy brands with content backed by E-E-A-T signals are more likely to appear on AI overviews and boost brand recall in the age of zero-click searches.

3. Structured Data is AI’s Roadmap to Your Content

Users have increasingly switched to AI searches because they offer summarized answers with context and clarity without requiring a single search. So, how exactly does AI accomplish this? They rely on structured data to understand context, match it with the user’s query, and present an aggregate of answers from different websites that offer such context. 

Simply put, they rely on structured content to deliver summaries of topics and answers to user queries. To ensure that your content also appears on AI overviews, it must have a clear, easy-to-understand structure.

4. Engagement Signals in AI Overviews

Zero-search clicks have significantly reduced the importance of click-throughs as indicators of user interest or traffic. So, you can see a rise in customer visits even if your click-throughs are falling. On the other hand, you might be ranking first on SERPs for several keywords and still experience a dip in store visits or online orders.

This is because AI overviews can promote your brand without requiring customers to actually visit your website during the research phase of their buying journey. Plus, AI monitors different metrics in the era of zero-click queries: 

• Dwell time, which indicates user satisfaction with your website.
• Low bounce rates, which tell AI that your content offers solutions to user queries.
• Social shares show that your content is relevant to the users. 

In other words, brand recall is both a cause and an effect of AI noticing your brand. So, appearing on AI overviews can increase the speed and intensity of your sales cycles!

5. AI Prefers Fresh and Updated Content

One thing that you might have noticed is that more and more brands are constantly updating their content. This isn’t just because they want to structure their content to meet AI standards. It’s also because AI prefers getting its answers from fresh, relevant content, compared to old, outdated answers. 

Now that we’ve explored the benchmarks your content needs to hit to appear on AI overviews, let’s understand what practices can help you do just that.

How to Build Brand Recall for Zero-Click Searches

At the Lean Summits, we’ve had a lot of success in helping B2B and B2C brands adopt an AI-friendly marketing strategy that boosts brand recall for zero-click searches. 

Here are the 5 best tried and tested methods that you can use to build your brand’s recall value for zero-click queries:

1. Create a Set Structure for Your Content

Before anything else, you need to switch to using a pre-defined structure for all your content. This means you should:

• Use schema markup for FAQs.
• Include relevant and detailed headings.
• Write FAQ-style content throughout your blogs.

Remember, pages with schema markup get nearly 70% more snippet placements compared to those without. So, schema markup is an absolute must in the age of no-click searches.

2. Use Storytelling and Visual Identity

While Google uses textual summaries to give answers to search queries, it also shows a list of sources on the right side. Once Google starts showing your content in these overviews, you must have a clear visual identity. 

To do so, you must streamline your logo, website font, and colors. This will help you deliver a visually consistent, more memorable experience to your target audience. 

3. Strengthen E-E-A-T Signals

As we’ve discussed, Google and other AI search engines give a lot of priority to content that is aligned with E-E-A-T signals. Here are some steps you can take to ensure that your content reflects these signals: 

• Publish original case studies and research.
• Include author bios for every single blog you publish.
• Get backlinks for high-DA websites to boost your website’s authority. 

These measures are absolutely essential to ensure that AI doesn’t just notice your website, but understands that you offer expert advice trusted by industry experts and other users.

4. Optimize for Branded Searches

Once you’ve made your content AI-ready, you should start optimizing your content for the next phase of your users’ buying journey. This is the stage where they’re either considering your brand or focusing on it exclusively. 

During this phase, users might be engaging in something called “branded search.” So, they’re typing your brand’s name straight into Google and asking it about reviews or your products or services.

So, you must prepare and optimize all the available content for this phase of your sales funnel. Here’s what you can do: 

• Create a Google My Business Profile for your enterprise.
• Update your Google Knowledge Panel with accurate information about your business.
• Encourage users to leave positive reviews on Google and other review websites.

This phase of optimization is very important for your business. It’s the stage of your sales funnel where you actually leverage your brand recall to convert prospects into customers faster than ever before.

5. Go Beyond Google

Lastly, one thing you might have noticed is that Google is increasingly citing forum answers in its AI overviews. This is especially true for queries related to niche products or services. This is because forums follow a structure that naturally aligns with AI requirements: 

• It has a question/answer format for discussions.
• It allows users to give their honest reviews. 
• Users can rate the answers or give feedback on whether they found them useful.

These factors play a huge role in naturally boosting the E-E-A-T signals of forum-based content. So, we suggest encouraging your employees to create profiles on Reddit, Quora, and other forums where they can answer questions, address concerns about your products/services, and generally increase your brand’s visibility and recall value.

Achieve Peak Brand Recall with Lean Summits

Brand recall is critical in the age of no-click queries. Within the next couple of years, it can make or break your SEO strategy, which means it will have a huge impact on whether you survive this period of transition or use it to your advantage. 

As we’ve seen, it’s not impossible to leverage this shift and make the most of it to push your traffic even beyond pre-AI levels. All you need to do is create an actionable roadmap to ensure that AI notices and identifies your brand’s content as authoritative and trustworthy. Once that’s done, it’s a relatively easy task to optimize for branded searches and convert prospects into customers. 

However, it can be very difficult to identify and optimize all the touchpoints of your brand identity, especially if you’re operating on multiple platforms. That’s where we at Lean Summits Solutions come in.

In the past year, we’ve had enormous success in helping our clients switch from SEO and keywords to GEO and questions to ensure they benefit from the rise of AI overviews.

From ideating to indexing, we can help you create a roadmap to building brand recall that is ready for the era of zero-click searches.

Connect with our growth marketing experts, and we’ll help you create a tailored strategy so that you can convert recall into revenue and reach your industry’s summit!

Brand Recall for Zero-Click Searches: FAQs