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Ask Gemini for “running shoes under €120 that fit supination” and the model now shows a shortlist, stock status and a one-tap “Buy with Google Pay” button. No product page, no coupon field appears for your coupon code. The sale ends inside the answer card. Bain & Company calls this moment “zero-click commerce” and finds that 80 percent of consumers rely on answer-level results. That’s 4 out of 5 shoppers, now leaning on in-answer results for at least forty percent of their product searches. Shaving organic traffic by 15 to 25 percent. The funnel has shrunk from four steps to two, and every marketing playbook must adjust.
SGE: Google’s Search Generative Experience, an answer-first version of Search that replaces most blue links with AI-generated summaries.
New Value: how brands reclaim attribution in a zero-click world.
In the classic flow a user scans ten links, chooses a site, studies a product page, then checks out. In the zero-click flow the user poses a single prompt, reviews an answer card, and taps pay. Perplexity’s Shopping layer already offers side-by-side spec sheets and an instant “Get It” button. Amazon’s Rufus assistant keeps buyers inside its mobile app and, according to internal forecasts, will add more than seven-hundred million dollars in operating profit next year because carts no longer leak.
Google is close behind. At I O 2025 the company previewed agentic checkout, a Gemini feature that tracks price drops, negotiates coupon codes, and completes payment through Google Pay long before the shopper sees a retailer’s site. Buy on Google widgets are fading; native checkout belongs to the platform, not the merchant.
The behavioural data confirm how fast this is happening: TikTok Shop reports that more than seventy-one percent of users buy the moment a product appears in-feed. Amazon forecasts that answer-layer upsells will generate over one billion dollars by 2027. Zero-click is not a side trend, it is live-fire revenue.
Generative answers now include product metadata, third-party and buyer reviews, and real-time inventory. All of that flows through a vector index, so token weight (the statistical heft of every phrase), decides who appears. An emissions sheet with SKU-level data gives your backpack more weight than a thousand-word press release. Vaude, the outdoor brand, proved it by publishing its supply-chain spreadsheet as a public Google Sheet. Three weeks later Gemini cited the file in four separate cards for “carbon neutral backpacks.” A transparent table outperformed every glossy brochure.
Instead of click-through rate, marketeers will now track these 3 numbers:
A Botify crawl-speed report shows that pages exposing product feeds through both XML and on-page JSON are indexed twice as fast when Google refreshes its answer layout, giving brands more opportunities to improve every one of those metrics.
Real-time feeds are non-negotiable. Gemini swaps retailers if a rival posts fresher stock data, and a two-hour lag can replace your listing with another brand. Pål Machulla on Medium notes that faulty third-party price trackers now decide who owns the narrative. Merchants need a live feed sync plus override rules in Merchant Centers.
Future signals come fast. Agentic checkout is already in beta, negotiating coupons on the shopper’s behalf. C2PA watermarks in product photos will soon influence ranking because provenance proves authenticity. A draft spec called llms.txt lets merchants whitelist which product paths AI crawlers may quote, protecting sensitive variants while keeping hero SKUs open.
Your board deck still needs numbers, just not the ones you tracked last year. The 3 behavioural stats you need to start adding to your decks now:
• 80% of shoppers rely on in-answer results for at least forty percent of their searches (Bain & Company 2025).
• +71% of TikTok users buy the moment a product appears in-feed, without following an external link (Capital One Shopping 2025).
• Amazon expects Rufus answer-layer upsells to add more than one billion dollars in downstream spend by 2027 (Business Insider 2025).
Put together, these signals confirm zero-click commerce is live trading volume that flows around your website. Attribution teams feel the squeeze first. Pixels cannot fire inside an answer card, and server logs never record the view, so first-party data must come from purchase confirmations, not page hits. Leading merchants now tag every feed item with a unique offer-ID, then send those IDs back to order receipts, through the Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol at the moment of payment. The same ID travels in the XML price feed and the on-page JSON block, so when Gemini or Perplexity surfaces the product, the purchase record links back to the exact answer. Able to show exactly which answer engine closed the cart, even though no click occurred.
BigCommerce reports that early adopter merchants who aligned this feed-ID loop with order analytics, restored 85% of the visibility they lost when click-through evaporated. Now giving finance and marketing a shared metric for zero-click return on spend. Turning invisible views, into visible value.
Zero-click commerce compresses desire and delivery into a single prompt. Publish verifiable specs, sync live inventory, and speak in alt-tag clarity. Every citation you win teaches the model to trust the next table you publish, creating a flywheel no ad budget can match. Publish the facts and tomorrow’s AI will close the cart for you.
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