Remember when building a great website, stuffing it with smart content, and buying your way to the top of Google meant your sales pipeline practically filled itself? That world is slipping away. Quietly. Quickly.
Welcome to the zero-click era of business development in an AI world.
A world where search engines answer questions without sending people to your website. Where AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s new AI Overviews offer up instant, summarized responses that leave your SEO strategy stranded at the station.
In 2025, referral traffic from Google to the top 500 content sites dropped by more than 15%. That’s not a trend. That’s a landslide. And here’s the thing: it’s not just happening to big media outlets. It’s happening to agencies like yours.
So let’s be clear: If your agency’s best thinking is locked up on your website, it’s invisible.
AI Is Eating the Middle of Your Funnel
Once upon a time, a prospective client might ask their network, dig into Google, click through a few blog posts, and fill out your contact form.
Today? They ask ChatGPT.
"Who are the best agencies for B2B demand gen?"
"Who should I hire to handle brand repositioning for a SaaS startup?"
And that’s it. No searching, no clicking, no website visit. Just a clean, confidence-filled AI answer.
According to Bain, 42% of AI users already ask these tools for purchase recommendations. And a growing number trust those answers more than what they find on traditional search engines.
So if your agency isn’t showing up in those answers—if you're not part of the training data, the citation set, the buzz—you’re not even in the room.
That’s a problem. But not an unsolvable one.
The Propinquity Principle™: Showing Up Where It Matters
Here’s the truth: You don’t need people to visit your website. You just need them to see your thinking.
That’s the heart of The Propinquity Principle™.
Propinquity is proximity. Closeness. It’s the psychological effect that makes people trust what feels familiar. Not what’s best. Not what’s ranked #1. What’s consistently present in their world.
In a zero-click world, your job as an agency isn’t to get someone to your site. It’s to get your ideas into their feed, inbox, and podcast queue. Over and over again.
Like a street musician playing the same spot every Saturday until people stop to listen.
Or, better yet, like a Taco Truck that finds where the foot traffic is heaviest and parks itself there.
Cobblestones and Cornerstones: A Framework for the Future
In The Invisible Sale, I introduced the idea of Cobblestones and Cornerstones.
Cornerstones are your deep, rich, longform content—whitepapers, signature blog posts, the heavy-hitting stuff that lives on your site.
Cobblestones are the little pieces—a podcast quote, a LinkedIn post, a guest post on a reputable third-party website, a slide from a recent talk, a short video—that you spread out into the world. These are the pieces that appear in someone’s feed, get mentioned on a podcast, or are referenced in an AI tool scanning the web.
The key? Don’t wait for people to find the cornerstone. Lead with cobblestones, and then let curiosity drive the audience toward your bigger thinking.
And guess what? Cobblestones are what AI sees. They’re what gets scraped, cited, referenced, and recombined. They are the digital breadcrumbs that lead back to you.
The Propinquity Principle™ thrives in this framework. It says: be present. Be consistent. Be visible.
And most importantly? Be useful.
Painless Prospecting Meets the Invisible Sale
Now, showing up is one thing. Getting remembered? That takes finesse.
That’s where Painless Prospecting fits in. It’s not cold calling. It’s not spray-and-pray. It’s strategic outreach rooted in relevance.
If someone comments on your post—you reach out. If someone listens to a podcast you were on, you follow up. If someone is grappling with a challenge you’ve addressed in your cobblestones, you send them the cornerstone.
You're not asking for a meeting. You're offering a perspective.
This is the modern funnel: Visibility (Propinquity) + Curiosity (Cobblestones) + Value (Cornerstones) = Trust.
From there, sales become a side effect. Not a hard sell.
What Happens When the Keyboard Disappears?
Let’s go further.
Imagine a world where no one types anything. They just speak.
"Hey AI, who’s a good agency for positioning a fintech brand?"
That’s not science fiction. That’s 2026. Voice interfaces are coming fast. Ambient computing—where queries happen passively, conversationally, without a screen—will fundamentally change how decisions are made.
In that world, search becomes memory. Recommendation. Reputation.
AI won’t browse websites. It will consult its models, training data, and citations. The agencies that win will be the ones that AI recognizes and trusts.
How do you become that agency?
You stop focusing on being found and start focusing on being known.
Most of us in business development have been conditioned to believe success is a numbers game. WRONG!
Real business growth doesn’t come from reaching the masses. It comes from reaching the right person—The ONE who listens, engages, and takes action.
The Power of One
Build Mindshare, Not Just Search Share
Stop worrying about your Google Juice. Because the truth is, you don’t need to dominate search rankings. In fact, you never did, but I was the only one telling you that.
To consistently grow your agency, you must dominate your ideal client's mental space when they think, "Who do I trust to help me with this?" Top-of-Mind-Preference, that's the goal.
In a zero-click, AI-mediated, keyboardless future, Propinquity isn’t just a principle. It’s your edge.
Agencies that embrace this shift will win. They’ll be the names clients remember, the voices AI repeats, the links that show up in snippets and summaries.
They’ll stop waiting for traffic. And start driving results.
Your Move
So what do you do next?
Stop hoarding your ideas on your website. Break them into cobblestones and spread them where your clients already hang out.
Pick three channels to consistently park your agency's taco truck—LinkedIn, podcasts, industry Slack groups, whatever makes sense.
Use your cornerstone content to deepen trust, not initiate it.
And most importantly? Get comfortable being seen. Because in the AI age, the agency that gets seen gets selected. And that's the game now.
If you're ready to play it differently. If you're ready to leverage The Propinquity Principle™ to grow your agency this year, let us help you.
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. Till next time.
This post was originally published on Painless Prospecting, the weekly sales and marketing blog created by the fine folks at Converse Digital. If you want to learn how to create, engage in, and convert conversations into new clients and customers, give them a call.
