Rand Fishkin on Building Brand Influence in a Zero-Click World

In this episode, Rand Fishkin (co-founder of SparkToro and Moz) joins @Dan Baptiste to unpack major shifts in search-driven discovery, the rise of “zero-click” content, and the hard truths marketers must face in the process: traffic is a vanity metric and attribution is a dead-end.

How does marketing work when LLMs are disrupting search visibility and platforms are suppressing clicks back to your website?

Today, brand discovery and consideration happens across fragmented, untrackable terrain—in feeds, forums, and ChatGPT sessions—that don’t feed neatly into our analytics dashboards. Your website is no longer the destination; it’s one stop on a messy, pinball-machine buyer journey.

But there’s a path forward. Rand doesn’t just dismantle the old content marketing playbook, he lays out new rules for modern brand building:

Getting traffic isn’t the goal. Building influence is.
“Building on rented land” isn’t risky. It’s required.
Influence now comes from showing up consistently across platforms your audience already uses—LinkedIn, Instagram Reels, Reddit, LLM search—not pulling people back to your site.

If you're serious about staying relevant in the AI era, this episode is a must-listen.

Learn how you can partner with the experts at Skyword to master the new content marketing model at skyword.com.

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