The Zero-Click Era Insight: The One Question That Reveals Whether a Growth Strategy Is Durable or Borrowed
Author: IMB Editorial Team
IMB Journal – International Marketing Board
Volume 1 | Issue 7
July 2026
The One Question That Reveals Whether a Growth Strategy Is Durable or Borrowed
Chegg’s leadership did not fail to notice the threat. They built an AI product, they filed a lawsuit, they cut costs when the numbers demanded it. What they didn’t have, when the moment arrived, was an answer to a question that should have been asked years earlier, back when the growth numbers still looked healthy: who actually owns the relationship with our customer, us or the platform that sends them to us?
That question is worth running against any growth channel a business currently depends on, not only search. Ask it plainly: if this platform changed its algorithm, its terms, or its fee structure tomorrow, with no warning and no recourse, would our customers still know how to find us? For a company that has built an email list, a branded app, a community, or simply a level of brand recognition strong enough that people search for the company by name, the honest answer is usually yes, even if the transition would be painful. For a company whose entire funnel starts with a generic search query it doesn’t own, the honest answer is often no, and that answer is the actual measure of strategic risk, regardless of how efficient the channel looks in this quarter’s report.
This test has a useful side effect: it reframes what counts as marketing success. A campaign that drives a spike in generic search traffic looks identical, on a weekly dashboard, to a campaign that builds durable brand recognition, right up until the underlying platform changes and one of those two things turns out to have been worth far more than the other. Branded search volume, the number of people who search for a company by name rather than a generic query, is one of the few metrics that reliably distinguishes the two, and it deserves more attention from marketing leadership than it typically receives.
None of this means abandoning any channel that isn’t fully owned. Very few businesses can or should try to run entirely on owned channels alone. It means treating every unowned channel as a source of leverage to be used while building something more durable behind it, rather than as the destination itself. The businesses now scrambling to make up for a decade of pure dependency did not lack good marketers. They lacked a habit of asking, early and often, whether their best-performing channel was one they owned or one they were simply borrowing.
This concludes our three-part series on strategy in the zero-click era. Read Part 1, “Why a Strategy Built on Someone Else’s Platform Is Not a Strategy,” and Part 2, the Chegg case study, in this issue.