Rand Fishkin taught a generation to chase Google clicks, and his new book is about how the clicks stopped coming

For most of two decades, if you worked in marketing and wanted to understand Google, you learned it from Rand Fishkin. Moz, the company he co-founded and ran, was the industry's toolkit and its schoolhouse at once: the software, the metrics, the Whiteboard Friday videos that taught a whole profession its vocabulary. He took it from $500,000 in debt to more than $47 million in revenue across seventeen years.

His new book, co-written with Amanda Natividad, is about how the traffic that whole industry was built on is drying up. It is called Zero Click Marketing, and the subtitle is not softening anything: how to build brands and earn customers on the traffic-starved web.

The man who calls his own game

This is the duality, and it is unusually honest. Google increasingly answers the question on its own results page. AI assistants answer it without a results page at all. The click, the entire economic premise of the discipline Fishkin helped professionalise, is quietly being removed from the equation, and the person saying so loudest is the one with the most to lose from being right.

He has form for this. Lost and Founder, his 2018 book, is a founder memoir that is mostly about mistakes: the funding decisions he regrets, the growth targets that were the wrong targets, the parts of startup orthodoxy that he followed and should not have. It has sold more than 25,000 copies, largely because it does the thing almost none of them do. He has also been public about stepping down as Moz's CEO in 2014 during a serious bout of depression, and about leaving the company entirely in 2018.

The SparkToro chapter is the argument made structurally rather than in print. He and Casey Henry raised a deliberately weird round designed to escape the venture treadmill, no forced follow-ons, no binary outcome, and then published the investment documents so anyone else could use them. By 2023 the company was profitable and had paid its investors back. For a man whose previous company was a case study in what venture money does to a founder, that is not a business model. It is a rebuttal.

Alertmouse, and a video game studio

The current portfolio tells you the rest. SparkToro does audience research: instead of guessing where your people are, it tells you what they actually read, watch, and follow. Alertmouse is a Google Alerts replacement, which is the kind of product you build when you have spent twenty years irritated by a thing nobody else bothered to fix. And Snackbar Studio makes indie video games, listed in his own bio right alongside the other two, with no apology and no framing as a hobby.

That last one is the tell. A person who could spend the rest of his career as the elder statesman of search instead spends part of it shipping games, and the same instinct runs through everything: he keeps choosing the version of the work that is smaller, weirder, and actually his.

If you sell anything on the internet, the zero-click argument is the most important thing anyone is currently saying about your job, including for a site like this one, where being quoted by an assistant now matters more than being clicked. Read Lost and Founder first for the person. Then read the new one for the forecast, which we would like to be wrong about and suspect is not.

Founder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, and Snackbar Studio.

Rand's own bio, in which an audience research tool, a Google Alerts replacement, and a video game studio are listed as equals