Rand Fishkin on why raising $30 million was his biggest mistake, and how to market in a zero-click world where traffic no longer tells the truth.
Long before anyone said the words digital PR, I was the odd one out at the agency, doing SEO alongside media relations. Most of what I knew came from Moz and its ranking. So interviewing Rand Fishkin, the man who built it, felt a bit like marking your old teacher’s homework. I spent half the prep worrying he would ask me about MozRank.
He turned out to be the most honest guest we have had on Embracing Marketing Mistakes. In under an hour, he covered the $30 million decision that nearly broke him, the slow death of the click, and why your boss keeps giving Google credit it never earned, which I thought was interesting.
Why does Rand Fishkin call raising venture capital his biggest mistake?
Venture funding shifted Moz from serving customers to chasing a billion-dollar exit. The pressure contributed to a bout of depression, and Rand stepped down as CEO in 2014.
The first round was small, $1.1 million in 2007, and it paid for the link index behind Domain Authority. The $30 million that followed changed the company. Board meetings stopped being about what customers wanted and became about total addressable markets and competing with HubSpot.
What struck me was where he laid the blame. His investors could never have removed him. He held two of the four board seats and veto rights on nearly everything. The pressure was cultural, a promise he felt he had to keep. “I bet Moz would have been Semrush or Ahrefs today, with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and happy customers,” he told us. “Instead we chased this other outcome, and that is completely my fault.”
He left Moz at the start of 2018 and founded SparkToro the very next day. It runs at under $5 million a year, a twentieth of the size of Moz, and he says he is happier and, weirdly, making more money.
What is zero-click search in 2026?
Zero-click search means people get their answers inside Google, AI tools and social platforms without ever visiting your website. Whole buying journeys now finish without a single click.
Rand’s explanation was ten minutes old when we recorded. His wife Geraldine had just Googled something and asked him where the results had gone. No websites, just answers, AI summaries and suggestions that kept her firmly inside the Google system.
Every big platform now works this way. Google, ChatGPT, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and TikTok all want you to stay put, and they reward content that lets them keep you. People discover a problem and settle on a brand without ever touching your site. His answer is zero-click marketing: doing work that earns influence where your audience already pays attention, even when it sends you no measurable visit. It is the subject of Zero Click Marketing, the book he has written with Amanda Natividad, out this autumn with pre-orders already open.
Is website traffic still a meaningful metric?
Rand argues traffic was always a vanity metric. Plenty of businesses now watch traffic fall while revenue holds steady, because influence has moved onto other people’s platforms.
I have lived this. Prohibition’s website traffic dropped by around 48% after Google rolled out AI Overviews, and for months our inquiries did not budge. Rand has seen the same pattern across businesses that share their numbers with him, and wrote a widely shared post arguing the traffic was never the point.
“Traffic was always a vanity metric,” he said. Publishers are the painful exception, because for them traffic is the revenue. His advice there is blunt: find another model. Bloomberg gives its journalism away and monetises the terminal. The New York Times went another way entirely. “They’re not subscribing to the New York Times,” Rand said. “They’re subscribing to Wordle.”
His favourite proof that unmeasurable marketing still works is a kitchen knife. When Scott Heimendinger’s ultrasonic chef’s knife picked up a glowing review in the Guardian, sales spiked visibly on the dashboard. Nothing in analytics could prove the connection. Should he stop doing PR? Rand’s word for that idea was “mental”.
How do you measure marketing when nobody clicks?
Build a dashboard around four things: earned mentions, search and AI impressions, social impressions, and referral sources. When leads dip, check which column moved rather than guessing.
This was the most practical part of the conversation. Rand suggests tracking brand mentions across press, podcasts, newsletters and blogs with an alerts tool (he built his own, Alertmouse), watching brand impressions in Google including the new AI answer data, monitoring how often AI assistants mention you against competitors, and logging impression counts across every social channel. Four columns. When one slides, you know where the problem lives.
Then came the rant, and it deserves quoting in full. “Anyone who searches for your brand in Google, Google should get zero credit for that, because they did not create that demand. They are merely a navigation source.” Someone hears about you on a podcast, searches your name, and the analytics hand Google the credit. So the budget goes to Google. He has watched that addiction to attribution starve brand channels for 25 years, and PR people have endured it longer than anyone.
How can a small business compete in zero-click marketing?
Ignore the be-everywhere advice. Pick one or two channels and go deep, using Rand’s three tests below.
Rand’s pet peeve is case studies from Nike and Apple being served up as lessons for businesses doing a few million in turnover. His advice for the rest of us runs on three filters:
- Attention. Is your audience actually paying attention in that channel? If your buyers are not on Reddit, your helpful answers there are wasted.
- Unique value. Can you offer something different from everyone else already there? Same-as content earns nothing.
- Energy. Do you enjoy it enough to keep showing up? Nobody sustains a channel they hate, however well it converts.
A window display counts. So does a killer voice on other people’s podcasts. As he put it, the most powerful force in marketing is the compound interest of brand, and compounding only works if you stay in the same place long enough to collect it.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the episode on YouTube or find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. Rand’s first book, Lost and Founder, tells the full Moz story, and you can pre-order Zero Click Marketing now (he suggests UK readers wait until September, when shipping costs drop).
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers share the mistakes that taught them the most, so you can skip the expensive part.
Rand rebuilt his working life on a twentieth of the revenue and swears he has never been happier. So what exactly are the rest of us chasing?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
