Beyond Google Zero: Will Scott on Agentic SEO and the Rise of Non-Human Traffic
April 24th, 2026 by
The “Google Zero” panic has been building for months. The fear: AI Overviews and zero-click search are slowly starving websites of organic traffic. Some publishers have responded with alarm. Others have abandoned SEO strategies entirely.
Will Scott, AI SEO expert and CEO of Search Influence, has a different read, and it’s published in Search Engine Land.
His piece, “‘Google Zero’ misses the real problem: Your next visitor isn’t human,” pushes back on the collapse narrative while surfacing a more urgent question: what happens when most of your website’s visitors aren’t people at all?
Google Isn’t Dead. But That’s Not the Point.
Will cites Similarweb and Graphite data showing only a 2.5% decline in Google traffic to top websites globally. The widely-cited collapse figures are skewed by publishers hit by algorithm updates. Google still drives nearly 20% of all web visits.
But defending Google traffic isn’t the goal of the article. It’s the setup.
The Visitors You’re Not Seeing
According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, bots now account for 51% of all web traffic, and AI crawlers are the fastest-growing segment, up more than 15x year over year.
The crawl-to-referral math is striking: Anthropic’s ClaudeBot crawls roughly 24,000 pages per referral sent. OpenAI’s GPTBot: about 1,276 to 1. Meanwhile, Googlebot sends 831 times more visitors than AI systems do per crawl. The old deal of read my content, send me traffic is quietly being rewritten.
What Agentic SEO Actually Means
The bigger shift Will identifies is agentic commerce. AI agents are increasingly researching, comparing, and shortlisting vendors on behalf of human buyers, before a person ever visits your site. Gartner projects 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028. Salesforce reported AI agents influenced 20% of all global orders during Cyber Week 2025.
An AI agent doesn’t read your hero banner. It parses your structured data, checks your specs against competitors, and builds a shortlist. That “visit” might show up in your analytics as a zero-second bot session — or not at all.
Will’s practical response: treat schema markup as core infrastructure, not a nicety. Answer compound multi-variable questions in your content, not just broad keyword queries. Keep your pricing pages current. Make your robots.txt a conscious business decision.
And don’t abandon Google SEO. The agentic web adds a layer, but it doesn’t replace what’s already working.
Read the Full Article
Will Scott’s Search Engine Land piece covers the data, the agentic commerce projections, and the practical agentic SEO playbook in full. It’s required reading for anyone managing digital visibility in 2026.
Read “‘Google Zero’ misses the real problem: Your next visitor isn’t human” on Search Engine Land.
Want to talk through what agentic SEO means for your organization? Contact the Search Influence team.
