Google Zero, AI Shopping Reports, and the New SEO Scoreboard

Google’s CEO says stop worrying about zero-click searches. Google is also quietly building an entire reporting layer to track how brands perform inside AI-generated answers. These two facts are not unrelated.

Sundar Pichai’s ‘Low-Quality Clicks’ Argument Deserves Scrutiny

Search Engine Journal reports that at a recent appearance, Sundar Pichai pushed back on the Google Zero narrative — the concern that AI Overviews and answer-style results are cannibalising referral traffic to publishers and brands. His framing: the clicks being lost were low-quality to begin with, and the users who do click through now are more intentional.

It’s a defensible position in theory. A user who reads a full AI summary and still clicks is probably further down the decision funnel. For transactional queries — product comparisons, service lookups, local business searches — that could genuinely mean higher conversion quality per session.

The problem is that this argument transfers all the risk to the publisher. Mid-funnel informational content — the kind that builds brand familiarity, nurtures consideration, and drives Southeast Asian consumers from Shopee browse to branded search — depends on volume, not just intent purity. If awareness-stage traffic disappears into AI summaries without attribution, the top of the funnel starves quietly, and you only notice six months later when branded search volume softens.

The strategic response isn’t to argue with Pichai. It’s to make your brand the source Google’s AI cites — not the destination it replaces.

Google Merchant Center’s AI Performance Report Changes the Measurement Game

Semrush reports that Google is adding an AI performance insights report to Merchant Center, giving ecommerce brands visibility into how their products appear across AI-powered shopping experiences — think AI Overviews with product carousels, conversational shopping in Gemini, and similar surfaces.

This is significant for a simple reason: until now, brands had no structured way to measure AI-surface visibility separately from traditional Shopping ads or organic listings. You could see clicks and impressions, but you couldn’t isolate performance within AI-generated shopping contexts. That gap made it nearly impossible to run disciplined optimisation experiments.

For Southeast Asian ecommerce teams running across Lazada, Shopee, and Google Shopping simultaneously, this creates a new reporting obligation. When the report lands, the immediate priority is establishing a baseline — what percentage of your product catalogue is appearing in AI shopping surfaces, which categories are being surfaced, and whether AI-cited products correlate with your highest-margin SKUs or just your highest-volume ones. The answer will reshape your product feed optimisation priorities.

Practically, this means auditing product titles, descriptions, and structured data for conversational query alignment — not just keyword matching. A product titled “Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones 40hr Battery” ranks fine in traditional Shopping. A product described as “best headphones for long-haul flights under THB 3,000” is positioned for how AI systems interpret and match intent.

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Domain Rating Still Matters — But Context Changes Everything

Ahrefs published a detailed data-driven piece on Domain Rating benchmarks, and the finding that matters most for strategic planning is this: DR is relative, not absolute. A DR of 50 might be dominant in a niche vertical but entirely unremarkable against direct competitors in a crowded category.

This reframing is quietly important for AEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) strategy. AI systems — whether Google’s or third-party LLMs — appear to use domain authority signals as one proxy for source credibility when deciding what to cite in generated answers. But they’re doing relative comparisons within topic clusters, not absolute DR thresholds.

What this means operationally: chasing a DR number is less useful than systematically outbuilding authority within your specific topic perimeter. A Singaporean fintech brand doesn’t need to out-link the Wall Street Journal — it needs a stronger backlink profile than the three other Singapore-based personal finance comparison sites competing for the same AI citation slots.

For Southeast Asian brands, this creates a realistic path. Regional publishers — The Ken, Tech in Asia, KrASIA, and category-specific media — carry genuine topical authority signals in regional AI indexing. A coordinated earned media and digital PR strategy targeting these outlets builds the kind of backlink profile that influences AI citation probability, not just traditional SERP rankings.

The New SEO Scoreboard Has Three Columns

The shift happening across these three developments points to the same structural change: search performance now needs to be measured across three distinct surfaces, each with different optimisation logic.

First, traditional organic — still relevant, increasingly intent-filtered. Second, AI-surface visibility — product feeds, structured data, and topical authority driving citation in AI Overviews and conversational results. Third, domain credibility signals — DR in competitive context, earned media velocity, and E-E-A-T signals that influence whether an AI system treats your brand as a citable source or a background result.

Most SEO dashboards in Southeast Asia are still built around column one. The teams that build measurement infrastructure for all three — and start optimising accordingly — will have a structural advantage that compounds as AI-mediated search continues to expand its share of the discovery journey.

The deeper question worth sitting with: if AI systems increasingly decide what information users deserve to see, who decides which brands the AI trusts — and how transparent will that selection logic ever actually be?

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At grzzly, we help brands across Southeast Asia build search visibility strategies that work across traditional SERP, AI-generated answers, and platform-native discovery — not just one of the three. If you’re rethinking how to measure and grow search presence in a post-click world, we’d like to think through it with you. Let’s talk