The Zero-Click Reality: Atlassian Vendors Must Adapt to Stay Visible, or Disappear

In 2026, visibility isn’t earned by clicks; it’s engineered by citations. Zero-click searches are stripping Atlassian Marketplace vendors of up to 25% of their organic traffic, and AI Overviews are accelerating the decline. Traditional SEO, fighting for the first-page spot on Google, no longer guarantees visibility or conversions.

For Atlassian Marketplace vendors, that means even if your content ranks well, AI-generated summaries can replace your organic exposure entirely. The apps that appear in those summaries – not the ones buried below them – will own the conversation.

To stay visible in 2025, Marketplace vendors must shift focus from SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), an approach that ensures your pages and brand stories appear inside AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results.

Learn how Brighttail helps Atlassian vendors future-proof their Marketplace visibility with Full-Funnel audits.

What Are Zero-Click Searches?

• Zero-click searches happen when a query is answered directly on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
• AI Overviews, Featured Snippets, and Knowledge Panels have become the “new homepage” for our audience by providing the needed information immediately.
• A study by Bain & Company shows that approximately 60% of all searches end without a click to a website, meaning most buyers never reach your content anymore by now.
• AI Overviews and AI answers from LLMs (like ChatGPT and Perplexity) take this a step further: they summarize your insights, and sometimes your competitors’, without clear attribution.
• For Atlassian Marketplace vendors, that means a buyer searching for ‘best Jira test management tool’ could see a competitor listed in an AI summary, while your product, despite ranking high, never gets mentioned.

Discover how to turn AI Overviews from a threat into a traffic source.

The Zero-Click Exploit: Where Your Traffic Really Went?

According to SimilarWeb, ChatGPT’s traffic surpassed Bing’s in 2024, rising to become the 11th most used website worldwide in 2024.

It’s not surprising, considering the fact that 55% of US users and 62% of UK users treat LLMs as search engines (Future, 2024) and use them as a springboard for information and research. When LLMs give users a satisfactory answer, they often choose not to leave the platform at all, resulting in a loss of organic traffic for many vendors who rely on organic traffic for trial sign-ups and lead generation.

Additionally, an Ahrefs study shows that average CTR drops by about 34.5% when AI Overviews appear on the results page. AI Overviews usually take up a large portion of the screen, pushing down high-ranking organic results.

For Atlassian vendors, this can cause a loss of 15-25% in organic clicks and trial sign-ups each quarter.

Aside from reducing CTR rates, AI Overviews also increase CPCs by up to 25%. Paid ads and organic results are pushed down the webpage by AI Overviews, leaving less space for ads. As ad space becomes scarce, businesses start bidding more, driving up cost-per-click (CPC).

If your business depends on organic CTR for top-of-funnel traffic like free trials, blog visits, or organic lead-gen, these developments will erode your funnels and contribute to declining growth.

In short, AI Overviews and other LLMs are rewriting how software buyers discover Atlassian apps and our content, and the only way to stay visible is to optimize for how AI now finds, reads, and cites content.

Adapting to Zero-Click SEO: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

You can’t fight this new zero-click reality, but you can adapt. GEO helps your brand remain visible inside AI-generated summaries and AI answers, ensuring your message is represented accurately across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

Atlassian vendors who are serious about staying visible and relevant need to implement GEO frameworks to keep up. Some of the strategies include:

• Optimizing for AI Understanding: Establish and implement technical layers to tell AI what you do and why you’re the credible source to cite. Implement structured data and Bottom-Line-Up-Front (BLUF) summaries to help AI interpret your brand correctly. Add llm-info pages summarizing app features, editions, and pricing to guide AI references.
• Building Citation-Worthy Content: Make your app the obvious answer. Develop authoritative, helpful, high-quality content clusters in semantic-rich topical hubs so AI engines recognize your authority and pull your content into answers. Add credible sources and data references so AI systems treat your content as authoritative.
• Tracking AI Citations: Visibility in AI requires measurement beyond traffic. Periodically measure “Share-of-Answer” and “AI Citation Rate” to understand your brand or product’s visibility in AI answers or AI Overviews. Ensure that you’re not just cited often, but accurately as well.
• Rebalancing Paid Search: Shift Pay-Per-Click (PPC) spend to transactional keywords relevant to the middle or bottom of your funnel. Use GEO insights to reduce Customer-Acquisition-Cost (CAC).
• Strengthening Ecosystem Trust: Ensure your Marketplace listing, community contributors, and review site presence reinforce credibility because AI systems rely on these signals to determine authority.

The New GEO Playbook

GEO isn’t a replacement for SEO; it’s its evolution. SEO gets you ranked, GEO keeps you visible. Together, they form a dual-visibility strategy that ensures your brand is both searchable and citeable in the AI era.

Think of GEO as the bridge between what search engines understand and what AI models explain. When you control how AI interprets and interacts with your content, you control the narrative your buyers see, even when they never visit your site.

Own Your Visibility in the AI-Driven, Zero-Click Era

AI Overviews and AI answers are here to stay. The longer you wait, the harder it is to beat out competitors who are already being cited and mentioned.

Secure your AI mentions and rebuild demand for your products with Brighttail’s customized GEO strategy now. Schedule a consultation call now to find out how.