Is SEO Still Worth It Amidst the Zero-Click Chaos? A Case Study Featuring Our Own Data.

At Sonar, we put our money where our mouth is as much as possible. Given all the upheaval in marketing, and very valid concerns teams are having about committing dollars to initiatives, we figured we’d publish data from our own site as a SEO case study. The TL;DR is that investments we made in our own search performance last year have had a major impact.

The blue line above represents clicks, the purple, impressions. As you can see, clicks increased meaningfully throughout the year, and in fact continue to do so. In a year-over-year comparison, the month of June saw a 57% increase in clicks. July is currently on-track to a 55% increase.

Here’s the simple, un-sexy laundry list of the not-so-simple, totally un-sexy things we did:

• Tackle small, persistent technical site performance issues
• Fix any and all listing inconsistencies for the business across the web

In June of 2025 I managed to undertake two meaningful initiatives that admittedly should have been handled long ago. But like most of my clients, I’m also a business owner, boss, professional and parent. Client work comes first, second, third and forth, so our website ended up with some niggling technical issues that required real bandwidth to solve.

At the same time, more than a year’s worth of research into how AI surfaces responses to common queries continue to point to a few core truths. One of those was the importance of consistent data—a “durable entity” in AI-speak—across the web. Again, we had all-too-uncommon issues.

So last summer I did what I counsel clients to do all the time: I drew a line in the sand. These things were getting fixed, come hell or high water. The truth is that no one really wants to do this type of marketing. Especially not right now. They’d rather sell you on the idea that their special Claude SEO workflow is going to magically fix everything with a snap of the fingers.

To be fair, it shouldn’t really even be called marketing. It’s like the wiring and the plumbing in a house, only there are no electricians or plumbers. How well or quickly a site renders or whether or not an address gets updated on MapQuest (yes, still a literal thing) are the perennial “hot potatoes” of your tech stack.

When it comes down to it, this kind of thing takes what it’s always taken: enough experience to know what questions to ask, time, and commitment to getting the job done. Zero flash, completely unsexy hard work. At Sonar, we’ve always raised our hands when it comes to this kind of stuff. Partly because that’s who we are. But also because, as in the case of our own site here, it’s what often makes a real difference.

So I spent actual, uninterrupted time digging into the technical issues. I walled myself off from colleagues and family for a few hours on a few days and managed to unbraid the knot. Meanwhile, I asked a colleague to map out every last instance of an old business address across the web (a disconcertingly complicated process, always). She did a phenomenal job of gently hassling the listing sites, deprecated mapping services and random PR outlets to get our NAP (Name, Address, Phone) updated and accurate.

I’m not trying to be that marketing guy, over-promising because “it’s just that easy!” There are always instances where this kind of thing isn’t going to work. The zero-click, AI money cloud is a thing. And for our better-resourced corporate clients, incremental gains like this are certainly harder to come by. But from where I stand as a business owner, this effort has had a real, meaningful, measurable impact on my company’s bottom line.

Right now, you’re probably overwhelmed. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in the news, and the marketing industry is in a pretty wild state of flux. But as always, it’s safe to assume that a significant part of that is hype. The worst thing to do is nothing. The best thing to do is to focus on what you have control over, and what you can affect. More often than not, that amounts to the fundamentals.

The really amazing thing about this anecdote? The two factors we addressed—site performance and listing consistency—are foundational to both SEO and AEO/GEO. So we’re bolstering our foundation while building for the future.

If that sounds like an approach you can relate to, give us a call or contact us any time.

*ps, that em-dash was my own and this post was 100% human generated (by me!)