As prognostications go, this one was about as grim as the beadle’s rejoinder to a hungry Oliver Twist on the availability of more soup. “Assume there is no search,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch recalled telling the company’s many publications during a recent episode of the TBPN podcast. In other words, assume publications such as The New Yorker and Wired will, one day soon, no longer derive visitors from Google Search results. He’s not alone in forecasting a massive change in the flow of internet traffic. It’s what some digital experts are calling the “zero click” or “no click” future, in which internet users primarily access the web via artificial intelligence chatbots, and rarely, if ever, click away from said chatbots. While Lynch’s prediction may be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s only a bit. Indeed, as remote as a “no click” future might seem, the “low click” age has already arrived (and Lynch quickly caveated that search traffic would drop to “single-digit percentages,” not precisely “zero”). For publishers like Condé Nast that have long relied on Google Search results sending internet surfers to their websites, and thus their advertisements, it’s just the latest in a long series of apocalyptic nightmares. For small businesses who relied, and thrived, on internet search being a key discoverability tool (after all, how else could poor souls with killer toothaches find the “best dentists nearby”