How and why to de-Google your life - Brian Merchant | Substack

Google just made your website invisible and called it "helping you find answers faster." If you've noticed your website traffic quietly dropping this year, you're not imagining it. Google's AI now an

Google just made your website invisible and called it "helping you find answers faster."

If you've noticed your website traffic quietly dropping this year, you're not imagining it. Google's AI now answers questions directly on the search page — so your potential customers never click through to you at all.

This isn't about being tech-savvy. It's about understanding where your business visibility is actually living right now. And for most small businesses, it's been quietly eroding for months.

Here's what this means practically: if your business depends on Google search to bring in leads, that channel is becoming less reliable — not because you did anything wrong, but because the rules changed while you were busy running your business.

You don't need to rebuild your entire marketing system. Start by checking one thing this week — look at your website traffic sources in Google Analytics and see if organic search has dropped in the last six months. That single number tells you whether this is your problem to solve right now or not.

Data first. Panic never.

One question before you go — have you noticed fewer leads coming from search lately, or are most of your best customers still finding you through word of mouth?

#SmallBusiness #AIStrategy #DigitalMarketing #BusinessGrowth

Original Source

We had a good and wide-ranging chat about why it is that what Google is doing with AI is so pernicious, especially to small businesses, independent ...