Open a new browser tab. Search for the simplest thing — "plumber near me" — and count how many things you have to scroll past before you reach a real recommendation. Four ads. A map pack with three businesses that paid for placement. A "people also ask" box. Two more ads. By the time you reach the first non-sponsored result, you've already given up and clicked something. That's not search anymore. That's a tollbooth with results pages between the gates.
What search has become
Twenty-five years ago, Google was a miracle. Type a word, get the relevant page. The whole point was the relevance — the ranking algorithm was earning its existence by sorting through the open web and putting the best answer on top. People talked about Google like it was a public utility because it acted like one.
The product Google ships in 2026 is not that product. It is a sales platform. Real estate above the fold is auctioned to the highest bidder. The map pack is a paid surface for businesses willing to spend on Local Services Ads. "People also ask" is engagement-engineering. The first organic result is sometimes the eighth thing on the page. The customer experience has been retuned to maximize ad revenue per query — and it shows.
You feel it when you search. So does your customer.
Why small businesses pay more every year
The downstream effect on small businesses is obvious if you've lived it. Click prices keep rising — because there's only so much screen real estate above the fold, and every year more competitors bid for the same finite slots. Organic visibility keeps shrinking — because each year the paid surfaces get bigger and the organic surfaces get smaller. The directories double-dip — because Yelp and Angi and HomeAdvisor and the rest run their own ad inventory on top of Google's, charging you twice to be found by the same customer.
Twenty years ago a contractor could rank for "drywall repair Aurora" with a decent website and a few local citations. Today that same contractor needs paid SEO, a Google Ads budget, an Angi premium subscription, an Enhanced Yelp listing, and a HomeAdvisor leads contract — and still might end up on page two of the organic results below all of it.
The quiet shift
Here is what almost nobody is paying attention to. While small business owners are getting squeezed harder every year by the search-and-ads model, their customers have started leaving it. Not en masse, not yet. But unmistakably.
The people who used to type "best plumber Aurora" into Google are now typing "best plumber in Aurora" into ChatGPT. Or asking Claude. Or running it through Perplexity. The query is the same. The intent is the same. The destination is different — and the destination doesn't sell ads.
When ChatGPT recommends a plumber, no one paid for that placement. There was no bid. No agency optimized it. The model read the open web, built up a sense of which businesses are credible in that market, and named the one it considered the best fit. Free recommendation. Direct introduction. No tollbooth.
The escape hatch
This is the moment the book is about. There is a transition happening in real time — quietly, unevenly — from a search-and-ads economy to an AI-recommendation economy. The businesses that figure out how to be visible to AI before their competitors do are going to inherit a years-long head start.
The discovery is not magical. It is not the result of paying ChatGPT for placement (you can't). It is the result of having a website and a digital footprint that AI can read, parse, and trust. There are 60 specific signals that decide whether AI considers your business credible. Most small businesses score below 40 out of 100. The ones that get above 80 hold their position for years.
The reason almost nobody is acting on this is that almost nobody knows it's happening. Their SEO consultant hasn't told them. Their web designer hasn't told them. Their marketing agency hasn't told them. Why would they? The transition makes most of those services obsolete. The book exists to put the playbook directly in the hands of the business owner.
Where the book goes from here
The full book — Sick of Search — walks through the whole thing in detail. How the search-and-ads model captured small business marketing. How it stayed entrenched for two decades. How AI recommendation works under the hood. The 60 signals that drive AI visibility, dimension by dimension. The exact playbook to move a business from invisible to recommended. Case studies of businesses that have already done it.
The thesis the book opens with is simple: you don't have to keep paying. The next era of small business discovery is being built right now, and the price of admission is not money. It is attention, time, and the work of making your digital footprint legible to the machines that are about to do the recommending.
If you are sick of search — sick of paying more every year for less visibility, sick of being a hostage to a system that grew in a different direction than you needed — the next chapter is for you. Quite literally.