You can buy links. You cannot buy a good reputation.
There has been a lot written lately about search traffic falling and AI taking clicks away from websites. Most of it says roughly the same thing, and most of it is fairly gloomy.
The underlying facts are not wrong. Traffic patterns have shifted. But I think there is a more interesting way to read what is happening, and it is not all bad news, particularly if you are a small business that does good work.
For a long time there was a gap between being good at your trade and being findable. They were separate skills. You could be the best joiner in Lancashire and be more or less invisible, while an average outfit with a decent SEO budget picked up the work. That was not a conspiracy. It was just how the machine worked: it read code and structure, not reputation.
That gap is narrowing. Not because anyone decided to make it fairer, but because the machines changed what they read.
What actually changed
Old search matched documents to keywords. It looked at your page, worked out what it was about, weighed up who linked to you, and ranked accordingly. It was a system for finding pages.
The thing answering questions now is doing something different. When somebody asks an AI who they should get to fit a bathroom in Lytham, it is not ranking documents. It is assembling an opinion about businesses, from everything it can find written down about them.
So it reads your reviews. It reads what people say about you elsewhere. It reads whether your story is consistent across the web. It is, in a clumsy mechanical way, doing what a person does when they ask around.
That favours businesses that are genuinely good in a way the old system never really did.
Why this is good news for a decent tradesman
Think about what used to determine whether you got found.
Technical setup. Whether someone had built your site properly. How many links you had accumulated. Whether you had the budget for an agency. None of that had anything to do with whether you turned up on time or did a tidy job.
Now think about what feeds an AI’s answer.
Reviews, and recent ones. What customers actually said, in their own words, about how the job went. Whether the same story about you appears in more than one place. Whether your business looks alive and active. Whether the specific things you claim are backed up by anybody else.
Almost all of that is downstream of being good at the work. The hoovered hallway, the phone answered, the price that came in under the quote. Those used to be nice human qualities with no commercial mechanism attached. Now they are the raw material the recommendation is built from.
The best tradesman in your town has spent years being outranked by people who were better at websites. That is the bit that is changing.
The catch, and it is a real one
Do not mistake this for “just do good work and the rest sorts itself out.” It does not, and anyone telling you that is being sentimental.
Being good is now necessary. It is still not sufficient, because the machine cannot see your work. It can only see what has been written down about it.
That is the honest position. There is still a job to do, and it is this: make the good work visible in a form a machine can read.
Which in practice means:
- Reviews, steadily. Not a burst three years ago. A trickle every month, in customers’ own words, with your replies underneath.
- Your own site saying plainly what you do, where, and roughly what it costs. In sentences, not slogans. If it is not written down, it does not exist to a machine.
- The same story everywhere. Your name, your patch, your services, consistent across your site, your Google profile, every directory you are listed in.
- Photographs of real work. Before and afters. Proof that the thing you say you do, you have actually done.
- The specifics only you have. What a rewire on a Fylde terrace actually costs. How long a boiler actually lasts round here. Nobody else can write that, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets quoted.
None of that is a trick. It is just refusing to keep your competence a secret.
What I would stop doing
Two things.
Stop reading the doom pieces. A lot of them are written by people who miss the old rules, which is understandable, because a whole industry was built on knowing them. But nostalgia is not a strategy, and someone whose expertise is becoming less valuable is not the best guide to what happens next.
Stop treating findability as a separate discipline from doing the job well. For a long time it really was, and that is why an entire industry grew up in the gap. As the gap narrows, so does the case for treating them as two different budgets.
The uncomfortable half
I should be honest about who this is bad news for.
If your business has been coasting on being easy to find rather than being good, this is a problem. Reviews are harder to fake than backlinks, and getting harder every year. Consistency is harder to manufacture than a keyword. And “what do people actually say about them” is a much less forgiving question than “what does their homepage claim.”
I have spent fifteen years in some of the most competitive corners of search, and I have watched a lot of businesses win on technical cleverness alone. That was always a slightly uncomfortable thing to be good at.
The new version suits me better, and I suspect it suits you better too, if you are the sort of business that does the job properly and has never quite understood why that was not enough.
So what do you actually do
Stop reading about the change and go and do the boring things.
Ask your last three customers for a review. Write down what you charge. Take a photo of the job you finished this week. Make sure your Google profile says the same thing as your website.
That is not a strategy that will impress anybody at a conference. It is just making sure that the machine deciding who to recommend can see what your customers already know.
Which, when you think about it, is all anybody ever wanted from marketing.
Want to know whether the machines can see how good you are? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.