A search page isn’t ten blue links anymore

I’ve been watching this since you could fill out a form and tell Google who you were.

That’s not a figure of speech. In the early days you submitted your own information. Here’s what we do, here’s how we’d like to be classified, here’s where to put us. I was in IT then, paying close attention to where this was all going, and I remember doing it. I was early enough on Twitter to have had one of the good handles, which they eventually took back from me.

I’ve watched every evolution since, and I’ve worked through all of them. So let me walk you through what actually happened, because most business owners are still picturing a search page that stopped existing years ago.

The eras, briefly

First it was submission. You told Google what you were. Hard to believe now.

Then it was links. For a long stretch, what mattered was backlinks and page strength. Get yourself into the top ten and you were set. People fought hard over the first position, and it was worth fighting over, because the page was ten blue links and that was the whole page.

Then came the local pack. Google started showing a map with three businesses, sometimes five, depending on the search. This is when it got real for small businesses. Suddenly there was a place to be that wasn’t the tenth blue link. Back then getting there was still mostly about descriptions, categories, page strength, backlinks. The same levers, aimed at a new target.

And then everything changed.

What’s actually on the page today

Pull out your phone and run a search in your own category. Here’s what you’ll find, from the top down.

An AI answer. Google reads your question, figures out what you actually meant, and answers it. Not links. An answer.

The local pack. Three businesses, sometimes five, on a map. If it’s a local service search, this is the most valuable real estate on the page.

Then blocks that didn’t use to be there. Videos. YouTube. Reddit threads. Google keeps adding these and they keep moving up.

Then aggregators. Yelp. Thumbtack. Angi. Healthgrades. Psychology Today. Which ones depends on your industry, but there are almost always two, three, or four of them stacked up.

And then, finally, real organic listings. Actual businesses. Way down there.

And ad blocks scattered throughout all of it.

How far down is “way down there”

On a phone, you’re scrolling two to three screens before you see much of anything organic.

That’s the number that should bother you. Because people don’t scroll two or three screens. Whatever is on the first screen is what exists. Everything below it might as well not be published.

So when somebody tells me their site ranks well organically, my honest reaction is: for a local business, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee.

The blunt version

Google has mostly pushed local businesses off the page.

Not deliberately, and not out of malice. It’s the consequence of Google deciding to answer questions rather than list documents. Once their AI got good enough to actually do that, giving people the answer directly was the obvious next step. Of course they took it.

But the effect on a small business is the same regardless of intent. The places where you can still be seen have narrowed to two: the AI answer at the top, and the local pack right under it.

That’s it. That’s the page now.

What this means if you own a business

It means the goal changed and nobody sent you a memo.

The old goal was to rank. The new goal is to be one of the handful of businesses that the answer engine considers worth mentioning, and to hold a spot in the local pack.

If you’re not visible in those first few results, Google is not sending you business. And Google can be an enormous source of business, which is exactly why owners get upset when they realize they’ve been left out of it.

The frustrating part is that most of them are still working on the old goal. Writing more pages, chasing more links, checking a ranking report that measures something that no longer decides anything.

The page changed. The work has to change with it.

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If you’re a Chicagoland business and you’d like to see what your category actually looks like on a phone right now, that’s a good fifteen-minute conversation.