A year ago I stopped Googling. I opened ChatGPT for a question about a contract, then for a recommendation, then for a recipe, and at some point I noticed I had not typed anything into Google in a fortnight. The habit had changed without me deciding to change it.
Around the same time, the small business owners I work with started saying the same thing in different words. Enquiries off a bit. Phone quieter. Website traffic flat or down. Nothing dramatic, just a quiet drift. The kind of drift that does not register as a problem until twelve months have passed and the year is materially smaller than the last one.
Two things, the same thing. Customers were finding businesses differently, and most businesses had not yet noticed.
I have spent twenty years working with small businesses on brand, which in practice means every part of how a business shows up to the people who might buy from it. The website, the words, the way the phone gets answered, the way the work gets delivered. Brand is the whole shape of the thing, not the logo.
I have done a version of this once before. Around 2007 I designed and made a product in-house with a small team, built the website, and spent the next few years getting it to number one on Google. The product ended up on several TV shows, with me on one of them installing it. None of it came from a marketing budget. It came from a community of friends who were doing the early work on what we were calling SEO at the time, sharing what worked, and the slow grind of social media in the form it took back then.
The mechanics have changed. The principle has not. Pay attention to how people are looking, be where they are looking, write the thing in language a stranger arriving cold can understand.
This feels like that moment again. The search layer is shifting from ten blue links to three named recommendations, and small businesses with strong reputations and weak structured data are about to become invisible to a generation of customers who have already stopped Googling.
So this is the side project that came out of helping a few clients get ready for it. A small set of practical fixes, written down, priced honestly, no retainers, no sales calls.
Pricing, products, and what is included sit on the homepage and on each product page; whatever appears there is the canonical version. Email at [email protected] gets a reply inside one working day, every weekday.
That is the whole project. If it helps you, good. If it does not, the free check at the top of the homepage costs nothing and tells you where you stand inside sixty seconds.