lazybru blog

Why your ads keep getting more expensive

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

Every year it’s the same conversation. Last year a lead cost you a certain amount. This year it costs noticeably more, for the same product, the same offer and often the same ads. Someone suggests new creative. Someone else suggests a new agency. The number keeps climbing anyway.

The short answer: ad costs rise because ads are sold in auctions, the auctions keep getting more crowded, and privacy changes have made targeting less precise, so more of your budget lands on people who won’t buy. The platform has no reason to fix this; higher prices are its revenue. Sometimes your creative or offer is the problem, but often it’s the structure of the market.

This is part of our series on why ads are fading and distribution is replacing them.

You’re not buying ads. You’re bidding for them.

On Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, you don’t pay a set price. Every time someone loads a page, the platform runs a split-second auction among all the advertisers who want that person, and the winner pays roughly what it took to beat the next bidder.

That one fact explains most of what you’re seeing:

More advertisers means higher prices. Every business that moves budget online adds a bidder to the auction. Your competitors’ growth plans quietly raise your costs.
Attention is close to fixed. People only have so many hours to scroll and search. Platforms can add more ad slots, but each one tends to be worth a bit less, and users get better at ignoring them.
The best audiences get the most crowded. The buyers most likely to convert are the ones every advertiser targets, so they cost the most.

You can see the result in the platforms’ own reporting. In the second quarter of 2025, Meta said its average price per ad rose 9% year on year while ad impressions grew too. More ads, each one more expensive.

Less data means more waste

The second force is signal loss.

In 2021 Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency, letting iPhone users stop apps from tracking them across other apps and sites. Meta later estimated the change would cut its 2022 revenue by about $10 billion, which tells you how much targeting and measurement depended on that data.

For a small business, less signal shows up in three ways:

Broader targeting. The platform knows less about who’s likely to buy, so your ads reach more people who won’t.
Fuzzier attribution. It’s harder to tell which ad led to which sale, so it’s harder to cut what isn’t working.
More reliance on the platform’s own automation. “Let the algorithm optimise” often means handing over more control and more budget, with less visibility.

You end up paying more per impression and getting less useful impressions.

The platform’s incentives aren’t yours

This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s just how the business works. An ad platform makes money when advertisers spend more. Its tools, recommendations and default settings are designed, reasonably, to increase spend.

That’s why “increase your budget to exit the learning phase” and “broaden your audience for better results” are such common suggestions. Sometimes they’re right. But the platform is never going to tell you that the cheapest customer you’ll ever get is the one who heard about you from a friend.

Paid clicks often aren’t extra customers

There’s a quieter problem underneath rising costs: some of what you pay for would have happened anyway.

In a large set of experiments at eBay, economists found that ads on brand-name search terms had no measurable short-term benefit, because people searching for eBay were going to reach eBay regardless. Non-brand ads mostly helped new or infrequent customers, while regulars, who’d buy anyway, soaked up most of the spend.

Your business isn’t eBay, but the lesson travels. If you’re paying for clicks from people who already know and want you, your real cost per new customer is higher than the dashboard says.

Is it you or the market?

Before you blame the auction, rule out the fixable stuff. Your rising costs are more likely your problem if:

Your click-through rate has dropped while competitors’ ads look fresher.
Your landing page is slow, confusing or doesn’t match the ad’s promise.
Your offer hasn’t changed in years while alternatives have improved.
You’re targeting everyone instead of the people who actually buy.

They’re more likely the market if:

Costs rose steadily even when the ads and page didn’t change.
New creative helps for a few weeks, then results slide back.
Your category has filled up with well-funded competitors.
Your conversion rate is stable but cost per click keeps climbing.

Most businesses have a bit of both. Fix the first list; you can’t fix the second, only route around it.

What to do about it

Know what a customer is worth

You can’t judge an ad cost without knowing what a customer brings in. Work out roughly how much margin a typical customer generates over the time they stay with you, then compare it with what you pay to win one.

Here’s a hypothetical. Say a customer is worth $600 in margin over their lifetime and you pay $150 in ads to get one. That’s healthy. If ad costs creep up until you’re paying $450, you’re barely ahead once you count the time, discounts and refunds. Same ads, very different business.

Stop paying for customers you’d get anyway

Test it. Pause brand-term search ads for a few weeks, or switch off retargeting in one region, and watch whether total sales actually drop. If they don’t, that money was buying credit, not customers.

Build channels where the price doesn’t go up

The structural fix is to stop depending on a market where your costs are set by other people’s bids. Owned channels like content, an email list, partnerships and referrals don’t have an auction. They take effort up front, but the cost per customer tends to fall as they mature, not rise.

We explain how they fit together in what a distribution engine is, and how to build one, and how to shift budget safely in how to cut your ad spend without stalling growth.

The lazy version

Rising ad costs feel like a problem you have to keep outworking: more tests, more creative, more budget. The lazier answer is to need ads less. Keep the campaigns that clearly pay for themselves, and put the rest of your energy into channels where next year is cheaper than this one.

Frequently asked questions

Why do Facebook and Instagram ads cost more every year?

Meta sells ad space through auctions, so prices rise as more advertisers compete for the same people. Privacy changes since 2021 have also reduced the data used for targeting, which makes each ad less efficient. Meta reported its average price per ad grew 9% year on year in Q2 2025.

What is a good customer acquisition cost?

There’s no universal number. A healthy acquisition cost is comfortably below the margin a customer generates over their lifetime, with enough room left for your own costs and profit. Many businesses also look at how many months it takes for a customer’s margin to pay back what you spent to win them.

Should I bid on my own brand name in Google Ads?

Often not, unless competitors are bidding on it and taking your traffic. Research at eBay found brand-term ads had no measurable short-term effect because searchers were going to arrive anyway. Test it by pausing brand ads for a few weeks and watching total sales, not just ad-reported conversions.

Will ad costs ever go down?

Possibly in short bursts, when demand drops in a downturn or a platform adds lots of new inventory. But the long-run pressures, more advertisers and less targeting data, point the other way. It’s safer to plan as if they won’t.

If you want a second pair of eyes on where your acquisition money is really going, send us a note. We’ll tell you honestly what we see.

What a distribution engine is, and how to build one

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

Most small businesses have a product people like and a growth plan that amounts to “run some ads and hope for referrals”. When the ads get expensive, there’s no plan B.

A distribution engine is plan B. Done well, it becomes plan A.

The short answer: a distribution engine is a small set of owned channels, typically content, an owned audience, partnerships and referrals, that work together to bring you customers without paying for every click. Each piece feeds the others, so the system gets cheaper and stronger over time instead of resetting every month like an ad budget. You don’t need all of it at once. Start with the one channel closest to where your customers already are, and do it properly.

This is part of our series on why ads are fading and distribution is replacing them.

Distribution, defined

Distribution is how your product reaches the people who need it. Advertising is one way to do that: you rent a platform’s attention. A distribution engine is the alternative: you build reach you own.

We call it an engine rather than a list of tactics because the parts are connected. A useful guide brings in a reader. The reader joins your list. The list hears about a partner’s event. The event produces a customer. The customer refers a friend, who found you because the guide was quoted in an AI assistant’s answer. No single piece is magic. The loop is.

The four parts

1. A content system

Content is the part that does the finding. It’s how strangers, and the AI assistants working for them, discover that you exist and know what you’re talking about.

The word that matters is system. Not “we should post more”, but a repeatable way to turn the questions your customers ask into pages that answer them.

What good looks like:

Built from real questions. Sales calls, support emails and “how much does it cost?” are your best topic list.
Answers first. Put the useful answer near the top, then the detail. People and AI assistants both reward this.
Durable. Guides, comparisons, pricing explainers and how-tos that stay useful for years beat posts that are stale in a week.
Readable by machines. Fast pages, clear headings, structured data and nothing blocking crawlers. More on that in when AI agents do the buying.

2. An owned audience

An owned audience is any group of people you can reach without asking an algorithm’s permission: an email list, a customer community, an SMS list for a local shop, a WhatsApp group for regulars.

It’s the part that does the keeping. Content brings someone in once; an owned audience lets you reach them again on your terms. Ideally it’s also where your past customers live, so you can bring them back.

What good looks like: a clear reason to join, a regular rhythm you can actually sustain, and messages people would miss if they stopped.

3. Partnerships

Partnerships are the fastest way to borrow trust you haven’t built yet. Somewhere out there is a business that serves your customer just before or just after you do, and doesn’t compete with you.

Some hypothetical pairings:

A bookkeeper and a business-banking adviser.
A wedding photographer and a venue.
A B2B software tool and the consultants who implement it.
A physiotherapist and a running club.

What good looks like: a specific, mutual arrangement (co-hosted workshops, shared guides, a simple referral agreement), not a vague “let’s keep each other in mind”.

4. Referral loops

Your happiest customers are your most credible channel. In Nielsen’s 2021 U.S. study, recommendations from people they know were the most trusted channel, trusted by 89% of respondents.

Most businesses leave this to chance. A referral loop makes it deliberate:

Ask at the right moment, when the customer has just had a good result, not in the first email.
Make it easy. A link, a short message they can forward, a card in the box.
Make it worth it, for the referrer, the new customer or both. Sometimes that’s a discount; often a genuine thank-you is enough.
Close the loop. Tell people when their referral became a customer.

How the parts feed each other

The engine is a loop. Each part feeds the next, so every turn costs less than the last.

Here’s one turn of that loop for a hypothetical 12-person design studio:

The studio publishes a straightforward guide to what a brand refresh costs and what’s included. (Content)
A founder finds it, either through search or because an AI assistant cites it, and downloads a checklist in exchange for an email address. (Owned audience)
The studio’s monthly email mentions a workshop co-hosted with a web developer they partner with. (Partnership)
The founder attends, hires the studio and, three months later, gets a nudge asking whether anyone they know needs similar help. (Referral)
The referred friend searches the studio’s name and finds more guides, which answer their questions before the first call. (Back to content)

Every turn of that loop makes the next one cheaper. The guide keeps working. The list keeps growing. The partner keeps referring. Compare that with an ad, which brings someone in once and then costs the same again for the next person, often more, as we explain in why your ads keep getting more expensive.

Where to start

Don’t build all four at once. That’s how you end up with a half-written blog, a dormant newsletter and a partnership that was one coffee long.

Pick one channel using three questions:

Where do your customers already gather? If they ask questions in search or AI assistants, start with content. If they trust peers, start with referrals. If someone else already has their attention, start with a partnership.
What can you sustain every week for six months? Consistency beats ambition. One good guide a fortnight beats a burst of ten and then silence.
What do you already have? A list of past customers, a partner you already like, a founder who loves writing? Start there.

Then give it a real try: one channel, a weekly rhythm, at least a quarter before you judge it.

How to tell if it’s working

Owned channels are slower to show results than ads, so measure the leading signs as well as the sales:

Part	Early signs (weeks)	Real signs (months)
Content	Pages indexed, first organic visits, mentions in AI answers	Inbound enquiries that cite a page
Owned audience	Sign-ups, open and reply rates	Repeat purchases, replies that become sales
Partnerships	Joint activities that actually happen	Referred leads and customers
Referrals	Customers who share the link	Customers acquired by referral

The simplest measurement of all: ask every new customer how they heard about you, and write down the answer.

The lazy version

A distribution engine sounds like a big build. It isn’t, if you do it lazily: one channel, done well, connected to the next one when it’s ready. The point isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to build a few things that keep working after you’ve stopped pushing them.

Frequently asked questions

What is a distribution strategy?

A distribution strategy is your plan for how your product reaches its buyers: which channels you use, in what order and how they connect. For most small businesses, a good one mixes a small amount of paid reach with owned channels like content, an email list, partnerships and referrals.

What are owned channels in marketing?

Owned channels are ones you control and don’t pay for per view: your website, your blog, your email list, your community and your customer relationships. They differ from paid channels (ads) and earned channels (press coverage, reviews and word of mouth), although owned channels are usually how you earn the latter.

How long does it take to build a distribution engine?

Expect a few months of consistent work before a single channel pulls its weight, and longer for several channels to reinforce each other. The trade-off is that results keep coming after the work is done, unlike ads, which stop when spending stops.

Can a small business build distribution without a marketing team?

Yes. Start with one channel you can sustain alongside the day job, often referrals or a simple content habit built from questions customers already ask. A small amount of automation, like a scheduled referral ask or an email that goes out after each project, does a lot of the remembering for you.

If you’d like help picking the first channel and building it properly, start a brew with us. We’ll tell you where we’d start, even if it’s not with us.

How to cut your ad spend without stalling growth

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

You’ve decided your business leans on ads too much. Maybe costs have crept up, maybe the results feel thin, maybe you just don’t like that growth stops whenever the card gets declined.

The tempting move is to switch everything off and see what happens. Please don’t. Not because ads are sacred, but because you’ll learn very little and might scare yourself back into spending more.

The short answer: cut ad spend in stages. First measure what your ads actually cause, not what they claim. Then cut the spend that’s buying customers you’d have won anyway, keep what clearly pays for itself, and move the savings into one owned channel. Turn paid customers into an owned audience as you go. Review monthly and keep going until ads are a tool you choose, not a habit you can’t afford to break.

This is part of our series on why ads are fading and distribution is replacing them.

Step 1: Find out what your ads really do

Ad dashboards measure attributed conversions: sales that happened after someone saw or clicked an ad. That’s not the same as sales the ad caused. Someone who was already going to buy, then clicked your ad on the way, counts as an ad conversion.

The gap can be large. In experiments at eBay, economists found that ads on brand-name searches had no measurable short-term effect: people searching for the brand arrived anyway. Most of the spend went on regular customers who would have bought regardless.

To see what your own ads cause, run a simple holdout test:

Pause one thing at a time. Brand-term search ads are the classic first test. Retargeting is a good second.
Or split by geography. Turn ads off in one region or city and leave them on in a similar one.
Run it long enough. A few weeks at least, longer if you have a long sales cycle.
Watch total sales, not ad-reported sales. The question is whether the business made less money, not whether the platform reports fewer conversions.

If sales hardly move, you’ve found spend you can cut. If they drop clearly, that campaign is earning its keep.

Step 2: Cut the obvious waste

Most ad accounts that have run for a while carry some dead weight. Common places to look:

Brand-term bidding with no competitors bidding on your name.
Retargeting that mostly reaches people who were already on their way to buying.
Broad or automatic placements that send your ads to apps and sites your customers never visit.
Campaigns nobody remembers launching, still quietly spending.
Audiences that click but never buy. Cheap clicks are expensive if they don’t convert.

Cutting these rarely hurts growth, because they weren’t really driving it. This step alone can free up a useful share of the budget.

Step 3: Keep what clearly works

Some ads pay for themselves. Keep those, and be honest about how you decide.

A campaign earns its place if it brings in new customers whose margin over time comfortably exceeds what it costs to win them, and if that holds up when you test it, not just on the dashboard. We explain the arithmetic in why your ads keep getting more expensive.

The goal isn’t zero ads. It’s ads you choose deliberately, at a price that makes sense, alongside channels that don’t depend on them.

Step 4: Move the savings into one owned channel

This is where the real change happens. Take the money and attention you’ve freed up and put them into one owned channel, not five. Owned channels, such as content, an email list, partnerships and referrals, are the ones where you aren’t paying per click and the results build up over time.

Pick it by asking where your customers already are, and what you can keep doing every week for six months. What a distribution engine is, and how to build one walks through the choices.

Be realistic about timing. Owned channels take months to pull their weight, not days. That’s exactly why you cut in stages: the paid spend you keep buys you time while the owned channel grows.

Step 5: Turn paid customers into an owned audience

Every customer you’ve already paid to acquire is a chance to stop paying for the next one. Make sure each one leaves with a reason to stay in touch:

Capture the relationship. An email list, an account, a community, a loyalty card. Something you can reach again without an ad.
Ask for the referral once they’ve had a good result.
Bring them back. A repeat customer you contact directly costs you almost nothing compared with re-buying their attention through an ad platform.

Done consistently, this shifts the balance over time. A growing share of each month’s customers comes from people you already know, or people they sent you.

Step 6: Review monthly and keep going

Set up a short monthly review with a handful of numbers:

Total new customers, and where each one came from (ask them; don’t rely only on attribution).
Ad spend and cost per new customer from paid channels.
Progress on your owned channel: content published, list growth, partner activity, referrals.
Revenue from repeat and referred customers.

When the owned channel is reliably producing customers, repeat steps 1 to 4: test the next layer of ad spend and move more into owned distribution.

A 90-day plan

Here’s what that might look like for a typical small business. Adjust the timing to your sales cycle.

Weeks	Focus	What you do
1–2	Baseline	List every campaign and its spend. Start asking every new customer how they found you.
3–6	Test	Run a holdout on brand search or retargeting. Cut campaigns with no clear purpose.
5–8	Choose	Pick one owned channel and set a weekly rhythm you can sustain.
7–12	Build	Ship consistently. Set up a referral ask and a way to capture every customer’s contact.
12	Review	Compare total sales with the baseline. Decide the next layer of spend to test.

When not to cut

Be careful about cutting ads if:

Ads are almost your only source of customers and you have little cash runway. Build the owned channel first, then cut.
You’re in a short seasonal window where missing a few weeks means missing the year.
You’re mid-launch and the ads are carrying the announcement.

In those cases, start with the cheap, safe parts (measurement, waste-cutting, capturing customers) and leave the bigger shifts until you have breathing room.

The lazy version

Cutting ad spend isn’t a dramatic switch-off. It’s a few calm, boring steps: measure honestly, stop paying for what you’d get anyway, and put the difference somewhere that compounds. Within a few quarters, you have a business that grows whether or not you’re paying the platforms that month.

Frequently asked questions

What happens if I stop running ads?

It depends on how much of your growth the ads actually cause. If they’re mostly reaching people who’d buy anyway, sales may barely change. If they’re your main source of new customers, sales will drop. A holdout test, pausing one campaign or one region at a time, tells you which before you commit.

How do I measure whether my ads are working?

Compare total sales with and without the ads, using a holdout test by campaign, time period or region. Platform dashboards show attributed conversions, which include customers who would have bought anyway, so they tend to overstate the effect.

How much should a small business spend on advertising?

There’s no right percentage. Spend on a campaign only while it brings in new customers whose lifetime margin clearly exceeds the cost of winning them, and keep testing that. Everything beyond that is better invested in channels you own.

What should I spend on instead of ads?

Owned distribution: a content system that answers your buyers’ questions, an email list or community, partnerships with businesses that serve the same customers, and a referral loop. Pick one, do it consistently and add the next when it’s working.

Want a hand working out which ads are earning their keep? Tell us about your setup. We’ll help you plan the first test, whether or not you work with us after.

Are ads dead? What's replacing them for small businesses

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

You’ve probably had this month. The ad budget went up again. The dashboard says the campaigns are “performing”. And the number of real customers walking in, booking a call or checking out looks much like it did last quarter.

So you start wondering whether ads still work at all.

The short answer: ads aren’t dead, but the model most small businesses run on is: renting attention every month and hoping it turns into growth. Ads are getting more expensive, harder to measure and easier to skip. More and more buying research now happens inside AI assistants that don’t show your ad at all. What’s replacing that model is distribution: channels you own, trust you’ve earned and reach that keeps working when you stop paying.

This post is the overview. The rest of the series goes deeper on why ad costs keep rising, what changes when AI agents do the buying, what a distribution engine actually is and how to cut ad spend without stalling growth.

What people mean when they say “ads are dead”

Nobody serious thinks Google and Meta are about to stop selling ads. Meta alone reported $47.5 billion in revenue for one quarter of 2025, almost all of it from advertising. Plenty of businesses are still buying.

What’s dying is a specific idea: that you can grow a business mainly by paying a platform for attention, month after month, and that this gets easier as you scale.

That idea is the one that’s breaking. You can see it in three places.

Why renting attention stopped working

1. The rent keeps going up

Ads are sold in auctions. You aren’t paying a fixed price for a customer; you’re bidding against every other business that wants the same eyeballs. As more businesses move their budgets online, the auction gets more crowded and the price goes up.

Meta’s own numbers show it. In the second quarter of 2025, the company said the average price per ad rose 9% year on year. That’s great for Meta. For a small business, it means the same budget buys less reach every year unless something else improves.

2. You can see less of what you’re paying for

When Apple let iPhone users opt out of app tracking in 2021, it cut off much of the data ad platforms used for targeting and measurement. Meta estimated the change would cost it about $10 billion in revenue in 2022 alone.

For advertisers, less signal means broader targeting, fuzzier attribution and more of your budget spent on people who were never going to buy. You’re paying more, and you’re less sure what you’re getting.

3. The buyer isn’t always looking at the page any more

This is the big one. People increasingly ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling a results page: “What’s the best accounting tool for a five-person studio?” “Find me a physio near work who does evening appointments.”

When Pew Research tracked real browsing behaviour, Google users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% without one. Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people moved to AI chatbots and agents.

And assistants are starting to do the buying too. OpenAI’s Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, built with Stripe, says its product results are not sponsored and are ranked on relevance. An interruptive ad has nobody to interrupt when the shopper is software working from a brief.

What distribution means

Distribution is how your product reaches the people who need it. In practice that means the channels, relationships and reputation that put you in front of buyers without paying for each impression.

It’s the difference between renting and owning:

	Rented attention (ads)	Owned distribution
What you pay for	Each impression or click	The work of building a channel once
When you stop paying	Results stop the same day	Results keep coming, then slowly fade
Over time	Costs tend to rise with competition	Costs per customer tend to fall as it compounds
Who owns the audience	The platform	You
What AI assistants see	Usually nothing	Your content, reviews, mentions and facts

Owned distribution usually comes from a handful of building blocks:

A content system that answers the questions your buyers actually ask, published where people and AI assistants can find it.
An owned audience, such as an email list or community, that you can reach without permission from an algorithm.
Partnerships with businesses that already serve your customer before or after you do.
Referral loops that make it easy for happy customers to bring the next one.
A clear, consistent public footprint (accurate listings, reviews, pricing, a site machines can read) so assistants can recommend you with confidence.

We break these down in what a distribution engine is, and how to build one.

Why distribution wins over time

Ads are a cost. Distribution is closer to an asset.

Imagine a 12-person design studio. Option A is spending a fixed amount on ads every month: the leads arrive while the money flows and stop when it doesn’t. Option B is the same studio publishing one genuinely useful guide a fortnight, building a small list of past clients and partners, and setting up a referral arrangement with two complementary agencies.

Option B is slow for the first few months. But every guide is still there next year, still being found, still being quoted by the AI assistants their next client asks. The list grows. The partners keep referring. Month twelve is easier than month one, which is the opposite of the ad treadmill.

That’s the whole argument: rented attention resets every month; owned distribution compounds.

Where ads still make sense

We’re not purists about this. Ads are still a good tool when:

You’re testing demand. A small, time-boxed spend is a fast way to learn whether a message or offer lands.
Your unit economics clearly work. If a customer is worth far more than they cost to acquire, and you’ve proved it with clean measurement, keep buying.
You’re amplifying something that already works, like boosting a piece of content that’s already earning attention organically.
Timing matters, as with a launch, an event or a seasonal window.

The problem isn’t ads. It’s ads as the whole growth plan.

What “lazy” looks like here

At lazybru, “lazy” means the simplest thing that actually works. For growth, that usually means:

Find out what your ads are really doing for you (often less than the dashboard claims).
Keep the spend that clearly pays for itself. Cut the rest.
Put the savings into one owned channel, and do it properly before adding a second.
Make your business easy for both people and AI assistants to understand and recommend.

It’s less exciting than a new campaign. It’s also the kind of work that’s still paying you back in two years.

Frequently asked questions

Are paid ads still worth it for small businesses?

Sometimes. They’re worth it when you can measure that a customer brings in clearly more than they cost to acquire, or when you’re testing an idea quickly. They’re rarely worth it as your only growth channel, because results stop the moment spending does.

Why are ads getting more expensive?

Ad platforms sell attention through auctions, so prices rise as more advertisers compete for the same audiences. Privacy changes have also reduced targeting data, which means more spend is wasted on unlikely buyers. More detail in why your ads keep getting more expensive.

What is the difference between marketing and distribution?

Marketing is the wider work of deciding who you serve, what you say and how you price. Distribution is the narrower question of how your product physically and digitally reaches buyers. Ads are one distribution channel; owned channels like content, community, partnerships and referrals are others.

How do AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend?

They draw on what they can find and trust: your own pages, reviews, third-party mentions, listings and structured information. Paid placement isn’t part of most AI answers today. See what changes when AI agents do the buying.

How long does owned distribution take to work?

Longer than an ad, which can drive traffic the same day. Most owned channels take a few months of consistent effort before they pull their weight, then keep producing results long after the work is done. That’s why it’s worth starting before you need it.

If your ad spend keeps rising while growth stays flat, tell us what’s going on. We’ll take an honest look at where your customers really come from and what to do next.

When AI agents do the buying, who sees your ad?

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

Think about the last time you asked an AI assistant for a recommendation. Maybe it was a laptop, a dentist, a project management tool. You got a short answer with three or four names and reasons. You didn’t see a single ad.

Now think about where your marketing budget goes.

The short answer: AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity increasingly sit between your business and your buyer. They read the web, compare options and, more and more often, complete the purchase. Their recommendations are mostly earned, not bought, so an interruptive ad has no one to interrupt. To be chosen, your business has to be easy for an AI to find, understand and trust: clear facts, consistent information, real reviews and content that answers the questions buyers ask.

This is part of our series on why ads are fading and distribution is replacing them.

The buyer has a new assistant

Search used to work like this: a person typed a query, scanned a page of links and ads, and clicked. Advertisers paid to be on that page.

Now a growing share of research happens in a conversation. Someone describes what they need, and an assistant does the scanning on their behalf.

The effect on clicks is already visible. Pew Research found Google users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn’t, and they very rarely clicked the sources the summary cited. In early 2024 Gartner predicted a 25% drop in traditional search volume by 2026 as people turned to chatbots and agents.

With an AI summary on the page, clicks on a traditional result nearly halve: 8% of visits, down from 15%. Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025.

Fewer people on the results page means fewer people seeing results-page ads.

Agents are starting to check out, too

It’s not just research. The infrastructure for AI agents to buy is arriving:

In September 2025 OpenAI and Stripe launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for letting AI agents complete purchases with merchants. OpenAI says the product results ChatGPT shows are not sponsored and are ranked on relevance.
The same month Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol for agent-led payments, backed by payments and commerce companies.

Put those together and you get a buyer journey with no feed to scroll and no banner to notice. An agent gets a brief (“a waterproof running jacket under $150, delivered by Friday”), compares what it can find, and acts.

You can’t bid your way into that answer. You have to deserve it.

What AI assistants look for

No AI company publishes a complete ranking formula, and they change often. But the inputs are visible in the answers themselves, and the principles are stable. An assistant can only recommend what it can find, understand and trust.

Can it find you?

Your site is crawlable. If your pages are blocked, hidden behind scripts that don’t render, or locked behind logins, assistants can’t read them. Check your robots.txt and your CDN settings. Cloudflare, for example, began blocking AI crawlers by default for new sites in July 2025, so some businesses are invisible without realising it.
You exist beyond your own site. Listings, directories, marketplaces, review sites, partner pages and press mentions are all places an assistant may look.

Can it understand you?

Plain facts, stated plainly. What you sell, who it’s for, where you operate, what it costs, how long it takes. If a human has to email you to find out, an agent will move on to someone who published it.
Pages that answer real questions. “How much does a kitchen refit cost in Leeds?” is a question. A page that answers it honestly is far more useful to an assistant than one that says “contact us for a quote”.
Structured data. Markup like schema.org for your organisation, products, prices, opening hours and reviews makes facts easy to extract.
Consistency. If your hours, prices or address differ between your site, your Google profile and a directory, the assistant has to guess. Guessing lowers confidence.

Can it trust you?

Real reviews and mentions from customers and other businesses.
Evidence over adjectives. “Award-winning” and “best in class” tell an assistant nothing. Specific detail does.
Content with a point of view and genuine expertise, rather than thin pages written to catch keywords.

None of this is a trick. It’s what made a business easy to recommend by word of mouth, written down where software can read it.

A practical checklist

If you want to know how your business looks to an AI assistant, start here:

Ask them. Put the questions your buyers ask into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Are you mentioned? Is the information right? Who’s recommended instead, and why?
Check access. Make sure your robots.txt, firewall and CDN aren’t blocking the crawlers you want to be read by.
Publish the facts. Prices or price ranges, service areas, delivery times, policies, what’s included and what isn’t.
Write the answers. One clear page per important buyer question, with the answer near the top.
Add structured data for your organisation, products and services.
Fix inconsistencies across your site, listings and profiles.
Earn mentions. Partnerships, guest content, community involvement and happy customers who leave reviews.

Notice that almost nothing on this list is an ad. It’s distribution: owned content, earned trust and a clear public footprint.

Will there be ads in AI assistants?

Probably, in some form. Some AI products are already experimenting with sponsored placements, and it would be naive to assume answers will stay ad-free forever.

But even if paid slots arrive, the underlying dynamic holds. An assistant that recommends bad products to paying advertisers stops being trusted, and people stop using it. The organic recommendation, earned on merit, is what makes the product valuable. That’s where you want to be.

The lazy version

You don’t need a new “AI strategy” or a prompt-engineering consultant. You need the boring fundamentals done properly: a site that loads and can be read, honest answers to real questions, consistent facts and people who’ll vouch for you. Do that once, keep it current, and it works for human visitors and AI agents alike.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

Make sure ChatGPT’s crawlers can access your site, publish clear factual information about what you offer, answer common buyer questions directly on your pages, keep your details consistent across the web, and earn genuine reviews and third-party mentions. There’s no paid way to guarantee a recommendation.

What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

GEO, sometimes called AI search optimisation or answer engine optimisation, is the practice of making your content easy for AI systems to find, understand and cite in their answers. It overlaps heavily with good SEO: crawlable pages, clear structure, direct answers and genuine authority.

Do AI assistants show ads?

Some are starting to experiment with sponsored placements. But the recommendation itself is meant to be earned on relevance, because that’s what makes people trust the assistant. OpenAI, for example, has said the product results ChatGPT shows for shopping are not sponsored.

Should I block AI crawlers from my website?

It depends on your business. Publishers who sell their content may want to block or charge AI crawlers. Most businesses that sell products or services want to be found and recommended, so blocking AI crawlers usually works against them. Check your CDN, because some now block these crawlers by default.

Curious how your business shows up when someone asks an AI for a recommendation? Ask us to take a look. We’ll run the questions your buyers ask and tell you what we find.

Why we called it lazy

2026-10-04T00:00:00Z

People raise an eyebrow at the name. An agency that calls itself lazy? Isn’t that the one thing you don’t want from the people you hire?

It’s deliberate. “Lazy” is the shortest way we know to describe how we work: we’d rather spend a week thinking than a quarter building the wrong thing.

Lazy about busywork

Most growing businesses aren’t short on effort. They’re short on the right effort. The ops lead is stitching three tools together by hand every Monday. The marketing budget goes up every quarter while the leads stay flat. Everyone agrees “we should really automate that”, and nobody has the time to.

Throwing more work at problems like these rarely fixes them. So we start somewhere less glamorous: what’s actually true about your customers, your costs and your market? Strip the problem down to first principles and the real constraint usually turns out to be smaller, and different, from the one on the brief.

Obsessive about outcomes

Being lazy about busywork only works if you’re relentless about the result. That means:

Building the one tool you need, not another SaaS subscription on the pile.
Choosing channels you own, so every month of work makes the next one easier instead of resetting when the ad budget does.
Saying what to stop doing. Often the most valuable line in a plan is the one that removes something.

The simplest thing that works beats the impressive thing that almost works.

What lazy doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean cutting corners, and it doesn’t mean slow. Simple solutions tend to ship faster, cost less to run and are easier for you to own once we hand over the keys. That’s the whole point.

It also doesn’t mean we’ll pretend to fit every problem. If we’re not the right people for what you’re stuck on, we’ll say so, and point you to someone who is.

If that sounds like the kind of help you need, tell us what’s stuck. We’ll put the kettle on.