Two weeks into the Google antitrust trial in Washington, I am reading the daily coverage at Ovation with a cortado going cold, and the thing marketers keep saying about it is that it is a legal story. It is not. It is an invoice.
The government's case is largely about defaults: the money Google pays to be the search box that appears when you do not choose a search box. Billions a year, by the numbers being argued over in that courtroom. The claim is that placement is the moat.
Sit with what that means if you sell anything.
Every brand I have worked with treats search as a channel. There is a line for it in the plan, next to social and email and out of home. A channel is something you buy into. What the testimony describes is not a channel. It is a toll road, and the toll is set by someone who also sells the cars.
If a platform stands between you and customers who are already asking for you by name, you are not running a channel, you are paying rent on demand you created yourself.
Here is the test I have started running with clients. Look at your branded search spend, the money you pay to appear when somebody types your own company name. Then ask what business you are in if that number climbs ten percent a year forever and you cannot say no. That is not marketing. That is a lease with an escalator clause.
The brands that are comfortable right now built demand that arrives without a query. Liquid Death has an audience that shares the can unprompted. Patagonia answers a question about values before anyone opens a browser. Duolingo lives where people already are and is strange enough that the app comes to mind before the search bar does. None of those companies stopped buying search. They stopped being defined by it.
That is not marketing. That is a lease with an escalator clause.
So do not abandon search. Reclassify it. Stop reporting it as performance and start reporting it as exposure. What share of your revenue depends on placement you do not own and cannot price? Put that one number in the board deck and watch how fast the conversation stops being about keywords.
The trial will run for months and any remedy will take years. That is not the useful part. The useful part is that a room full of lawyers is establishing, in public, that the front door to your customers has a landlord, and nobody ever showed you the lease.
I walked to Powell's afterward and did the thing I always do, which is wander into the orange room with no title in mind and leave with three books. Nobody routed me. Nobody took a cut. Some demand still just walks in the door.