We Got Lazy, and Google Noticed

Google does not care about your mission, and that turned out to be the most useful thing about it.

Losing almost seventy percent of our organic traffic was a wake-up call to take action.

I want to start there, with the admission, because every version of this argument that opens with a villain lets the reader off the hook, and I am not interested in letting anyone off the hook, least of all myself.

The traffic did not vanish because Google singled us out. It vanished because we had built the path to the people we serve on land we did not own, and one morning, the owner moved the walls. The shock was never the change. The shock was discovering the ground had never been ours.

This is not really a story about higher education, though that is the example I know from the inside and the one I will use. It is a story about every business that mistook a rented channel for an owned asset. The corner contractor who lives and dies by local search. The clinic. The software company. The shop. If most of the people you serve find you through Google, what happened to us is coming for you, and the lesson is the same regardless of what you sell.

A landlord can raise your rent. A landlord can also stop returning your calls and decide the room you built your life inside no longer exists. You would never knowingly sign that lease. Most of us signed it years ago with Google and filed it under sales & marketing.

Here is what the ground actually looks like now. When Google answers a question with one of its AI summaries at the top of the page, the click never has to happen. The Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of nine hundred U.S. adults across roughly sixty nine thousand searches. On pages where an AI summary appeared, people clicked a normal search result eight percent of the time. On pages without one, fifteen percent. Clicks roughly halved. Links inside the summary itself were used in about one percent of visits.

Google disputes the study and calls the sample unrepresentative, which is worth saying plainly, but even Google does not dispute the direction of travel. The answer increasingly arrives before the click, and the business that supplied the underlying information never sees the visitor.

For us, the picture was sharper, because our sector was measured directly. Everspring, a firm that studies enrollment, analyzed more than four hundred fifty thousand prospective student searches and reported that when an AI summary appears, click-through rates to top-ranked university pages fall by seventy to ninety percent. They sell services to fix the problem they are describing, so take the precise figure with that in mind. But it matched what our own dashboard was telling us, and ours had no product to sell. We were ranking. We were simply no longer being visited.

And here is the part worth pausing on, because it dismantles the one comfort most businesses still cling to. A high ranking and a click are no longer the same thing. You can sit at the very top of the results and watch the summary above you answer the question so completely that no one scrolls to you at all. The metric you have celebrated for a decade quietly stopped meaning what you thought it meant.

So is Google hurting businesses? Yes, measurably, and that is still the least useful way to understand it.

Google did not wake up and decide to punish anyone. It did something colder. It stopped tolerating the lazy work that let all of us fake our way up the page for years. The thin page written for a crawler instead of a person. The content built to rank rather than to inform. A whole industry sold these tactics to organizations that did not have time to know better, and the shift erased them at once.

Here is the part I have made a strange peace with. Google does not care about our mission. It does not care that we exist to change lives, that we mean well, that our work matters. It cannot be moved by any of the things we use to justify ourselves to our boards and to each other. And that indifference, as much as it stung, was the most honest feedback we had received in years.

A mission can charm a donor, comfort a staff meeting, and quietly excuse work that is not good enough. The algorithm grants none of that grace. It does not ask whether you are sincere. It asks whether you are the best answer, and it could not care less how badly you want to be. We needed something that could not be charmed by our own story, and we got it.

I will not pretend the machine is fair, because it is not. An indifferent judge is not the same as a just one. Google answers the question itself now and keeps the click for a reason, and the reason is Google, not you. So take the clarity its coldness offers and refuse the verdict its self-interest reaches. The gift is that it cannot be fooled by your good intentions. The trap is believing that makes it the arbiter of your worth. It is neither friend nor fair. It is only objective about the one thing the mission was hiding from you.

Sit with the uncomfortable version of that, because it is the true one. When our traffic fell by seventy percent, the algorithm did not break our enrollment. It revealed that our enrollment had been standing on something Google permitted, not something we had built. Permission is the one asset that can be revoked without notice and without appeal.

That is a worse diagnosis than a villain. A villain you can resent from a safe distance. This one implicates the lease you signed yourself.

It is also the only diagnosis that leads anywhere. The problem was never traffic. The problem was that the entire path between us and the next person we hoped to serve ran through a company that owes us nothing and rewrites its rules several times a year. We did not have a Google problem. We had a dependency, and we had been calling it a channel.

Dependency is comfortable. It asks nothing of you while it lasts. You buy the ranking, you accept the rules, you optimize inside someone else’s system, and you tell yourself you have a strategy. You do not. You have a tenancy, and the lazy part is mistaking the two until the eviction notice arrives.

One more thing, the wakeup call forced me to admit. Many in higher education are still quietly picturing a narrow version of the person we serve, and that narrowness was its own laziness. In our case, the easy mental image is a seventeen-year-old choosing a residential campus. But the modern learner is just as often the thirty-five-year-old stacking a credential between shifts, the career changer, the working parent, the veteran, the person who will never set foot on a quad and does not want to. Every business has its own version of this comfortable, outdated picture of who its customer is. The platforms changing under us are a good reason to throw that picture out and look at who is actually there.

The only response that matters is to stop renting.

That begins with the thing no consultant will package for you, because it cannot be sold as a service. The relationship itself. Someone who knows your name and chooses you without a search bar in between is yours. An audience you can reach directly, on a list you own, is yours. None of it can be reordered by an update you will never see coming. If most of your business depends on people, you have no way to reach without Google standing in the middle; that is not a marketing gap. That is the entire fragility of the enterprise, and it is the first thing to attack.

If you want the practical version, here is what we are actually doing about it. Five moves, in the order they matter.

One. Build a direct line to the people you serve and never let go of it. An email list, a text list, a relationship you own. The goal is simple. Be able to reach the people you care about without paying a toll to a company that can change the price overnight. Every organization should know what share of its business it can reach directly, and that number is almost always embarrassing the first time you calculate it. If you do not, you are running blind.

Two. Stop measuring the wrong thing. Rankings stopped predicting reality. The question is no longer where you sit in a list of links most people will never scroll to. It is whether you show up in the answer at all. If your dashboard still throws a party over a number one ranking, your dashboard is lying to you in a comforting voice.

Three. Make the things only you could make. The same shift that punished thin content rewards real substance precisely now that substance has become rare. The honest answer to the question your customer actually asks, at a depth no templated page will ever reach. The people inside your organization know things no machine can synthesize from scraping your competitors. Use them.

I can point to our own evidence; we have a lot of great content, but here are some real examples of how we are both the cautionary tale and the proof of this. Somewhere on our site is an article answering what a community health worker is, and another on virtual job shadowing, and they are competent, accurate, and completely generic, indistinguishable from the dozen other versions a search will surface and identical in spirit to whatever a machine will now generate on demand.

We built them to rank. They no longer do, because we gave those pages nothing only we could give. A few clicks away is an article asking whether an online MBA is worth it, and that one still surfaces, but only because buried in the middle of it are a couple of sentences that are unmistakably ours, our tuition held well below the private nonprofit average, our rate frozen through 2030.

The generic majority of that page is filler that every competitor also wrote. The specific minority is the only reason Google still bothers with us. Sit with that ratio, because it is the whole strategy in miniature.

The machine does not need your definition of a thing. It needs the one true sentence only you can write, and most of our pages buried that sentence under work built for a crawler.

The fix was never better keywords. It was to lead with what only we could say and delete the rest.

Four. Show up where no algorithm can stand between you and a person. The conversation, the partnership, and the room a summary cannot replace. These channels were always the most durable and only looked optional while the rented one was working. They are not optional anymore.

This is where I will show our own work, unfinished as it is. Rather than wait for the machine to describe us accurately, we started building our own. Una is the AI resource on our site, and Una exists for a simple reason. If a learner is going to ask an assistant about us before they ever speak to a human, I would rather that assistant be one we built, in our voice, pointing to a real advisor the moment the person wants one, than surrender the first impression to whatever a general model scraped about us last year.

And we are working toward the harder, less visible part, structuring our own content so the machines have something true and firsthand to draw from, closer to feeding the answer at its source than hoping to rank above it. That is the direction in one sentence.

We are trying to stop optimizing to be found and start engineering to be the answer. We are not all the way there. But Una is not a chatbot we bolted on to look current. Una is our early attempt to own the relationship in a world where the first conversation about you increasingly happens without you in the room.

Five. Stop buying the shortcuts today. Whatever scaled trick someone is selling you this quarter, the templated pages, the bulk content, the package that promises rankings, is the exact thing the next update will delete. Cut that spending and move it toward the four things above that you actually own.

None of that is a hack. That is the point. Hacks are what you buy when you have accepted that the platform makes the rules. Ownership is what you build when you decide to stop asking permission.

The organizations that survive the next 5-years are not the ones who outsmart the algorithm. Nobody outsmarts the algorithm. They are the ones who were already the best answer to the question their customer/learners were asking, and who built a direct road so that they could arrive without a search engine waving them through.

Google was never our partner and never our landlord, though the arrangement was easy to mistake for one. It is a channel. A powerful one, worth using well, and far too unstable to build a foundation on.

Losing seventy percent of our organic traffic did us one accidental kindness. It told us the truth while we still had time to use it, and it embarrassed us out of being lazy. That is what a wakeup call is. Not the moment you lose something. The moment you finally see what you were standing on the whole time.

The organizations that treat this as a warning will come out holding something they never actually had. A path to the people they serve that belongs to them. The rest will keep paying rent and calling it “Strategy.”

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