Picture a boardroom. The CMO puts up a slide: organic visibility, down 18% for the year. Nobody’s happy, but nobody’s surprised.
Next slide: the three closest competitors. Down 15%. Down 17%. Down 20%. And you can feel the room exhale. It’s the market. Everyone’s down. Tough year.
Here’s what isn’t on either slide. The market didn’t shrink last year. It grew. And every company on that second slide lost to somebody who wasn’t on it.
Hi, I’m Jeff Payne. You’re listening to The Jeff Payne Show, Episode 90: The Index Went Up. You Went Down.
There’s an independent index that does for Google what a stock index does for the market. It follows a fixed panel of roughly 2,600 companies week after week and measures how much of Google’s results each one holds relative to the others. Because the panel doesn’t change, the total tells you whether search as a whole grew or shrank — and one company’s number tells you how much of the shelf it actually occupies.
For the 293 companies with a full year of weekly data, here’s the twelve-month read.
The total went up 1.8 percent.
The median company went down 17.2 percent.
Both numbers are true. And only one of them is on anybody’s dashboard.
How does a market grow while the typical company in it shrinks? Concentration. A small number of players earned many points. Most companies lost fewer points — but those points represented a large share of what they had.
Look at where the gain went. The ten largest companies in the panel grew by a total of 4.7%. Ranks eleven through fifty lost 3%. The other 243 lost nearly 5% as a group, with a median loss of 19%.
Two platforms carry the whole total. YouTube gained 55 percent in a year. Facebook gained 81%. Between them, that’s more than 2,300 points of visibility — about four times the net gain of the entire group of 293. Take those two out, and everybody else lost 6 percent.
Now here’s the part that matters for the boardroom. The companies that lost weren’t the weak ones. The Mayo Clinic lost 22% of its Google visibility in twelve months. Microsoft lost 43%. Hilton lost 45%. WebMD lost 40%. Bank of America lost 32%.
Nobody believes the Mayo Clinic got worse at medicine last year. So the visibility didn’t leave because the company slipped. It left because Google is giving more of the shelf to places where people post — video, social, review platforms — and less of it to companies publishing on their own domains.
Which means when you benchmark against your peers and everyone’s down together, you are not seeing the market. You’re seeing a group of businesses that all lost to the same thing. The competitor that took your position isn’t in your competitive set. It’s a platform. And it’s not going to show up on a slide that only lists the companies you’ve always compared yourself to.
A few more reads from the same panel, because they sharpen the picture.
Software companies had the worst year of any sector tracked — down 38 percent across 84 companies, with only 20 of them growing. The informational searches went to the platforms. The comparison searches went to review sites. What’s left is the brand search and the product page.
But it isn’t a story about websites being finished. In e-commerce over the summer, the brands that own their stores held flat. The resellers — the middle layer — lost 8%. Amazon itself is down 23% in a year, and Best Buy nearly half. The squeeze is on whoever sits between the maker and the buyer.
And the people producing the content feel it. A survey of just over a thousand content marketers found that only 14% reported strong results from blogging — a 12-year low, down from 26% in 2022. More than 92% of them are now using AI, and that adoption has shown no correlation with better results. The ones who reported results were measuring leads and revenue, not traffic.
So here’s what this means, and I’d rather leave you with the question than a to-do list.
A flat year in organic visibility was a win in 2026. If you held your ground while the median company lost 17%, you outperformed the market — and your team should hear that from you, because their dashboard will never say it.
Second: stop measuring yourself only against the companies you’ve always measured yourself against. For every search where you used to hold a top position but no longer do, ask who’s above you now. If it’s a competitor, that’s a competitive problem, and you know how to fight it. If it’s a platform, that’s a structural problem — and no amount of out-publishing your rivals fixes it, because they’re losing to the same thing you are.
And third: the gain didn’t disappear. It moved. The question for your leadership team isn’t how to get the old shelf back. It’s whether you’re present on the shelf that grew.
Three questions to take into your next planning meeting.
One. Do you know your own twelve-month change — and have you compared it to the market, or only to the three companies you always compare yourself to?
Two. For the searches you used to win and don’t anymore, do you know what’s standing there now — a competitor, or a platform?
Three. If a prospect never visits your website before deciding to call you — and that’s increasingly how it works — where did they form their opinion?
I’m Jeff Payne. Thanks for listening. I will see you next time.
Picture a boardroom. The CMO puts up a slide: organic visibility, down 18 percent for the year. Next slide: the three closest competitors — down 15, down 17, down 20%. The room exhales. It’s the market. Everyone’s down. Here’s what isn’t on either slide: the market didn’t shrink last year. It grew.
Two True Numbers, One Dashboard
An independent index does for Google what a stock index does for the market. It follows a fixed panel of roughly 2,600 companies week after week and measures how much of Google’s results each one holds relative to the others. Because the panel doesn’t change, the total tells you whether search as a whole grew or shrank — and one company’s number tells you how much of the shelf it actually occupies.
For the 293 companies with a full year of weekly data, the twelve-month through mid-September 2026 rose 1.8%. The median company went down 17.2%. Of the 293, 185 sit below where they were a year ago, and 134 lost more than a fifth of their visibility.
Both numbers are true. Only one of them is on anybody’s dashboard.
The market didn’t shrink last year. It grew. And every company on that slide lost to somebody who wasn’t on it.
WHERE THE GAIN WENT
How does a market grow while the typical company in it shrinks? Concentration. A small number of players earned many points. Most companies lost fewer points — but those points represented a large share of what they had.
The 10 largest companies in the panel grew 4.7% together. Ranks eleven through fifty lost 3%. The remaining 243 lost nearly 5 percent as a group, with a median loss of 19%.
Two platforms carry the whole total. YouTube gained 55% in a year and Facebook 81% — more than 2,300 points of visibility between them, roughly four times the net gain of the entire group. Remove those two and everyone else lost 6%.
“Nobody believes the Mayo Clinic got worse at medicine last year.”
The Companies That Lost Weren’t the Weak Ones
The Mayo Clinic lost 22% of its Google visibility in twelve months. Microsoft lost 43%. Hilton lost 45%. WebMD lost 40%. Bank of America lost 32%.
Nobody believes the Mayo Clinic got worse at medicine last year. The visibility didn’t leave because the company slipped. It left because Google is giving more of the shelf to places where people post — video, social and review platforms — and less of it to companies publishing on their own domains.
That changes what a peer benchmark means. When you compare yourself to your competitors and everyone is down together, you are not seeing the market. You’re seeing a group of businesses that all lost to the same thing. The competitor that took your position isn’t in your competitive set. It’s a platform — and it will never appear on a slide that only lists the companies you’ve always compared yourself to.
This is one of the best written, most informative email newsletters I’ve ever read!
Thank you for sharing your expertise, and hope you’re doing well.
Beth Zimmerman
Founder, Executive Director
THE SQUEEZE IS IN THE MIDDLE
Software companies had the worst year of any sector tracked — down 38% across the 84 companies we followed every week, with only 20 growing. Informational searches went to the platforms; comparison searches went to the review sites. What’s left is the brand search and the product page.
But this isn’t a story about websites being finished. In e-commerce over the summer, brands that own their own stores held flat while resellers — the middle layer — lost 8%. Amazon itself is down 23% in a year, and Best Buy nearly half. The squeeze lands on whoever sits between the maker and the buyer.
The people producing the content feel it too. A survey of just over a thousand content marketers found that only 14% reported strong results from blogging — a 12-year low, down from 26% in 2022. More than 92% now use AI, and data has shown a correlation with better results. The marketers who did report results were measuring leads and revenue, not traffic.
“A flat year in organic visibility was a win in 2026.”
What It Means for Your Leadership Team
First, a flat year in organic visibility was a win in 2026. If you held your ground while the median company lost 17%, you outperformed the market — and your team should hear that from you, because their dashboard will never say it.
Second, stop measuring yourself only against the companies you’ve always measured yourself against. For every search you used to win and don’t anymore, ask who’s above you now. If it’s a competitor, that’s a competitive problem and you know how to fight it. If it’s a platform, that’s a structural problem — and out-publishing your rivals won’t fix it, because they’re losing to the same thing you are.
Third, the gain didn’t disappear. It moved.
“The question isn’t how to get the old shelf back. It’s whether you’re present on the shelf that grew.”
Three Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
A note on an earlier episode: Episode 25 reported that primary-source companies were gaining ground in Google alongside platforms. The 12-month data in this brief shows that trend has reversed — companies publishing on their own domains lost ground over the year while platforms gained. The data moved; the episode above reflects where it stands now.
Source credit: Visibility data in this episode is drawn from the Search Signals Index published by Kevin Indig at Growth Memo (Growth Intelligence Brief, September 2026). Content-marketing survey figures are from Orbit Media’s annual survey of 1,042 content marketers, as reported by Search Engine Land. The episode’s analysis and conclusions are Jeff Payne’s own.
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