A hockey goalie on Hacker News nailed it:

What matters more than where the puck is, is where it’s going to be in two seconds. If you can’t see the puck, look at the players. As a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they’ll be looking at the puck.

Someone wrote that Google Ads gave them 5x their monthly budget as a bonus. Zero return.

Google is dead, they say. Where do we go now?

Wrong question.

Your customers aren’t gone. They’re just elsewhere. Maybe on ChatGPT. Maybe reading AI summaries at the top of Google. Maybe in Discord servers you’ll never find. Maybe on TikTok, watching a 30-second video that answers their question better than your SEO-optimized blog post ever did.

The real problem isn’t “where did Google go?” It’s that 15 years of easy traffic made us forget how to find customers.

Google Ads was the yellow pages on steroids. You paid, you appeared, they clicked. No need to understand why they bought. Just increase the budget.

That era created intellectual laziness. Why do focus groups when you can A/B test headlines? Why talk to customers when you can read analytics dashboards?

Now the shortcut is gone. And the naked question appears: did you ever know why people bought from you?

The game hasn’t changed. It’s still leveraging attention. The tactics shift:

  • Yellow pages: start your business name with “A”
  • Google: buy keywords
  • Now: be the source the AI cites. Be in the private conversations.

The puck moved. Everyone’s confused.

But look where the players are looking. Look where the ref is looking.

Pick up your phone. Do a focus group. Find your customers.

They’re not gone. You just stopped watching the game.