Surely if you're dependent on search, you don't HAVE organic business no matter that they call it organic search traffic? "that thing I get from whosit but I don't recall them yea them" is kind of always going to be very variable.

That said a colleague said when his brother-in-law stopped paying for placement his printer/toner supply business tanked, despite him believing they knew who he was. Nobody knows anyone.

Machine learning is by definition a black box. Nonlinear statistical models with huge numbers of parameters to be estimated.

Maybe Google doesn't want people to reach businesses from search results and they want businesses to pay for ads so people can reach them.

On one of my sites I received a million requests from Googlebot before lunchtime today. Those requests were spread over hundreds of IPs. I get similar traffic from them and other hyper scalers daily. I'm just one guy. I don't have load balancers and endless engineering budget. I'm sick of this.

Everyone is complaining about Google since years ago. But no one has built a good alternative. Is it a bad business idea?

If you can afford it, please try kagi[0]. It's not a panacea. It IS a lot better than Google and has been for some time.

[0] https://kagi.com/welcome