The Month Google Spent $4

What a broken ad account taught Jon Mest about winning in the age of answer engines

August 2024. Jon Mest is running Just Reach Out, a PR software company, and something is wrong with his ad account. Not broken-wrong. Quiet-wrong.

Google hasn’t charged his credit card in a while. And Google loves charging his credit card. So he logs in expecting to find an error: a paused campaign, a billing glitch, something he could fix in five minutes. Instead he finds this. Over a three-week stretch, Google had spent exactly $4 of an ad budget that normally ran into the thousands every month.

Nothing was broken. That was the terrifying part.

He did the thing he hadn’t bothered to do in months. He searched his own core terms. “Affordable digital PR.” The phrase he used to own. He’d had the number-one blue link. He’d had an ad running underneath it. He was double-dipping on his own category. And now, sitting on top of the whole page, was a giant AI overview answering the question for free. A tidy list of affordable PR options. His company wasn’t on it. You scrolled past the answer, past more context, and eventually, after what felt like five minutes of scrolling, you reached his number-one link. His ad was below even that.

Google had decided to stop spending his money so it could give away the answer above his ad.

That’s the moment I wanted to talk to Jon about, because most founders are about to live some version of it. The ground moves under your business, fast, and the only question that matters is what you do in the next ninety days.

The complaint is the easy part

Here’s what almost everyone does when the rug gets pulled: they complain. SEO is dead. Google killed my channel. The platform changed the rules. All true, all useless.

Jon did something different, and it’s worth being precise about what it was, because it’s copyable.

His team had already been poking at a quieter question. How was discovery going to change? He’d noticed it in his own behavior. He was using ChatGPT to find brands and do research, and reaching for Google less and less. So when the $4 month hit, he didn’t treat it as a catastrophe. He treated it as confirmation. The thing they’d been wondering about had arrived.

Then he did the part most founders skip. He went public with the problem before he had a solution. His team started posting to LinkedIn, to their email list, to anyone who’d listen: Is anybody else seeing this? Anybody want to talk about it? We’re thinking about building here. Building in the open, asking for feedback in a space nobody understood yet.

I’ve watched a lot of founders sit on a half-formed idea because they’re afraid someone will steal it. Jon’s instinct was the opposite. Say it out loud, early, and let the responses tell you whether there’s a there there. The responses were strong. They piloted something with existing customers. Would you pay for this? Some said yes. That became ChatRank, a product that helps brands figure out why the answer engines do or don’t recommend them. It wasn’t born from a strategy deck. It was born from a broken ad account and the discipline to ask the next question instead of cursing the last one.

Search engines vs. answer engines

I should admit something here. For years I told founders that SEO was a solved game. Write good content, earn good links, climb the rankings. I’d lived it at Concur. We ranked, we ran ads, the machine worked. I was giving advice from a world that was quietly disappearing.

Jon drew the distinction that reframed it for me, and it’s simple enough to put on a napkin.

A search engine helps you search. It hands you ten blue links and you do the work of deciding what the answer is. An answer engine, like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, does that work for you and hands back the answer. Under the hood, Jon says, it’s essentially running the search, reading the first hundred-plus results, and then deciding, based on what it knows about you, which one to actually recommend. It’s doing the clicking. You just get the conclusion.

That one shift changes everything downstream. If a machine is going to read your site and decide whether to vouch for you, you don’t optimize to rank. You optimize to be chosen.

And the way you get chosen is more meritocratic than anything that came before it. This is the part that should make every small founder sit up. Jon told me about a cybersecurity customer competing against Vanta and Drata, companies many times their size, for one specific thing they did genuinely better. They used ChatRank to find the gap in their own messaging, wrote a single strong piece of content explaining exactly what they did and why it was different, and within a week of publishing, they were outranking the giants on that query. In the old SEO world that climb would’ve taken years of accumulated authority. The answer engine just looked at the evidence and went, you’re right, you are the best at this.

Money can still buy a big brand a lot of polished content. What it can’t buy nearly as easily is the thing the LLMs actually weight: real humans saying you’re good.

Where you actually win

Jon breaks the “real humans” part into three buckets, and they’re the most actionable thing in the whole conversation.

Third-party brand mentions. Does a credible outside source say you’re good? It used to be about the backlink. Now, Jon says, the backlink barely matters. The mention does. And credible doesn’t mean the Wall Street Journal. He has a New York restaurant customer whose whole identity is no seed oils. There’s a tiny blog called Seed Oil Scout that does nothing but hunt down restaurants that avoid them. Small readership, almost no traffic. But the LLMs treat it as the world’s authority on that exact question. One mention on that nobody-blog, and the restaurant got validated as one of the best no-seed-oil spots in the city, instantly. The expert the machine trusts is often not the one with the biggest audience. It’s the one with the narrowest obsession.

Social signals. Reddit, Quora, the forums where actual people talk. Organic conversation about your brand, the messier the more believable.

Sentiment. Reviews, on whatever platform your world lives on. G2 for software, Yelp for restaurants, Healthgrades for doctors. Real people saying you were good. If you got dinged on service, you don’t argue with the algorithm; you go earn a review that mentions how you handled the problem.

None of those require a war chest. All of them are available to a two-person company today. That’s the quiet good news buried in Jon’s $4 disaster: the new game rewards specificity and credibility over budget, which is exactly the terrain a small focused company should want to fight on.

What to do Monday morning

I always ask founders the same closing question. It’s Monday: what do you actually go do? Jon’s answer cost nothing and I think it’s the best single move available right now.

Open ChatGPT. Hit the button that makes it a temporary chat, so it has no memory of who you are. Then ask it plainly: who are the best five companies that do the specific thing you do?

It’ll name five. Maybe you’re on the list. Probably you’re not. Either way, ask the follow-up: why didn’t you mention me? And the model will tell you. You don’t have the right reviews. Your website never actually says you serve the customer you claim to serve. There’s no credible source backing up the thing you say you’re best at. It will hand you, in plain language, the exact gaps between the company you think you are and the company the evidence says you are.

That’s the whole job, really. Close those gaps. Write the one piece of content that names what you do better than anyone. Get the narrow-but-trusted source to mention you. Earn the review. Repeat.

The $4 month felt like the end of Jon’s marketing. It was actually the beginning of ChatRank. The difference wasn’t that he saw the disruption coming. Almost nobody does. The difference was what he did in the ninety days after it landed. He stopped defending the old answer and went looking for the new one.

Google’s already told us where this goes. The ten blue links are on their way out. The only question is whether the machine, when someone asks it about your category, has any reason to say your name.

Go find out. It’s a free search away.