Don't build your house on rented land (Google's included)

When I interviewed Jeff Sauer in 2022, I asked what felt like a sensible question. Everyone was telling small marketing teams to build up their first party data, and I wanted to know what he'd say to the ones who found that daunting.

He didn't really accept the premise. "Daunting as far as what, right?" Then he gave me this:

"The advice I've always had is don't build your house on rented land."

Jeff wasn't telling anyone to quit Facebook or TikTok. "There's nothing wrong with using rented platforms," he said. "If you want to be a TikToker, that can be your front end thing, but you always want to fulfill it on something you own as much as possible." The full answer is in his written interview on kwasi.com.

The only thing you really own

"The only thing that you really own ever is email addresses. I think that's it, right? That's the one thing that you can always have permission to do."

Not followers, and not rankings. Jeff's example was YouTube: "I subscribe to a ton of YouTube channels and I never see that content." "I'm at the mercy of what the platform chooses to do and how they choose to present it."

Platform changes, he said, are "as certain as the sun rising in the morning".

The part I liked most was that he had a way of living with it. You need rented platforms to grow a list, he admitted, "there's no other way to do it". So you treat them as rent to own:

"Facebook, I'll pay you, but I want to own these things eventually... I'll pay like property tax on this thing, but I'm not going to pay rent on it constantly."

Pay the platform to meet people. Then move the relationship somewhere the landlord can't reach.

We've been warned about this for years

Jeff wasn't the first guest to say it. At MozCon in 2015, Ian Lurie was even more direct: "Don't become a single tactic marketer." If you depend on one tactic, "eventually, probably soon, something's going to happen. That yanks the rug out from under you." His example was Facebook organic, "which is pretty much gone".

What Ian would do with a small budget instead is the bit people skip. Put it into "the best product or the best whatever it is that you do or having that really powerful, unique voice, because that's something no one can take away from you."

Marty Weintraub told me about a keynote he gave in Las Vegas to a room of about 250 online sellers. He asked who bought AdWords. No hands. Who had their own website? No hands. They were "all dependent on Shopify and Amazon and eBay stores and these other platforms." His verdict: "marketers are being turned into moderately paid affiliate drones." And a moment later, on the rest of us: "we live in Google Hell."

We got a local lesson in this in February 2021, when Facebook switched off news for Australians overnight during the fight over the media bargaining code. Publishers who'd built their audience on Facebook woke up to empty pages. We wrote about the code at the time, and the advice was the same as Jeff's: your website is your most valuable asset, and nobody else gets to switch it off.

Google is rented land too

This is the part that's changed. For years, SEO felt like the owned channel. You didn't pay per click, you built pages on your own domain, and the traffic kept coming. It still felt like that when I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022, but she could see where it was going. I asked her what Google's end game was:

"I think it's fair to say that Google wants to keep people on Google... if you take all our information and you own all the information, and people don't need to visit any other sites, like, what is the internet?"

I said, "It's just you. It's not the internet anymore." She said, "Yeah, exactly." Her written interview is on kwasi.com.

In 2026 that isn't a thought experiment. SparkToro's study of US searches from January to April this year found 68% of Google searches ended without a click, and Search Engine Land's write up reports AI Overviews cutting click through rates by nearly 60% when they show up. Pew's earlier tracking found people clicked a result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1%. The chatbots work the same way. The answer comes to the person, and the person stays put.

Dr. Pete Meyers saw the money side of this years before any of it existed. Talking about answers with no results page underneath, he asked, "how do you monetize a voice answer?" and predicted ads and organic would stop sitting in separate blocks and start to blend. In May, Google started testing ads that sit inside AI Mode answers, labelled as sponsored. So the answer to his question is the same as always: ads, just inside the answer now.

None of this means give up on search. It means stop treating it as the one thing you own.

Use every channel, marry none of them

Mike King had the most practical version of this. His advice for staying ahead was a comprehensive plan across channels: "you can't just do organic. You can't just do paid." For his own hip hop store, UGHH, he'd have put the money into Google Shopping first and layered organic on top once revenue was up, because "if any given channel changes", you're in trouble. His agency stayed deliberately platform agnostic rather than joining one vendor's cult. We made the same argument in SEO vs PPC: it's rarely one or the other.

Loyal customers don't need you to rank

The best argument I heard for owning your audience came from Paddy Moogan, and it's not really about marketing at all. At 36:49 he talked about building online assets Google can't take away, and put a good customer base at the top of the list:

"If you've got a loyal customer base, you don't need to rank, they'd come straight back to you. They just google your brand or they'll have your bookmarks, they're typing your URL."

A loyal customer is the house you own, more than any email address. They open your emails, search your name and type your URL without thinking. It comes from the unglamorous stuff in show you care: the reply, the follow up, the useful thing nobody asked for. And it's easier when you've made something worth coming back to.

A checklist for owning your audience

It's what I go through with clients now. None of it's new, it just costs more to skip.

Email list

• Give people a reason to sign up that isn't "subscribe to our newsletter": a guide, a price alert, early access.
• Put the sign up where the rented traffic lands: on the pages that get social, paid and AI referral visits, not just the footer.
• Send something useful often enough that people remember you. A list you email once a year is forgotten, not owned.

First party data

• Make sure every enquiry, purchase and sign up lands in a system you control (your CRM, your email platform, your own database), not just in an ad platform's reporting.
• Keep your own copy of the numbers. Export your analytics and Search Console data on a schedule, because tools get renamed and retired.
• Use Jeff's rent to own rule: when you pay a platform to reach people, measure how many of them you ended up owning, not just how many clicked.

Community

• Pick one place where your customers can talk to you and each other, and show up in it as a person.
• If your community lives on someone else's platform, keep a way to reach the members that doesn't depend on it.

Brand search

• Track branded searches as their own number. Search Console now has a branded queries filter, which makes this much easier than it used to be.
• Treat growth in people searching your name as a result, even when it doesn't come with a neat attribution report.
• Make your brand search worth doing: a homepage that says what you do and answers the questions people ask before they buy.

If you only do one thing this month, count how many customers you could contact tomorrow if Google, Meta and every chatbot disappeared overnight. That number is what you own. Everything else, as Jeff would say, is rent.