Meta and Alphabet - how, together, we can we make sure your business adds the fewest possible £££s to their $billions

Recent court cases have taken some of the shine off these two leviathans of the tech world. Is it just a blip, or could the rest of the business world now begin to look at Meta and Alphabet's colossal revenue streams and wonder if some of their own hard-earned cash might not be better employed elsewhere?

Some facts:

There are around 200 million businesses listed on Google Maps, of which around 7-10 million regularly buy Google ads.

Of a similar number using Facebook and Instagram, around 12 million are paying.

Alphabet's gross revenue was $400 billion in the last 12 months: roughly 75% generated by advertising across Google and YouTube.

Meta's gross revenue was $230 billion in the last 12 months: 98% generated by advertising across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

That's 500 billion of ad spend by businesses. If we assume that spend is spread across 20 million businesses, we arrive at an average annual spend per business of $25,000. Now we know that's just an average; there will be businesses spending a whole lot more, and plenty spending far less, but that is still an impressive number. 

Thank you, DigitalMunkey, for these numbers

So let us take a vertical we all know well (in the case of HelpHound, because we have clients of long standing in that vertical, and for all our readers, because they will invariably have first-hand experience of using such businesses): estate agency.

The next obvious move is to research the most-bought Google Ads search terms:

Now things are getting interesting. Let us see which business shows up for each of those searches:

"Estate agents in [Location/Postcode]":

"How much is my house worth in [Location]":

"Sell my house in [Location]":

Or:

Note: In this search, only the HelpHound client has a review score/stars under its listing; that is because they host their own reviews on their own website, and we have enabled the Google schema, which pulls that information from their website through to local search. When we first introduced this, we weren't quite sure if clients would value it, until one day Google accidentally switched it off, and we had to field the calls!

"Letting agents in [Location]":

"Property Management in [Location]":

We even asked Google Gemini, 'How many agents cover the Kingsbury/London NW9 area?' and it returned this:

Now we are going to make a simple pitch: would you rather your business be returned like this in search results for free, or would you prefer to keep paying for Google Ads*?

The options for businesses in 2026 and onwards:

1. Pay for advertising on one or more of these platforms
2. Pay less for advertising as a direct result of adopting professional review management
3. A hybrid of 1 and 2

It would be unfair to ask you to answer that question without first telling you what our moderation and review management service currently costs. Here are the numbers.

*You may wish, completely understandably, to continue to do both, at least for a trial period. That is entirely up to you. At least you will have the HelpHound guarantee to reassure your CFO that it won't be money wasted.