Caught up with a founder friend of mine this week — he's been building a B2B SaaS in a brutal niche for about seven years — and he said something that stuck with me.
All the noise about the SaaS apocalypse is mostly hot air. A couple of startups couldn't make their unit economics work, and suddenly everyone's writing obituaries for the whole category. Big corporations found a convenient excuse in the panic too — they lay people off in waves and blame it on "going AI-driven." Sure. Right.
His actual problem is completely different. His organic traffic tanked — not because his site dropped in the rankings, but because AI Overview, that block sitting above the organic results, just doesn't show his product at all.
Overview pulls its answers from a tiny circle of sites Google has decided are "authoritative," for whatever godforsaken reason — competitor vendor blogs and a couple of well-known ranking aggregators. If you're not in those listings, it doesn't matter how good your product is. You're just not in the Overview, which means you're not getting the traffic that used to be free.
Getting into those listings is a paid game now. A backlink from a decent domain runs about $300. An article carrying 9-11 backlinks is already $3-9K. Aggregators that slot in fifty of these placements want $30K. Webmasters figured out the game fast and stopped being shy about the pricing.
He's budgeting $200,000 just to run the initial experiment, and doesn't expect to see any real results for at least two months.
So basically:
AI didn't turn into the technological leap everyone promised. It turned into a new racket for webmasters to run.
Bottom line: the SaaS apocalypse is noise. $200K is the actual problem.
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