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The cover of The Price of Being Found, Edition 1.6

The Price of Being Found

Free · PDF · 155 pages · Edition 1.6, 7 October 2026

What six years of advertising data actually say, why almost everyone quotes it wrong, and what to do about it on Monday morning.

New in this edition: three chapters on being found by AI assistants. 71 corrections, listed one by one in the back.

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What is inside

There are six parts and a short coda, and each part answers a different question.

  1. Part One

    The Complaint

    The Complaint asks whether online advertising actually got more expensive. Everyone knows it did. “Everyone knows” is not a source. This part goes and looks.

    1. 1Everyone Knows
    2. 2The Difficulty With Measuring The Price Of A Thing That Is Never The Same Thing Twice
    3. 3What Actually Happened To The Price
    4. 4Everything Else Got Cheaper
    5. 5The Price They Quote Is Not The Price You Pay

  2. Part Two

    The Machine

    The Machine asks why the price does what it does. Auctions, attention, and the moment the industry’s ability to measure itself broke.

    1. 6An Auction With Excellent Manners And No Reserve Price
    2. 7The Attention Did Not Grow As Fast As The Money
    3. 8The Measurement Broke, And Then The Price Went Up
    4. 9The Scorekeeper Owns The Scoreboard

  3. Part Three

    The Bill

    The Bill asks who paid. This is the part with the marketplaces in it, and the contracts, and the ninety-five thousand doors.

    1. 10The Levy
    2. 11Who Captured The Rent
    3. 12The Missing Profit And Loss
    4. 13They Could Not Pass It On
    5. 14Ninety-Five Thousand Doors

  4. Part Four

    The Floor

    The Floor asks what can be known at all. It contains a number below which nobody, including the company that published this book, can measure advertising incrementality reliably. It also contains the arithmetic to work out whether you are above that floor, which takes an afternoon once you have a year of weekly revenue by region.

    1. 15The Measurability Floor
    2. 16Thirty-One Vendors, Zero Validations
    3. 17The Customer Journey, Reassembled
    4. 18What A Defensible Number Looks Like

  5. Part Five

    The Work

    The Work is what to do on Monday.

    1. 19The Monday Protocol

  6. Part Six

    The Answer

    The Answer asks what changes when the buyer stops searching and asks a machine instead. It contains a hand-count of our own visibility in AI assistants, and the arithmetic for how little one reading of it can tell you.

    1. 20The Shop Window Learned To Talk
    2. 21The Only Answer
    3. 22Measuring An Answer That Is Never The Same Twice

  7. Coda

    The Account

    The Account says what would change our mind, and then what all of it adds up to.

    1. 23What Would Change Our Mind
    2. 24The Price Of Being Found

At the back

  1. AVerdicts, by claim
  2. BErrata
  3. CEvidentiary tiers
  4. DReproducible construction
  5. EThe forward calendar
  6. FThe words, in plain English
  7. References

How it reads

Plain speak after anything technical

Wherever something technical could not be avoided, a paragraph marked Plain speak immediately afterwards says the same thing in ordinary English. Every unavoidable term is also in Appendix F, translated.

Nothing you cannot do in a spreadsheet

There is no maths in the body of this book that you cannot do in your head or in a spreadsheet; the real formulas are in Appendix D, where anyone who wants to rebuild the numbers can find them and nobody else has to look at them.

Its own errors, at the back

This book has changed its own mind three times. The errata are in Appendix B, at the back, where you can check them.

Who it is for

The person who owns the marketing budget: ecommerce owner-operators and in-house marketing leads.

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