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MBC / Group / Blog / AI & Automation
AI & Automation 9 min read Sep 23, 2026
A business owner has a week full of the same steps in the same order — quotes, invoices, onboarding, follow-ups — and decides to have it built once so it runs itself. The phrase for that is business process automation. It gets 1,300 US searches a month and an advertiser pays about $47 a click for it. You would expect page one to be full of people who will build it for you.
On 23 September 2026 we ran the search from a United States location and asked for the top 100 results. Google returned 17. Eight were about business process automation. The ninth result onward was grief theory, a New England Journal of Medicine trial, the constitutional amendment process, and Joel Embiid's Instagram account.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 What we searched 02 Eight answers, then the subject changes 03 Who page one actually sends you to 04 Add one word and the page changes again 05 Nobody names a price 06 Google answers before the results now 07 What to search instead, and what to ask 08 Method, and what this does not prove 09 Common questions
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00 — Key Takeaways
We searched “business process automation” from a United States location on 23 September 2026 and asked for 100 results. Google returned 17.
Eight of the 17 were about business process automation. The other nine include a grief-counselling site, a New England Journal of Medicine trial, the National Archives' page on amending the Constitution, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Joel Embiid's Instagram, and the dictionary definition of the word “process”.
Of the eight real answers, five are software vendors, one is Wikipedia, one is a software review site, and one is a consulting firm — whose specialities are audit, compliance and cybersecurity.
We could open six of the eight. Not one names a price for the work. The only dollar figure on any of them is a $1 trillion market forecast.
Adding the word “services” finally surfaces firms that will do the work — and then runs into three government employment agencies. Adding “company” gets you Eli Lilly, Ford, Bain, two dance companies and a Justin Bieber song.
All three searches now open with an AI-written answer. On the main term it cites six sources, five of them software vendors or a review site, and it recommends three tools by name before you have scrolled once.
Business process automation means taking the repetitive, rule-based parts of running a business — the quote that always follows the enquiry, the invoice that always follows the job, the five things that always happen when a new client signs — and building them once so they run without anyone remembering to do them.
It is a real thing that small businesses really want. The numbers say so: “business process automation” draws 1,300 US searches a month, and the average advertiser bid sits at about $47 a click. That is a high price to pay for a visit, and people only pay it when the visitor is worth money.
So on 23 September 2026 we ran the search as a plain Google organic search from a United States location, in English, and asked for the top 100 results. Then we did the same for “business process automation services” and “business process automation company”, and opened the pages that came back. Everything below is counted off what Google returned, not off memory.
This is the third study in a row where we have done this, and the pattern is getting hard to ignore. The ai automation agency search ran out of real answers after eight results. The ai automation services search returned three near-separate page ones for three ways of asking the same question. This one is worse than both.
We asked for 100 results. Google returned 17. That is not a page-one observation — that is the whole index of things Google is willing to show for this question.
Eight of them are about business process automation. Here is what Google offered after those eight ran out, in the order it offered them:
Position
Result
What it is actually about
09
whatsyourgrief.com
The Dual Process Model of Grief
10
nejm.org
A randomised trial of protocol-based care for early septic shock
11
archives.gov
How to amend the United States Constitution
12
transportation.gov
The federal rulemaking process
13
fdic.gov
A new review process for deposit insurance applications
14
instagram.com
Joel “The Process” Embiid
15
nrc.gov
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Reactor Oversight Process
16
sciencedirect.com
Process Biochemistry, an academic journal
17
merriam-webster.com
The dictionary definition of the word “process”
Read that list again. Google kept the word “process” and quietly dropped “business” and “automation”. A basketball player's Instagram nickname and a grief-counselling article are, as far as the index is concerned, among the best remaining answers to a question worth $47 a click.
There is an honest caveat here and we are going to make it loudly. We ran the identical request again a few minutes later and got 25 organic results instead of 17. The first eight were the same eight both times. What moves is the tail — the part that was never about automation anyway. The finding is not “Google has exactly 17 pages”; it is that the supply of genuinely relevant pages stops at eight and the rest is filler that changes between one search and the next.
The eight relevant results are worth naming, because who they are matters more than how many there are.
Who they are
Will they build it for you?
ibm.com
Enterprise software vendor
Explainer article
hyland.com
Software, with a demo request
en.wikipedia.org
Encyclopedia
No
bdemerson.com
Consulting firm — audit, compliance, cybersecurity, privacy
Yes, at consulting scale
atlassian.com
Software vendor
pipefy.com
Workflow software vendor
gartner.com
Software review and research site
No — it reviews tools
servicenow.com
Software
Five software vendors. One encyclopedia. One site that reviews software. And one consulting firm, whose own navigation lists its services as audit, business, cybersecurity, compliance, privacy and technology — a serious firm, but not the one a ten-person company calls about their invoicing.
So the person searching asked “who can build this for me” and Google answered with a catalogue of things to buy and read. That is a different question. Buying a workflow platform and having your workflow built are not the same purchase, and the gap between them is where most small-business automation projects quietly die — which is the whole argument in our piece on the difference between an AI tool and an AI system.
If you add “services” to the search — 210 a month, about $47 a click — the page finally shows firms that will do the work. msquare.pro is second, ardem.com third, and softwebsolutions, ScienceSoft and cbh.com all appear. Reddit sits at sixth.
Then it does the same thing again. Google returned 14 results, and from thirteenth place onward it holds the word “services” and drops the rest: North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services, the Legal Services Corporation, Michigan's Veterans' Employment Services, and a piece of worship-planning software.
“Company” — 260 a month — behaves differently and more comically. Google returned 48 results. The topic holds to about tenth place, then collapses into the English word: Eli Lilly and Company, Ford, Bain & Company, The Company of Biologists, Giant Food Stores, the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Wikipedia's article on the Sondheim musical Company, and Justin Bieber's song of the same name.
Three sensible English phrasings for one need. Three different sets of companies to call, and each one falls off a different cliff. If you have searched for this and come away thinking there is nobody good out there, that is not what you found. You found a thin index.
We tried to open all eight relevant pages. Six loaded. Gartner returned a 403 Forbidden to a normal Chrome browser identity, and ServiceNow timed out, so we are not making any claim about those two.
Of the six we could read, not one names a dollar price for doing the work. The only dollar figure that appears anywhere across them is on bdemerson's guide, and it is a market forecast — hyperautomation software “projected to approach $1 trillion” — not a price for anything you could buy. What you get instead is “request a demo” and “contact sales”.
That makes it three studies out of three. The ai automation agency page one: no prices. The ai automation services page one: no prices, across ten readable pages. Now business process automation: no prices, across six. Different companies each time. Same silence.
We publish ours. Every agent and every level of human involvement has a dollar figure on our pricing page, in public, without a form. We are not claiming that makes us better at the work. We are pointing out that after twenty-four readable pages across three studies, the number of them that will tell you what it costs is zero.
All three searches opened with an AI Overview — Google's own written answer, sitting above every result. This matters more than the rankings underneath it, because most people will read the answer and stop.
On the main term, that answer cites six sources: IBM, bdemerson, Gartner, Splunk, Kissflow, and a YouTube video. Five of the six are software-vendor or software-review content. It then recommends three products by name — Pipefy, Bizagi and Camunda — and closes by offering to help you build an implementation plan. A business owner who reads it comes away believing this is a software-shopping problem, because every source it read was written by someone selling software.
On “services” it cites eight sources, one of which is a Reddit thread, and it says so out loud: “opinions on Reddit are mixed regarding full accounting automation”. On “company” it cites ten, two of them YouTube videos.
The practical lesson is the one we keep arriving at: the question is no longer only who ranks, it is who gets quoted in the answer written above the rankings. That is a different discipline, and we have written about how to earn it in how to rank in ChatGPT and on our AI search optimization page.
One more tell. The “related searches” Google offered on the main term were business process automation examples, tools, courses, jobs, SAP, and PDF. Courses. Jobs. A PDF. Google's best guess is that you want to learn this or get hired doing it — not that you want to hire somebody.
If you are actually trying to hire someone, three things follow from the data above.
And one question to ask whoever you talk to: when this breaks in four months, who fixes it? Automation is not a project you finish. It is something that has to be watched, because the tools it connects change underneath it. That is the difference between somebody selling you a build and somebody running a system.
That is the part we do. MBC takes work you have already proven manually and rebuilds it as a self-running system, with a human approval gate on anything that goes out — that is what our AI automation service is, and Aiden OS is the platform it runs on. If you want to talk through which part of your week is worth automating first, book a working session.
Searches were run on 23 September 2026 as Google organic searches from a United States location, in English, requesting the top 100 results for each of three terms. Search volumes and cost-per-click are Google Ads figures for the United States. Pages were fetched with a standard desktop Chrome browser identity and read in full.
What this does not prove: it is one country, one language, one day. Two of the eight pages could not be read, so no claim is made about them. Search results are personalised and they move — our own repeat request minutes later returned a longer tail, which we have reported rather than hidden. And a thin search result is not proof that good automation firms do not exist. It is proof that Google is not currently able to find them for you, which is a different and more fixable problem.
Q What is business process automation, in plain English?
A It is building the repetitive parts of your week once so they run without anyone remembering to do them — the quote that always follows the enquiry, the invoice that always follows the job, the five things that always happen when a new client signs. The work is mapping what you actually do, then rebuilding it as a system that runs itself.
Q Why did Google only return 17 results for a 100-result request?
A Because there are not 100 pages it considers relevant. After the eighth result it starts matching on the word “process” alone and offers things like the constitutional amendment process and the dictionary. We repeated the request and got a longer tail the second time, but the same eight relevant results — the supply of genuinely on-topic pages is what is thin, not the search.
Q Should I search “services”, “company” or just “business process automation”?
A “Services”, if you want firms who will do the work — it is the only one of the three that puts real providers in the top five. The bare term returns mostly software vendors and explainer articles, and “company” runs into Eli Lilly, Ford, Bain and two dance companies within about ten results.
Q Why does nobody publish a price for this work?
A We do not know, and we are not going to guess at a motive. What we can report is the count: across three of these studies and twenty-four readable pages, zero named a dollar price for the work. Ours are published on our pricing page, per agent and per level of human involvement, with no form in the way.
Q Is business process automation the same as RPA?
A Not quite. RPA — robotic process automation — usually means software that mimics a person clicking through screens, and it is one technique. Business process automation is the broader job: working out which steps should exist at all, then connecting the systems you already own so the steps happen on their own. Most small businesses need the second one and get sold the first.
Q Does it matter that an AI answer appears above the results now?
A Yes, and more than the rankings do. On this search Google writes its own answer first, citing six sources — five of them software vendors or a review site — and names three products before you scroll. Most people read that and stop. Being quoted in the answer is now a separate job from ranking underneath it.
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