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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 24 September 2026 we ran three sensible phrasings of that need from a United States location and asked Google for 100 results each. The bare term returned 94 results and 72 of them were explaining what business process automation is. Add the word “services” and only 13 of 99 explain — the rest sell the work. Two domains appear in both top tens.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 What we searched 02 Ninety-four results, and 72 explain 03 Who page one actually sends you to 04 Add one word, meet different companies 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 24 September 2026 and asked for 100 results. Google returned 94 — and 72 of those 94 page titles exist to explain what it is: “what is…”, “a complete guide”, “explained”.
Add the word “services” and the page flips: 99 results, only 13 of them explainers. The rest are firms selling the work — msquare.pro second, ardem.com third, and neither of them appears in the top ten of the bare term.
Only two domains — IBM and Hyland — sit in the top ten of both searches. Of the bare term’s top eight, 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.
Across all three phrasings, only five domains make every top twenty: IBM, Hyland, Gartner, Salesforce and vegam.ai. Everything else changes with the wording.
All three searches open with an AI-written answer. On the bare term it cites twelve sources — every one a software vendor, an encyclopedia, a review site or a YouTube video, and not one a firm that would do the work for you.
Correction, 24 September 2026. An earlier version of this article, published on 23 September, reported that Google returned only 17 results for this search and that genuinely relevant results ran out after eight. We re-ran the identical request the next morning and Google returned 94, nearly all of them on topic. The original count came from a run in which our data provider reported it could not retrieve some result pages — an artifact on our side, not a fact about Google. We have rewritten the article around what does reproduce, and the method section at the end names exactly what survived and what did not.
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 ran the whole thing again on 24 September when the first run’s counts looked wrong. 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 on 24 September, not off memory.
This is the third time we have run this measurement. The ai automation agency search and the ai automation services search both found the same thing from different angles: three ways of asking one question return three nearly separate page ones, and nobody on any of them publishes a price. This search shows it most clearly.
We asked for 100 results. Google returned 94, and almost every one of them is genuinely about business process automation. So the supply of pages is not thin. What is thin, on this exact phrasing, is anyone offering to do the work rather than explain it to you.
Here is the shape of what comes back when you ask the same question three sensible ways. We counted page titles against a fixed list of explainer phrases — “what is”, “guide”, “explained”, “definition”, “examples”, “how it works”, “benefits”, “types”, “best practices”. A dull method, and one anybody can run again:
The search
Results returned
Titles that explain rather than sell
business process automation
94
72
business process automation services
99
13
business process automation company
15
Seventy-two of the first ninety-four pages exist to tell you what business process automation is. Forty-six of those titles literally begin by asking “what is”. Seventeen call themselves a guide. Google reads this phrase as a homework question, and the pages that rank are the ones that did the homework. Then you add a single word and only thirteen of ninety-nine are doing that — the rest are selling.
A word on how firm these numbers are, because we got them wrong once already. The 23 September run of this same measurement returned counts in the teens and twenties, and we published one of them. It does not reproduce. The figures above come from a clean run on 24 September with no retrieval errors reported by our data provider — and the top eight results were identical on both days, in the same order. We publish the counts we can reproduce and we flag the ones we cannot.
The top eight are worth naming, because who they are matters more than how many there are. They were the same eight, in the same order, on both days we looked.
Result
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 changes character completely. msquare.pro is second, ardem.com third, softwebsolutions seventh, cbh.com eleventh, sidgs.com thirteenth. These are firms that will do the work. Not one of them appears in the top ten of the bare term. Reddit sits at sixth.
Only two domains survive that switch. IBM and Hyland are in the top ten of both searches; everything else is a different company. One need, two sensible phrasings, and Google hands you two nearly separate industries — one that explains the idea and one that sells the labour.
“Company” — 260 a month — sits between the two. Ninety-nine results, fifteen explainers, and it surfaces bpaco.net second, vidi-corp sixth, ardem eighth and cbh ninth. Across all three searches only five domains make every top twenty: IBM, Hyland, Gartner, Salesforce and vegam.ai. Roughly three-quarters of who you meet is decided by which of three ordinary English phrasings you happened to type.
Three sensible English phrasings for one need. Three different sets of companies to call. If you searched once, read a definition and came away thinking nobody out there actually does this for a business your size, you did not find an empty market. You found the wrong word.
We tried to open all eight of the top results. 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 bare term, that answer cites twelve sources: IBM, Wikipedia, Red Hat, Atlassian, UiPath, Hyland, Gartner, Camunda, monday.com, FlowForma and two YouTube videos. Every single one is a software vendor, an encyclopedia, a review site or a video. Not one is a firm that would build the thing for you. 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.
Add “services” and the answer swaps its sources too — eight this time, and five of them are firms that do the work: ardem.com, msquare.pro, bcainc.com, ScienceSoft and Softweb, plus a Reddit thread. On “company” it cites ten, two of them YouTube videos. The AI answer is not a fixed thing sitting above the results. It is assembled from whoever ranks for the exact words you typed, which is why the words matter more than they used to.
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, and this one reproduced exactly on both days we checked. The “related searches” Google offered on the bare 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 24 September 2026 as Google organic searches from a United States location, in English, requesting the top 100 results for each of three terms, repeating a measurement first taken on 23 September. Counts of explainer titles were made by matching each page title against a fixed phrase list — what is, guide, explained, definition, examples, how it works, benefits, types, best practices, use cases — so the same count can be run again by anyone. 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, and what we got wrong. It is one country, one language, two days. Two of the eight pages could not be read, so no claim is made about them. The first version of this article, published 23 September, reported 17 results for the bare term and said relevant answers ran out after eight; that run came back with our data provider reporting it could not retrieve some result pages, and the numbers do not reproduce. We have replaced them here rather than quietly deleting them. What did hold across both days: the same top eight results in the same order, the same total absence of a published price, and the same list of related searches. Results are also personalised and they move, so treat every count above as a snapshot rather than a constant.
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 is the bare term full of “what is” articles?
A Because Google reads it as a question rather than a purchase. Of the first 94 results on 24 September 2026, 46 titles literally begin by asking what business process automation is, and 17 call themselves a guide. The related searches Google suggests alongside it are examples, tools, courses, jobs, SAP and a PDF. Add the word “services” and only 13 of 99 results are explainers — the rest are firms selling the work.
Q Should I search “services”, “company” or just “business process automation”?
A “Services”, if you want firms who will do the work. It puts msquare.pro second and ardem.com third, and neither of those appears in the top ten of the bare term. The bare term returns mostly software vendors and explainer articles — 72 of its first 94 results exist to define the thing rather than sell it. “Company” sits between the two and mixes both.
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 the bare term Google writes its own answer first, citing twelve sources — every one of them a software vendor, an encyclopedia, a review site or a video, and not one a firm that would do the work. Most people read that and stop. Being quoted in the answer is now a separate job from ranking underneath it.
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