Platform Dependence: When Marketplaces and Networks Change the Rules

How dependent is your sales on a single platform?

Monday morning, inquiries have dropped to a third. The website is running, the team is there, nothing has changed. Except that the marketplace that brought in half of all orders has changed its sorting. Or ads suddenly cost twice as much. Or the network where the owner has posted for years hardly shows posts with links anymore.

Many businesses that built their sales on platforms have had such experiences: online marketplaces, industry portals, search engines, ad networks, social networks, review and comparison sites. These platforms bring reach that a small business could never achieve alone. But they also set the rules, and they can change them at any time. The guiding question of this article is therefore: how does a business measure and reduce its dependence on platforms without giving up their reach? To answer it, we first look at what happens when rules change and what rights businesses have toward platforms, then distinguish rented land from owned land, and finally show how you measure and reduce dependence and what AI search changes about it.

If you only reach your customers through a platform, you don't have customers, you have a landlord.

What happens when a platform changes its rules?

A well-studied example is Apple's App Tracking Transparency, ATT for short. Since April 25, 2021, iPhones have asked users whether apps may track their behavior across other apps and websites. According to the studies cited, the vast majority declined. For advertisers on platforms such as Meta, meaning Facebook and Instagram, this made it harder to target ads and to attribute sales to an ad.

Aridor, Che, Hollenbeck, Kaiser, and McCarthy (2026) measured the consequences for online retailers. They analyzed advertising data from 1,221 companies and revenue data from 773 companies. For Meta campaigns optimized for purchases outside the platform, the click-through rate fell by around 37 percent compared with campaigns that were not affected. Retailers shifted budget to Google, which was less affected. But this did not offset the revenue loss of highly dependent retailers.

The range is wide because the authors deliberately use several methods and do not claim a single figure. Method A is an estimation approach for settings where all firms are affected to different degrees; method B is a simple before-and-after comparison of two groups. According to their analysis, the losses were borne mainly by smaller retailers. The study concerns online retailers selling to consumers. But the lesson applies to every business: a decision a platform operator makes for its own reasons can shake a business model built on it within months.

What rights do businesses have toward platforms?

Business users are not entirely unprotected. Since July 12, 2020, the EU regulation on fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services, known as the P2B Regulation, has applied. It covers platforms through which businesses offer their goods or services, such as marketplaces, app stores, or comparison sites, and partly search engines.

In practice, this is not observed everywhere. A 2023 European Commission review found that only around half of the intermediation services examined stated that they offer the 15-day notice period. Very large platforms are additionally subject to rules under the Digital Markets Act. Estrin, Meyer, and Kretschmer (2025) describe how European competition policy increasingly addresses the governance of platforms, the portability of data, and the interoperability of systems. These rights help in a dispute. But they do not change the fact that a platform operator may in principle change its terms and that rankings and ad prices shift.

Rented land and owned land: which channels really belong to you?

To assess your own dependence, I sort sales channels into two groups. Rented land consists of channels where someone else sets the rules and controls the customer relationship. Owned land consists of channels where you decide whom you reach, when, and how.

Your own website is not entirely independent, since many visitors come via search engines. But the content and addresses belong to you. The checklist A website that brings inquiries describes how to build your website so it generates leads. Specialized service providers can handle the implementation, for example quik-services, a provider of websites, SEO, and lead generation and a business partner of Owners Council.

How do you measure your platform dependence?

Most owners estimate their dependence from gut feeling. It becomes more precise if you record for one quarter where every inquiry and every order came from. The guide Measuring marketing success describes how to capture the source properly.

In this example, almost half of all orders come through a single portal. If it changes its fees or its sorting, the business is hit immediately. There is no fixed threshold at which dependence becomes dangerous. As a rule of thumb, I consider it risky when more than a third of orders come through a single channel you do not control. How quickly you could create a replacement also matters.

How do you reduce dependence without giving up reach?

Leaving a platform is rarely the right answer. The reach is real, and competitors would fill the gap. A gradual restructuring in which contacts migrate from rented land to owned land works better.

1. Put every contact into your CRM

   Record every customer who comes through a platform in your own CRM, as far as the platform's terms and data protection law allow.

2. Stay in direct contact after the order

   Give customers a reason to contact you directly: maintenance reminders, a named contact with a phone number, an invitation to the newsletter with consent.

3. Use several platforms in parallel

   Research calls this multihoming. Loh and Elsas-Nicolle (2026) found among game developers that mainly smaller, independent providers also joined a new platform and afterward tied themselves less to the old operator's campaigns.

4. Build your own visibility

   Invest a fixed share of your marketing budget in content, your website, and search engine optimization that stay with you even when ads get more expensive.

5. Write an emergency plan

   Record what you will do if your most important platform channel fails tomorrow: which customers you contact directly and which channel steps in.

Moving to owned land takes time. A newsletter needs months to build a readership, a website with good content often a year before it is found. The guide B2B newsletters describes how a newsletter prepares conversations. What counts for search engine visibility in 2026 is covered in SEO for SMEs.

What does AI search change about dependence?

A new form of dependence is emerging through search engines and assistants that answer questions directly with AI-generated responses. When users get the answer without visiting a website, control shifts even further toward the platform operator. The article Visible in AI answers explains what this changes for company websites and how to appear in such answers.

For local businesses, the business profile in map search remains one of the most important rented-land channels. It is free and often brings inquiries with high purchase intent. The guide Google Business Profile describes how to maintain it. Here too: whoever calls should end up in your own CRM afterward.

The next step

The first step is clarity. Many businesses are more dependent than they think, and some less than they fear.

• For the last three months, list which channel each order came from and calculate the shares.
• Classify each channel as rented land or owned land.
• Check whether the contact details of all customers who came through platforms are in your own CRM.
• Read the current terms of your most important platform: how are changes announced, what is the ranking based on, how can you complain?
• Decide on one measure to bring customers into a channel of your own after their first order.
• Write a half-page emergency plan for the failure of your most important platform channel.

What follows from this? Platforms are not the problem; they bring reach a small business would not have on its own. It becomes risky when a large share of orders comes through a channel you do not control and customers do not end up in a channel of your own afterwards. If you know your channel shares and bring customers into your own CRM after the first order, you use rented land without depending on it.