If your business lives or dies by aggregators and pay-per-lead platforms, it’s not really your business.

It’s theirs.

You’re just renting demand at a premium.

Aggregators and PPL platforms exist for one reason, to own customer intent. They dominate search, intercept leads at the point of need, and sell that intent back to you. You’re buying access to your own market. It’s a clever business model, for them. For you, it’s a slow erosion of brand, margin, and control.

When 50%, 70%, or 100% of your pipeline comes from aggregators, you’re effectively outsourcing your marketing strategy. You stop learning how to generate demand, test creative, build loyalty, or measure true CAC. You’re a reseller of someone else’s traffic.

And it’s devastating for your brand.
Because aggregators flatten every business into the same beige box.
They strip away your differentiation, turn every customer interaction into a price comparison, and erase all memory of who actually delivered the service. You become just another logo in a list, another discount in the inbox.

That’s how you end up trapped in a race to the bottom.
You can’t outspend the aggregator. You can’t outbid your competitors without killing your margin. And you can’t raise prices, because the customer has no idea why you’re worth more, they only know you as “Option 3” on a list.

I've seen HVAC companies sell for 4x EBITDA because 80% of leads came from Angie's List. The same business with 80% organic traffic? That's 8-10x

Now, this isn’t to say you should avoid these channels completely. They have their place. They’re efficient for testing markets, ramping up a new location, or balancing seasonality. But if they make up more than 30% of your total lead volume, you’ve built dependency, not a brand.

The healthiest companies treat aggregator and PPL leads like a bridge, not a foundation. They invest that short-term volume into long-term assets, SEO, first-party data, brand marketing, CRM, and repeat customers.

Owning your brand means owning your demand.
Owning your demand means controlling your destiny.

Quick leads might fill your week.
Owned channels build your enterprise value.