If Australians switch off the algorithm, who finds your business?

On Tuesday the Prime Minister and Communications Minister Anika Wells released draft laws for a new Digital Duty of Care. Most of it is about protecting young people from harmful content. One part, branded “My Feed, My Way”, goes after the feed itself. Platforms would have to send every new and existing user a notification offering a choice over their default feed. Opt in, and you keep the personalised recommendations. Opt out, and you only see posts from friends and accounts you actually follow.

It covers users 16 and over, the eSafety Commissioner would enforce it, and a platform that ignores the duty of care faces penalties of up to $109.2 million, according to the Prime Minister’s release.

It is a draft, out for targeted consultation, with legislation to be introduced to Parliament this year. So nothing changes on Monday. The business reaction was quick all the same. As SmartCompany reports, social media consultant Alisha Marfatia, director of The Social Impact, expects new businesses to be hit hardest, because the algorithm is what currently lets an account with a handful of followers reach a huge audience. ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar pointed out that many small businesses, especially those starting out, rely on social platforms to get established.

They are right, and it is worth being precise about why, because the precise version tells you what to do about it.

Your followers are not the ones at risk

A follow-only feed does not hide you from people who follow you. If anything, it shows you to them more reliably, because you are no longer competing with a stranger’s dog video for the same slot. (The dog videos will be fine. They always are.)

What the algorithm actually does for a business account is show your post to people who have never heard of you. That is the one job it does that nothing else on the platform does. Switch it off, and your post reaches your followers and stops there.

So here is the honest split. Social media does two jobs for most small businesses. It keeps you in front of people who already know you, and it introduces you to people who do not. The opt-out leaves the first job alone. It is the second one that goes quieter, one user at a time, for everyone who takes the option.

How much quieter? Nobody knows yet

This is the part worth keeping in proportion. Nobody knows how many people will opt out. Defaults are powerful, and plenty of people will tap whichever button makes the notification go away fastest. Marfatia also notes that dedicated Discovery and For You pages could still help people find new business accounts to follow, and that a feed built around accounts people actively follow could suit older, more established businesses.

So this is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to find out how exposed you are, which you can do this week without waiting for Parliament.

The ten-minute exposure check

Take your last twenty new customers or enquiries and sort them into two piles.

People who found you. They had never heard of you, and something put you in front of them: a post that turned up in their feed, a Google search, a map listing, a review site, an AI assistant’s recommendation.

People who already knew you. Repeat customers, referrals, people who walked past the shop, followers who finally booked.

Now look inside the first pile. If most of it came from social reach, meaning strangers who saw a post they never asked to see, that is your exposure to this change. If it came from search, maps and word of mouth, this news is mostly background noise for you.

If you cannot tell where your last twenty enquiries came from, that is the more urgent finding, and it has nothing to do with the government. (It is also fixable with one “how did you hear about us?” field on your enquiry form.)

Where discovery goes when the feed stops doing it

The algorithm finds you customers by interrupting them. The alternative is being there when customers go looking, and no feed setting touches those channels.

• Search and maps. Someone typing “physio Northcote” is already looking to book. For a local business, your Google listing often sells more than your website, and it is the thing most people set once and forget.
• Reviews. They are what a stranger checks before trusting you, and they feed straight into search and maps. They are also the cheapest marketing most businesses are not doing.
• AI answers. A growing share of “who should I use for this?” questions now go to ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews, and those answers come from what is published about you, not from your follower count.

To be clear, none of these are channels you own. Google changes its rules too. But they are a different kind of rented: the customer is asking a question and you are trying to be the answer, rather than hoping a feed decides to show you to someone who was not asking. Spreading discovery across a few of them is the point. One channel is a dependency. Three is a strategy.

And every one of them ends in the same place, your website and your enquiry form. More discovery does not help much if the enquiry lands on a slow page and then waits for a reply, because the first five minutes decide the sale, and most businesses take 42 hours.

Use the algorithm while it still works for you

Here is the timely bit. For now, the algorithm is still handing your posts to strangers. These draft laws make a follow worth more than it was last week, because in a follow-only feed, a follow is a subscription. Someone who follows you keeps seeing you whichever button they press.

So treat the next few months of reach as a window. When a post reaches people who do not follow you yet, give them a reason to follow, and a better reason to get onto a list you actually hold, like email or SMS. We made the broader rent-versus-own argument in July, when Meta briefly lined up public Instagram photos for its image AI. This is the same lesson, with a consultation period attached.

The func.digital take

If your new customers mostly arrive because a platform decided to show you to them, a law that lets people switch that off deserves ten minutes of your attention now, rather than a quiet quarter later. The answer is not quitting social. It is making sure the people who go looking can find you, and that your site turns them into an enquiry when they do.

That is exactly what we look at in a free digital systems audit: where your enquiries really come from, how findable you are when someone searches, and whether your site catches what those channels send it. No jargon, no hard sell, just a plain read on how much of your pipeline depends on someone else’s feed.