And if your entire business strategy is to have a website and depend on Google search results to drive traffic, you are doing it wrong as many news organizations like Buzzfeed found out.
I do occasional self promotion and “thought leadership” bullshit to put my name out there. I go to where the eyeballs are - LinkedIn. It’s far more likely that the people I want to reach are on LinkedIn than my blog that I don’t have a link to anywhere. I just use it as a publicly accessible place to workshop my writing and thoughts before I post them to LinkedIn.
And I will play the world’s smallest fiddle for advertisers even then, if you have a product to sale to consumers, you are probably better off using Amazon or a Meta app to advertised. It’s better targeting and ads are less likely to be blocked.
In 1870, if you wanted to get from Chicago to San Francisco, it would be facetious to claim that Union Pacific did not have a monopoly on that route. No, Union Pacific wasn't forcing you to board their train. Just like you can Ctrl+T over to duckduckgo.com/ or bing.com/ or kagi.com/ in seconds, and never go back to Google. You could avoid the railroad monopoly by 'just' riding a horse, or walking, or taking a boat down the Mississippi and launching a sailing expedition around Cape Horn. That's still a monopoly.