> All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.

Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to find reliable help in our area.

Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)

>If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner.

You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.

When Google has the monopoly on marketing of cleaning companies in your area, from a consumer standpoint it’s effectively the same as if one cleaning company has the local monopoly. The way to win is to pay Google a bigger cut than your competitors, so Google just takes the incumbency premium as its marketing fee instead of the cleaning company.