Why no SMB benchmark exists — "website/SEO/content/tools" cuts across native reporting categories

Claim: The cleanest taxonomy splits marketing into:

• Resources (paid media, labor, martech/tools, agencies)
• Channels (digital vs offline; within digital, paid vs owned/earned)

"Website/SEO/content/tools" is not a native reporting category in any major survey. It cuts across:

• The OWNED/EARNED channel bucket (SEO, organic, email)
• The MARTECH resource bucket (tools)
• LABOR/AGENCY (the people who build the site and write content)

This cross-cutting nature is the root reason no clean benchmark exists — and the most important meta-finding of the whole brief.

Why this matters for Candid: The widget cannot output a "% of revenue for your website" number that is defensible against the SOURCE structure. Tiers + dollar ranges + explicit caveats are the only honest output. See Rule — Output tiers, NOT a hard percentage-of-revenue, for digital-minus-ads spend.