The Near Memo

Send us Fan Mail

Google deletes just under 2% of new reviews within a week, and a new study of nearly five million reviews shows it's spikes, not content, that set it off. Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal walk through the Reviewflowz and Cartelis findings, explain why the study only sees Google's second pass, and share what to do when your profile gets hit with the 30-day review posting penalty.

Then: Mike tests Siri's new search in iOS 27.2 and Google's Let Google Call inventory agent (it took 48 hours), and the hosts unpack Alphabet's earnings miss, where Google admitted AI Mode makes less money than the search page it's replacing.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Garrett French, Valerie Cecil and James Wirth of Citation Labs rejoin Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2. After laying out the six layers of AI visibility in Part 1, they get into how an agency runs against that model: comparison content on satellite sites, narrow "query fan-out placements" that fill what AI answers are missing, and why models pass over the same facts when they sit on a brand's own domain.

They also cover how a 250-person, fully remote team uses Claude and MCP connectors for analysis without trusting it blindly, how impact reporting got them in front of executives, and how pricing moved from per-link to a "unit of work" tied to a visibility gap.

Part 1 (EP 277): https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-277-correcting-the-machine-citation-labs-on-the-six-layers-of-ai-visibility-part-1/

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Is attribution dead? Not quite, says Dana DiTomaso of Kick Point, but it isn't healthy, and it was always a little fictional. Universal Analytics hid the gaps. GA4 and privacy law put them in plain sight.

Dana joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to explain how much of your traffic you can really track, why a purchase that starts in ChatGPT can show up as four different channels, how a simple regression in Google Sheets forecasts bookings weeks ahead, why branded search is the best signal you've got for AI visibility, and the two GA4 settings to change today.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

AI answers get brands wrong all the time: old pricing, expired offers, comparisons nobody updated. Garrett French, James Wirth and Valerie Cecil of Citation Labs explain how they find where a brand drops out of an AI answer and what they do to fix it.

James walks through the six layers the team audits (returned, retrieved, cited, mentioned, recommended, and framing), Garrett explains how they build 50–300 word prompts from customer-service logs and sales pages, and Valerie covers the page-retrieval patterns that show up before citations do. Greg and Mike push on what this means for local, where traffic is falling but calls mostly aren't.

This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 will cover the agency side: the skills, tools and pricing behind this work.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide) and Mark Kabana (Places Scout, now part of Yext) rejoin Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2 of our conversation. We get into how agencies are turning "AI visibility" into a product, why clients can't tell what it's worth, and what a Local SEO Guide × Local Falcon study found about where ChatGPT gets its local answers — no Google reviews at all, and a review-count plateau at around 200.

Then the uncomfortable part: a 100-location franchise with rankings up 20–30% and calls down 40%, a storage search result that's 43% ads across five screens, the PI firm that quit Google ads and lost its leads, and why "ask every lead how they found you" is still the most honest AI metric there is.

Part 1 (EP 274): https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-274-why-position-one-doesnt-exist-in-local-anymore-brighton-seo-recap/

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide) and Mark Kabana (founder of Places Scout, now VP of Data Innovation at Yext) join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal fresh off Brighton SEO San Diego for an open-agenda conversation: what the conference floor actually said about local's place in the industry, why a single search rank may already be a dead concept, and how permissioned, agentic browsing is quietly showing up inside everyday consumer AI tools.

Topics include: why AI vendors already outnumber local vendors on conference expo floors, a Near Media survey finding that most internet use is tied to real-world local intent, why AI visibility still hasn't correlated with direct traffic in Andrew's own client data, Mark Kabana's "no more position one" argument for why AI ranking is becoming a distribution across conversational paths rather than a single number, and two live examples — one from ChatGPT, one from Claude — of AI assistants asking permission to browse the web mid-conversation.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal break down four stories shaping local search and AI discovery. First, a preview of new consumer-journey research Near Media ran for Lastmile Retail (heading to Brighton SEO): search and AI dominate discovery, but human referral has barely moved in a decade — and AI usage collapses at the moment of purchase.

Then the EU's DMA decision: a €460M fine for Google search self-preferencing (part of a combined €890M penalty), a 60-day cease-and-desist, and the Commission's rejection of the "the local pack is just search" defense. Mike audits Google's hotel results in Berlin vs. the US and finds ~40% of the mobile SERP is ads on both sides of the Atlantic.

Finally, Apple's foldable iPhone Duo event — Siri's 2.5-billion-a-day distribution story, wearables as AI inputs, the $2,000 Duo, and whether Apple's privacy moat can hold.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

The path to a local purchase used to be a straight line. It isn't anymore. Damian Rollison, Senior Director of Market Insights at SOCi, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to unpack SOCi's third annual consumer study and the idea at its center: the verification loop. Consumers now bounce among search, social, AI, and review sites — corroborating a choice before they act — and this year AI posted the single biggest behavior jump the survey has ever recorded.

We get into the numbers that matter for local marketers: AI usage for local research leaping from 9% to 52% year over year, the 81% of consumers who verify an AI recommendation before acting, why search *gained* ground even as AI exploded, and how the "where do you start" question breaks down very differently across restaurants, financial services, healthcare, property, and fuel & auto. Plus the practitioner reality check — habitual vs. one-time local behavior, the blind spot in last-click attribution, and the short list of surfaces that actually move AI visibility.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal go guest-free this week to connect three stories that are really one story. Apple has launched ads in Apple Maps — contextual, largely on-device, and with no way to turn them off — which quietly undercuts the "you're not the product" brand Apple spent years building. Google is expanding what it charges for: starting October 1, some missed Local Services Ads calls become billable leads, and LSAs have moved into Google's main ad organization as ad real estate keeps eating the results page.

Then there's Meta's roughly $18 billion youth-safety settlement with state attorneys general — a number the hosts argue is far smaller than it looks once you read the contingencies and spread it over ten years. Along the way: why the traffic "stolen by AI" is really going to ads, why even ad-skeptics now click rich local ad units, and why the settlement's shared discovery pool may matter more than the dollar figure.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Greg Sterling walks Mike Blumenthal through original Near Media user research — the "Choosing a Lawyer" study of the Atlanta personal-injury market, first presented at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit in Nashville. Using a user-testing video, a 350-person survey, and head-to-head ad-creative testing, the episode shows how prior brand awareness quietly steers online behavior: which result gets the click, which firm gets the benefit of the doubt, and who ultimately gets hired.

The throughline: brand is a pre-existing advantage that works before anyone compares options. Google is still the default first stop (fewer than 2% start with AI), reviews are the single biggest factor when brand is absent, and TV — not digital — builds most of the awareness in legal. Strong creative can close a 20-point awareness gap, but when forced to pick one, people still revert to the firm they already know. Brand and performance marketing aren't rivals; they compound.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Four agency operators join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to close out the Near Memo brand-building series: Paula French (Search Influence), Joy Hawkins (Sterling Sky), Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide), and Matt McGee (SEO Savvy Agent). It's a tactics-first conversation about what "brand" means for a local business now that AI Overviews, LSAs, and ads have squeezed organic off the first screen.

The panel gets specific: a startup's AI visibility jumping ~400% in a week off two press mentions, why third-party mentions now outweigh review count in AI answers, local listings as a cheap brand-mention engine, the reusable "fast expert" bio that scripts what LLMs say about you, "competitor jiu-jitsu" content, and why YouTube is both a top lead source and the most AI-proof play you can make. It closes on a warning: scaled content and scaled link building are what's getting penalized this year — foundational marketing is what's rewarded.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

We're on vacation this week, so we're re-running one of our favorite April conversations. It still speaks to our current series on brand in local, and a live panel on local digital brand strategy follows next week.

Cyrus Shepard (founder of Zyppy) joins David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal to unpack what the Google antitrust trial, the leaked patents, and the API leak revealed about how Google really ranks: user click data. They walk through the three signals that matter — clicks, long clicks, and the "last longest click" — why brand search keeps correlating with rankings, and what AI Overviews are doing to the click ecosystem, including how local businesses can still earn (and satisfy) the click.

Practical throughout: consolidating reviews and booking onto owned surfaces, using Search Console's branded-query filter as an AI-Overviews scorecard, and why a too-clickable title tag quietly costs you traffic.

Be sure to listen to our series on branding.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Part 3 of the Near Memo brand-building series brings brand down to earth in professional services — specifically legal, where a client hires once in a lifetime, can't judge quality, and every ad on the screen looks identical. Gyi Tsakalakis, co-founder of AttorneySync, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to talk about what actually moves the needle for personal-injury and other high-stakes firms.

The throughline: you can't outspend a bad intake experience. Gyi makes the case for treating intake and even rejections as review-generation surfaces, signing prospects up before you qualify them, and manufacturing brand demand offline that you route back through Google Business Profiles. They close on AI — still a top-of-funnel research tool for most local consumers, while Google (and the GBP data ChatGPT scrapes) remains the last click.

Watch Part 1 (John Jantsch) and Part 2 (Cyrus Shepard) for the general and technical sides of local brand.

Links:

- AttorneySync: https://www.attorneysync.com/

- EP 265 — Decoding Local Branding with John Jantsch: https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-265-decoding-local-branding-with-john-jantsch/

- EP 266 — Cyrus Shepard: What Local Brand Actually Means to Google and AI: https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-266-cyrus-shepard-what-local-brand-actually-means-to-google-and-ai/

- Michigan Auto Law "3K for Free": https://www.google.com/search?q=3k4Free

- Kruger & Hodges, The Hometown Lawyers: https://thehometownlawyers.com/

- Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit: https://lunchhourlegalmarketing.com/

- Google ATLAS study: https://ai.google/static/documents/GoogleATLASv1.pdf

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2 of the Near Memo brand-building series — this time on the technical side: how Google and AI systems actually model a brand, and what a local business can do about it.

To Google, a brand isn't a feeling. It's an entity — an entry in a database, connected to your website, your Business Profile, and you. Cyrus walks through what strengthens those connections, why branded search volume is still the single best lever in SEO, and why the decade-old fundamentals came roaring back the moment AI systems started needing the same entity signals local search always needed.

We also get into why ranking first no longer guarantees you're recommended, why Google stopped wanting content and started wanting evidence, whether llms.txt is worth your time (Cyrus says no), and the surprisingly low review threshold where a local flywheel starts turning.

Plus: the cross-business referral tactic neither host had heard proposed before, and a plan involving an unreasonable number of pizzas.

▶️ Be sure to listem to Part 1 of this series, with John Jantsch on small business brand building

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

What separates a commodity local provider from a business that easily commands premium pricing? In this kickoff to our four-part brand series, Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal are joined by marketing pioneer John Jantsch.
John details how small businesses can harness real customer language using clinet interviews, reviews and LLMs to establish distinctiveness, why top-down strategic leadership is required to effectively implement AI, and how to navigate the emerging threat of "agentic flattening" as AI agents and structured protocols begin to alter direct website interactions. Streamline your marketing operations from strategy to final customer touchpoint.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Are traditional websites dying, or are they just changing shapes? Hosts Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal catch up with serial entrepreneur and Mozilla VP of Product Raj Singh to discuss how AI search friction is changing the local web. Learn why small businesses must lean into "trust artifacts," how APIs and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) will surface local businesses to AI agents, and why human-in-the-loop authenticity is your best defense against algorithmic spam.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Local SEO strategy often gets stuck playing a quantitative numbers game with review counts and velocity benchmarks. But what happens when you treat the collective text of your market's customer reviews as an ongoing, free focus group? This week, Celeste Gonzalez joins us to show how tools like Apify and Natural Language Processing (NLP) allow local agencies to scrape hidden market trends from Reddit, TikTok, and competitor Google Maps profiles. We break down exactly how to extract actionable copywriting blueprints from customer pain points, avoid confirmation biases, and keep your business answers consistent for modern AI search engines.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

What happens when federal regulators take on fake reviews and predatory AI applications? This week on NearMemo, Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal host Michael Atleson, former Senior Attorney at the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices (now with DLA Piper). Michael walks us through the internal strategy behind the landmark Consumer Review Rule, the nuances of investigating multi-million dollar local business listing fraud, and how lawyers are using novel product liability theories to bypass Section 230 immunity. We also dive into the political shifts impacting AI enforcement, state-level legislation targeting companion bots, and the future of tech regulation in an era of congressional gridlock.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Are your local search frameworks ready for a probabilistic, AI-driven Map interface? This week, Greg, Mike, and local search practitioner Craig Burton map out the massive influx of automated algorithmic categorization structures rolling across Google Maps globally. From "Trending This Week" hooks to deep "Curated with Gemini" vertical subcategories, Google is testing dynamic, phone-facing carousels that ignore standard business profile naming and keyword densities. The team discusses the mechanics of how Google tracks localized user interactions, reviews, citations, and even point-of-sale data to create these lists, establishing a new competitive framework called "Evidence Optimization

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

How do you build brand permanence in a local market when web attribution metrics are fading? This week, we dive into Part 2 of our post-Google I/O masterclass with Cindy Krum, Krystal Taing, and Greg Gifford. The panel shifts completely from macro trends to hands-on execution strategy. We explore why search traffic is splitting across social apps and niche forums, how businesses can produce narrative-driven video assets that anchor themselves in AI overviews, and the structural limitations of using automated AI tools to write generic content. Plus, discover an exceptional, compliant framework for optimizing customer review acquisitions that subtly prompts consumers to write comprehensive, high-value keyword reviews without violating platform terms.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/