The Near Memo

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/

Send us Fan Mail The rules of user discovery are undergoing a massive rewrite. This week, the Near Media roundtable features top search minds Cindy Krum, Krystal Taing, and Greg Gifford to analyze the long-term strategic impacts of Google I/O and Google Marketing Live. The panel maps out exactly how Google plans to transform its core search application into a fully transaction-based ecosystem that handles everything from discovering local venues to completing checkouts natively inside the search framework. Get an inside look at the technical mechanics behind Google’s AI infrastructure, the roll-out of custom Google Spark agents, and the game-changing conversational interface of Ask Maps. We explore how these tools handle multi-variable, highly contextual natural language queries that used to break traditional local search algorithms. Tune in to explore why data privacy boundaries are fading into predictive personalization, how businesses can remain visible when traditional website traffic metrics shift, and where the future of e-commerce stands as tech platforms push for direct digital checkouts. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail In this Duda webinar, Darren Shaw and Mike Blumenthal explore the paradigm shift occurring in local search as Google increasingly incorporates generative AI into Google Business Profiles and Google Maps. Through new features like "Know Before You Go" and the conversational "Ask Maps," local discovery is transitioning from a deterministic ranking model to a highly personalized, context-aware ecosystem. Blumenthal demonstrates how to leverage Ask Maps for deep competitive analysis to pinpoint market weaknesses and operational gaps. The speakers emphasize that while traditional SEO remains foundational "table stakes," long-term visibility in the AI era requires businesses to cultivate a deeply revered brand through comprehensive website data, widespread consumer sentiment, community engagement, and niche specialization. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail Google just revealed the future of Search at Google I/O and Google Marketing Live — and it’s far more personal, predictive, and invasive than most people realize. In this episode of Near Memo, Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling break down: A massive fake Google Business Profile fraud case involving 15,000 fake listings and $79 million in alleged fraud How Google already infers your income, politics, preferences, and buying habits — even WITHOUT opting into “Personal Intelligence” The rise of AI-native advertising formats Why AI Mode may fundamentally reshape search, local discovery, Google Maps, and online commerce How Google’s ecosystem strategy could create unprecedented user lock-in They also discuss: AI-powered personalization Google’s “good enough” AI strategy AI agents and transactional search Why antitrust rulings may have changed nothing The future of ads inside AI search experiences Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail In Part 2 of Near Media’s conversation with Garrett Sussman, the discussion shifts from AI personalization theory to the real-world impact on local search, SEO, reviews, attribution, and marketing strategy. Garrett joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to explore how Google’s growing use of behavioral data, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, reviews, and AI Mode could fundamentally reshape local discovery. The group discusses: AI-driven local recommendations Why direct mail showed up in AI Mode The future of Google Business Profiles How marketers should rethink SEO measurement Persona-based AI testing Reviews and reputation in AI search Whether AI will ultimately simplify or complicate marketing This episode is both a warning and a roadmap for marketers navigating the shift from traditional search to the coming personalized AI-driven discovery. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail Is Google getting too personal? In this episode of the Near Memo, Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal are joined by Garrett Sussman (iPullRank) to discuss his provocative 12-month study on AI personalization. We dive deep into how Google’s "AI Mode" uses your Gmail, Photos, and Calendar to tailor results—and why "unopened emails" might be influencing what you see next. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/