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...

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 sam...

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 ch...

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 expla...

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 —...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 squee...

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...

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...

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 Prof...

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 strat...

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...

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...

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 mult...

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 t...

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...

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 tha...

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 hig...

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...

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...

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...