The Near Memo

Send us Fan MailAI 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/

Andrew Shotland, founder and CEO of Local SEO Guide, returns to unpack the real value of AI visibility for local businesses. The conversation explores how agencies package AI discovery, where ChatGPT gets local recommendations, why detailed reviews and FAQs matter, and what happens when rankings rise but calls fall. Also covered: ad-heavy search results, brand building, and the most trustworthy way to track AI-driven leads.

Andrew Shotland, founder of Local SEO Guide, and Mark Kabana, Places Scout founder and Yext data innovation executive, recap Brighton SEO’s biggest local search debates. They explore why AI dominates conference floors, how conversational search is reshaping visibility, and why “position one” may be disappearing. The discussion also features live examples of ChatGPT and Claude requesting permission to browse the web.

Send us Fan MailGreg 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/

Damian Rollison, SOCi’s Senior Director of Market Insights, explores how local discovery is changing. They unpack AI’s surge in local research, the rise of the verification loop across search, social, reviews, and maps, and why Google no longer stands alone. The conversation also covers category-specific starting points, affluent millennials’ AI adoption, habitual versus urgent searches, and the surfaces that shape AI visibility.

Send us Fan MailGreg 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 MailGreg 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 MailFour 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/

Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy and a respected SEO researcher, joins a timely conversation about Google’s reliance on click data. They explore clicks, long clicks, task completion, and why brand searches correlate with rankings. The discussion also examines AI Overviews, declining publisher traffic, local businesses keeping journeys on owned surfaces, and ways to earn meaningful clicks without manipulation.

Send us Fan MailPart 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.pdfSubscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/