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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.

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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/

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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.

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