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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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