The Near Memo

Send us Fan MailGreg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal look at Apple's quietly expanding agentic Siri: iOS 27.3 opens Siri AI to every app, Square now syncs merchant data straight into Apple Maps and Siri, and Apple Maps ads now come with a human rep. They contrast Apple's permission-based approach with Meta's Muse, which Amazon blocked, and ask the question every consumer-facing site now faces: feed the AI platforms your data, or protect the direct visit? Greg tells the story of how the Yellow Pages answered that question for Google, and how it ended.In the second half: Google's decision to cut off Search for schools that turn off its AI tools, the midterm results that went against data centers and the companies building them, and why a constrained buildout may favor Google and Amazon over OpenAI and Anthropic.Next week: Myles Anderson of BrightLocal on the disconnect between consumer behavior and small business marketers.Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan MailGoogle 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 penalty.Then: Mike tests Siri's new search in iOS 27.2 and Google's Let Google Call inventory agent (it took 48 hours), and the hosts unpack Alphabet's earnings miss, where Google admitted AI Mode makes less money than the search page it's replacing.Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan MailGarrett 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 same facts when they sit on a brand's own domain.They also cover how a 250-person, fully remote team uses Claude and MCP connectors for analysis without trusting it blindly, how impact reporting got them in front of executives, and how pricing moved from per-link to a "unit of work" tied to a visibility gap.Part 1 (EP 277): https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-277-correcting-the-machine-citation-labs-on-the-six-layers-of-ai-visibility-part-1/Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan MailIs 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 channels, how a simple regression in Google Sheets forecasts bookings weeks ahead, why branded search is the best signal you've got for AI visibility, and the two GA4 settings to change today.Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

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/

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

Send us Fan MailAndrew 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 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/

Send us Fan MailThe 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 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/