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The Near Memo

The Near Memo

Hosted by Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm

MarketingEntrepreneurshipNews
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Episodes

282

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Exploring the big stories for the week at the intersection of local business & marketing across the spectrum of search, social and commerce. With Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm.

Listen to episodes

60 recent
October 15, 2026Episode 2946 min

Track What You Can, Let Go of the Rest: Dana DiTomaso on Attribution After GA4

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 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/

October 8, 2026Episode 3856 min

Correcting the Machine: Citation Labs on the Six Layers of AI Visibility (Part 1)

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 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/

September 24, 2026Episode 3653 min

Rankings Up, Calls Down: What AI Visibility Is Really Worth to Local Businesses.

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 — 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/

September 18, 2026Episode 3537 min

Why "Position One" Doesn't Exist in Local Anymore (Brighton SEO Recap)

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 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/

September 10, 2026Episode 3441 min

Fragmented Discovery, Google's €460M DMA Fine, and Apple's Distribution Bet

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 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/

September 2, 2026Episode 3349 min

The Verification Loop: How People *Really* Find Local Businesses Now (SOCi's Damian Rollison)

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 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/

August 28, 2026Episode 3237 min

The Path of Enshittification: Apple Ads, Google's Toll Booth, and Meta's $18B Escape Hatch

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 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/

August 20, 2026Episode 3137 min

The Hidden Advantage: How Brand Awareness Decides the Click in Legal Search

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 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/

August 14, 2026Episode 3055 min

Tactics for Building a Local Brand in the Age of AI Search — An Agency Panel

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 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/

August 7, 2026Episode 2929 min

AI Overviews, Brand Search & Local SEO: Cyrus Shepard on Earning the Click - from the archives

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

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