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The Near Memo: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm
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.
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The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 2 weeks ago50 min
Beyond the Link: How Citation Labs Rebuilt Its Agency for AI Visibility (Part 2)
Send us Fan Mail Garrett 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 Cla...
- 3 weeks ago46 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...
- 4 weeks ago56 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 c...
- Sep 24, 202653 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 fran...
- Sep 18, 202637 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 alre...
- Sep 10, 202641 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-desis...
- Sep 2, 202649 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 t...
- Aug 28, 202637 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...
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About The Near Memo
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.
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