The Near Memo Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm

Send us a Text Message.In this week’s podcast we discussed the evolution of zero-click search and Rand’s upcoming study with Spark Toro's clickstream data provider, Datos, to explore the impact of AI overviews and changes in zero-click searches across different regions. Rand argued for more stringent antitrust measures, drawing parallels between Google's practices and historical monopolies that unfairly leveraged their market power to move into new markets. His call for breaking up Googl...

Send us a Text Message.GBP Chat is Dead, Long Live WhatsApp: Google nuked both Google Business Profile Chat AND Google Business Messaging last week in a typical show of disregard for the product and the businesses supporting it. This decision comes amid concerns over increasing spam within the GBP chat service, which initially launched in 2017 with high hopes. Despite a significant initial investment, Google's inconsistent product strategy led to its downfall.Interestingly, Google is no...

Send us a Text Message.Rand helps us explore the implications of the Google Web Search leak and how it impacts our understanding of how the search ranking aglo actually worksThis week we interviewed Rand Fishkin of SparkToro on the details and importance of the Google Search API leak. In discussing the “biggest leak of the last 25 years” we look at how it provides SEO practitioners with menu of possible experiments to explorethe role of Chrome as a source for click through data and what ...

Send us a Text Message.New SAB Local Ranking Factor: Service area businesses have long been a problem on Google Maps. Spam, privacy, suspension AND ranking issues have plagued them since the beginning. Now it appears that there may be hope on the ranking issue. Historically they were ranked around the location from which they were claimed regardless of the service area. Darren Shaw of Whitespark has uncovered some indications that this is starting to change and the ranking signals are m...

Send us a Text Message.ChatGPT 4o Makes an Impression: OpenAI, not so subtly, introduced improvements to ChatGPT 4.0 just before I/O Google's event. The presentation was crisp and focused highlighting OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o enhanced speech capabilities and creative functionalities, such as summarizing audio streams shows and organizing the resultant notes into coherent outlines. Despite some features demoed on Monday being API-exclusive, the potential for ChatGPT to rival Google's search, ...

Send us a Text Message. Is Google Finally fixing LSA reviews?In a significant update for advertisers and businesses in the UK, Google has announced changes to its Local Services Ads (LSA) review system. Effective July 7, the existing LSA customer review URLs will expire and be replaced with URLs from Google Business Profiles (GBP), centralizing review management under GBP. This shift mandates businesses to have an affiliated GBP to run LSAs, integrating reviews on both platforms. Wh...