HeyJaredThe 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.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest episodes
Rankings Up, Calls Down: What AI Visibility Is Really Worth to Local Businesses. (opens the original)
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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...
Why "Position One" Doesn't Exist in Local Anymore (Brighton SEO Recap) (opens the original)
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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...
The Verification Loop: How People *Really* Find Local Businesses Now (SOCi's Damian Rollison) (opens the original)
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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...
The Path of Enshittification: Apple Ads, Google's Toll Booth, and Meta's $18B Escape Hatch (opens the original)
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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...
The Hidden Advantage: How Brand Awareness Decides the Click in Legal Search (opens the original)
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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 hi...
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