Post view counts are back inside Google Business Profile this month, and the local marketing world called it a win. It is not much of one. Google restored the safe number, the one that goes up when nothing happens, while post button clicks, the action that actually sits next to
Your AI visibility tool hands you one number every month, averaged across six engines, and that number is the problem. For most local and service businesses, the correct move is to weight ruthlessly toward Google's AI layer first, ChatGPT second, and drop Perplexity to a monitor-only footnote
Google announced a new checkbox for Performance Max on September 9 and the trade coverage treated it like a free Q4 upgrade for anyone with a physical location. Turn it on, get more nearby buyers, done. My position is the opposite for most local businesses reading this: if you cannot
You opened Google Business Profile Performance on Monday and saw people searching "emergency dentist near me" and "same day crown." You opened Search Console for the same week and saw your own practice name, over and over, plus a page about teeth whitening you forgot you
Google switched the AI performance report on in Search Console for every site in the world on August 31, 2026, and the first thing most business owners did was screenshot the impression count. It is a satisfying number. For a business that sells appointments instead of ad space, it is
A customer forwards you a screenshot. They asked ChatGPT about your clinic, and the answer named the doctor who sold the practice years ago, sitting right next to a service you no longer offer. You run the same prompt yourself and get a slightly different wrong answer. Your first instinct
Somebody demoed a tool in March. You signed up, two people used it for a month, and now it sits on the company card next to a subscription nobody can explain. When your bookkeeper asks what the AI spend bought you this quarter, the honest answer is a shrug. That
Nothing is disapproved. The account is active, billing works, every campaign says Eligible, and your impressions are down by half. The pages ranking for this problem call it a traffic-quality or account-hygiene issue you fix with trust signals, steady spend, and finished verification. My position is different: for
Every service business has an hour it does not talk about. Lunch, a two-man crew on a roof, one person at the front desk running a card payment while the phone rings out. Starting October 1, 2026, that hour has a line item. Google is changing how Local Services
Ask ChatGPT for the best walking boots for wide feet and it may name your brand out loud. Then it links Outdoor Gear Lab. The advice sitting on page one for this problem says that gap is entirely off-page, that your own site barely counts anymore, and that the
You have been told to "do AEO". A vendor sent a deck and a peer quoted a stat. The advice at the top of Google reads the same on every page: write in questions and answers, answer in the first 40 to 60 words, add FAQ schema, publish
Your agency answered the wrong question. You asked whether blogging still works, they sent back a traffic chart, and that chart cannot tell you what to do on Monday, because in 2026 the answer stopped being a percentage and turned into a category. Blogging still works in cybersecurity and marketing
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What I do
Strategy and execution for businesses that want to stay visible while search gets rebuilt around AI.
Get your business named in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Learn more →Build a content plan that earns visibility in AI and traditional search.
Learn more →Map pack rankings, citations, and local authority for service businesses.
Learn more →Paid search campaigns built to convert, not just get clicks.
Learn more →Bring AI into your operations to cut busywork and scale what is working.
Learn more →30 minutes. No pitch. An honest look at where you stand in AI search and what to do about it.
Book a free call17 years in content and 15 in SEO, plus a decade of Google Ads and paid campaigns across Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Bing, and 300+ businesses helped across the USA, Canada, UK, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Now focused on how AI systems decide which brands get surfaced, cited, and recommended. More about me →