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
Search Engine Journal reported on Thursday that websites can now hand ChatGPT's browser a set of labeled actions to run, bookings, carts, searches, instead of leaving the software to guess at the screen. The pitches to get your site "agent ready" will land in your inbox
You are about to pay someone to get your business named inside ChatGPT, and every proposal on your desk reads like it was written by the same three people. Entity graphs. Retrieval pipelines. Definition-lead architecture. I sell this work, and it does not change the rule: the fancier a
Google Ads
Your Google Ads report shows a cheaper lead than it did last year. Your bank account has not noticed. The 2026 search benchmarks published this spring show average cost per lead falling for the first time in five years while the average click got more expensive, and the people selling
Local SEO
You posted for three weeks straight, added a few photos, watched nothing move, and quietly stopped. That was a rational response to advice that never told you which updates carry ranking weight and which are housekeeping your customers see: five of them carry weight, and the rest buy engagement, trust,
Generative AI Visibility
Most business owners keep exactly one piece of AI-visibility evidence: they opened ChatGPT, asked if it recommends them, and screenshotted the answer. As of May 2026, that test covers less than half of the people actually asking. Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026 report, covered by TechCrunch
Google Ads
Every AI Max conversation I get pulled into starts with the same question: on or off. That framing is why owners keep getting surprised by their own account a month later. Turning AI Max on buys you a test, and turning it back off does not buy you a refund,
Local SEO
Somebody told you AI ate search, and the story fit your quarter. Your rankings held, your map pack position held, and the phone still went quiet, so ChatGPT became the obvious suspect. It is the wrong suspect. ChatGPT did not take your local leads; Google rearranged its own results page
Generative AI Visibility
The shortlist exists before your server is ever contacted You paid for schema markup, an llms.txt file, and a faster server, and ChatGPT still recommends the clinic two streets over. That is not broken work. It is the second half of the job, bought as if it were the
Content Strategy
You published thirty posts last year, and four of them answer the same customer question in slightly different words. That overlap is not neutral storage. In the best public data we have on how ChatGPT picks its sources, a domain with two tightly matched pages on one question earns a
AI Integration
Four new AI features landed inside your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts this month, and most owners will treat that as one decision. On or off. It is four decisions, and they are not remotely equal. Two of them read your data and hand you a summary, which is
Google Ads
A Google Ads dashboard says the account returned $400,000. The books say $270,000 came in. Those are real figures from a paid search audit published this month, and nothing in that account is broken. Both numbers were produced by systems doing exactly what they were configured to do.
Local SEO
You did the checklist. Hours matched to when people actually search, reviews pushed past the threshold every guide names, an answering service that picks up before the second ring. For two quarters the Local Services Ads leads came steady, then they thinned out with nothing in the dashboard to explain
Generative AI Visibility
A woman in Leeds asks ChatGPT where to take a shoulder that has not settled in four months. It names three physio clinics and explains why each one fits her situation. She reads the answer, closes the tab, and books nothing that day. Two days later she types one of
Content Strategy
Twelve blog posts last quarter. A content retainer that renews every month without anyone asking what it bought. Then a customer opens ChatGPT, asks who to hire in your category, and the answer names three businesses that are not you. The problem is not your writing. It is where the
No pitch. No fluff. A straight diagnostic on your specific situation and the single highest-leverage fix to make right now.
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 →