Local SEO in 2026, AI Visibility Tracking & Google Review Bugs | E40 The Whitespark Local Update

This week, Claire Carlile and special guest Julian Hooks cover the latest local SEO news, including:

📝 The State of Local SEO in 2026 (Joy Hawkins, Sterling Sky)

📝 Why Your Google Reviews Disappear (Ex-Googlers Explain) (SterlingSky, Brad Wetherall)

📝 Where AI agents get stuck on your site (Kevin Indig)

📝 New Google Reviews Bug: You Have No Reviews Yet (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable)

📝 Build your own AI search visibility tracker for under $100/month (Julian Hooks)

📝 AI Prioritization Framework for SEOs (Elizabeth Linder)

Creators and Guests

Guest

Julian Hooks

Julian is a Senior Manager of SEO at Asurion (a tech insurance and warranty provider) and its subsidiary UBreakiFix, the retail chain of corporate-owned and franchise-owned tech repair stores with around 700 locations in the US and surrounding territories. He also runs a boutique consultancy, Advertising Commissions LLC, where he is the principal SEO consultant working with a range of businesses.

What is The Whitespark Local Update?

The Whitespark Local Update is the go-to podcast for Local SEOs and Marketers who want to stay ahead of the curve in local search and the local visibility space.

Join industry experts Claire Carlile and Darren Shaw for a lively, insightful roundup of their carefully curated selection of top “must-read” and “must-watch” links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.

[Claire Carlile]
Well, hello friends. It is that time again. It is the Whitespark Local Update, which is the podcast where we talk about local SEO and local marketing ting.

And today is the third and final week that Darren is on here riding his French bicycle around France with a string of onions around his neck and wearing a beret. And that is definitely happening. And I am lucky enough to be joined by special guest number three, Julian Hooks, here on the podcast today.

So Julian, will you give yourself a little intro, please?

[Julian Hooks]
Sure thing. My name is Julian Hooks. I've been doing SEO since I became an adult in 2007.

It's been a long time, a lot of technology changes. Currently at Asurion as a director of SEO and also oversee a You Break I Fix franchise, which has close to 700 locations spanning North America. And also, you know, newly crowned lead of AI in AEO search as that's fallen under my domain.

So excited to talk.

[Claire Carlile]
I love that. So Julian is a very titled, very titled man. And we met probably about on the interweb about two and a half years ago, we did some webinars, we did some podcasts together.

And I have always really liked your take on things that matter because you're actually out there working with, you know, big scale enterprise business. And I love that. So thank you for making the time today to come onto the podcast.

Thank you for coming. You have prepared your links. So I will ask you to kick off with number one, please.

[Julian Hooks]
Sure thing. So the first article that I wanted to talk about or bring up, and this is in the local flavor, is Sterling Sky's local state of local SEO report. And, you know, the core thesis of SEO isn't dying.

It's just customer behavior. Consumer behavior is just kind of shifting. And big players like Google are forcing that shift a little bit.

So the article talks about how we're seeing drops and, you know, click the calls from Google business profiles. What's going on in terms of increased traffic or increased adoption for things like chat GPT? How much attribution is even there?

You know, when people are using these LLMs like chat GPT, what Google's doing to kind of further this in terms of we all know the AI overviews, they're popping up on nearly all searches now. They've started rolling those into the local results even more and more now. So we're seeing that.

And the flavor, the style of what gets shown in these AI overviews, especially for local and what used to be the traditional map pack, it's just different. Same with, you know, the changing of the UI. Sometimes they're showing the call button less.

So if they're showing less CTAs, then obviously there's going to be less clicks there. And it's not necessarily that you're falling or you're ranking worse or performing worse or you've done anything wrong. It's just Google has changed what they're displaying.

And if they went from three businesses to two, that's going to affect a lot of people. What else was there? More ads, different ads.

That is always going to throw a wrench in people's plans if you're not participating in that arena. And it is unfortunate to say that it's kind of becoming more of a pay to play. If there's more paid real estate than there is organic real estate, then that just means if you really, really want to show up in that spot and have as much visibility, you have to try and figure out some type of profitable way that you could get into the paid real estate there.

And so there's, you know, a lot of different things going on for business owners, especially in local in terms of AI and Google just integrating AI into pretty much all their products. So I would say, you know, you definitely as a business owner, you just have to keep your ear to the streets or just stay informed, you know, with blogs like WhiteSpark that keep you up to date with the latest changes that are going on. And then you can kind of test and tease out what new features or how things are affecting your business and your websites and really lean into the whole AI play because, you know, the search end results page is shifting drastically.

And if you're just looking at your reports and not changing how you look at things holistically, you're going to think that, you know, you're doing something wrong and business is falling off a cliff and people aren't finding you, which might not necessarily be the case. They're just looking in other places that you're not looking at. And so in order to kind of know what's going on in your space and your business, you've got to kind of widen that breath.

And that's something that I've been doing. Like my reports now, I used to be focused on organic search channels and now I have to, well, Google's added the AI search channel, AI agent. So that's something to be aware of.

But on top of that, I've looked more at direct traffic now than I've ever in my entire history as an SEO. Pretty much every site that I have access to and I've looked at direct traffic has surged, you know, 100, 200% year over year. And I think that's part of the shift to AI search because the attribution isn't there.

There's not a ton of links linking out. So if you're being mentioned in these LLMs on local search or things like that, the next step is to just go search your brand. And, you know, there's going to be the autocomplete.

We know that direct attribution isn't, you know, very good. So you don't actually know how they got to your website and they just end up in the direct bucket. But we just know that other channels are shrinking like organic search, but direct is growing and AI search is growing.

And I think that's just a nod to the user behavior and people are just shifting from one channel to the other. So you're not necessarily losing those, but you have to think about that when you're looking at your business, your website and your analytics to see where everyone is and just make sure that, you know, are you losing customers or are they just moving and finding you a different way?

[Claire Carlile]
I would love to see and another time, you know, hearing more about the way that your reporting has changed because I think there is a big, there's a missing gap there in terms of people understanding how to be, how to be, how to be measuring and how to be reporting. Okay, I'll do my first link is a, oh, it's a, I think it's a double whammy on the Sterling Sky. So another one, it was part two of the ex Googlers bit where Joy was talking to Joel Headley and to Brad, whether also both ex Googlers, but, you know, some, some time ago, I think five or six years for each of them anyway.

So I love that because I just love the insight that it gives you into the way things work internally in terms of teams and systems. So a couple of things that I thought were interesting just Brad reminding you only make sure that you always have like three people on your Google business profile, not a million people, three people at a minimum. So make sure that you have the primary owner is a domain email and then make sure that you have an owner and a manager.

Another thing he said is that he remembers that in the olden days at Google money wasn't an object and they used to retain everything in terms of data. And there's a lot of stuff going on where we're thinking, you know, I know in the community sometimes it's like, oh, well, if that disappeared a few years ago, they're not going to have that anymore. So Brad was talking about data that used to live in perpetuity.

And now there's more pressure to delete things because they're paying for storage. So I thought that was quite interesting. He talked about things about suspensions, obvious things like don't change categories if it doesn't make sense.

Google is obviously trying to give accurate stable data to their users. And this is Joel coming in as well and saying, well, you know, think like a spammer, what would a spammer do? Don't do that to your business profiles.

That's not going to end in good times for you. The final thing is Joel and Brad both talked about what they thought the owners should prioritize now. So Joel said, as everyone always says, wow, who would have thought that citations would be a thing?

Citations are a thing. So go ahead and, you know, work on those listings and the places that information about your business, about your business, where that exists. So citations and reviews on third party sites.

Brad said reviews and multimedia content are increasingly important. Talking about posts and local posts there, Google is actually investing in that. We talked about the changes in there, so it's going to be important.

Brad says watch the API because sometimes changes that they make to the API can be clues about what's going to be important going forward. And he said that he wouldn't invest in services and service descriptions because they're likely to be replaced with user info and AI iterations the same way that Q&A has. So personally, he wouldn't spend time on that.

It was a good discussion, which I really enjoyed. And so obviously that is on the YouTube and people can go and see it there. Julian, tell me about your second link.

[Julian Hooks]
So the second link is from Kevin Indig's growth memo. And this one is not just local, but in general, it's about where AI agents get stuck on your website. And this one, it particularly honed in on, there's some technical aspects, but it really focused on pricing.

What we find is pricing is a huge, huge category in search and in AI search. People want to know how much things cost. And for a lot of businesses, it's interesting because you might have a premium product and you don't want to scare people away.

Or maybe you do have a premium product and you do want to scare the looky-loos away and you only want very serious customers. So there's a lot of different angles that people are looking at it. But in terms of the AI, when people are doing searches and the bots are doing searches on behalf of the users, a lot of times they always try and figure out price and value.

Even if the user is not particularly searching on price, if they ask, is this a good product or compare the top companies that do this or do that? Or where can I purchase this? Since the LLM is basically doing the research for you, price always comes into play basically.

And so the LLM is doing searches on all these different prices. And if you're a business that does not display price, you're either going to be excluded or you're at the whims of third-party operators, affiliate websites, aggregators, forums, and maybe reviews where customers have listed prices. Maybe it's wrong.

Maybe it's outdated. But if you're not providing any of that information, then the LLM has to go somewhere else to get it. And we saw that when that happens, the fallback using third-party pricing or citations went from 17% to 77%.

So basically that shows if you don't include any type of pricing, you're really, really diminishing your visibility or you're just leaving it to other people to give those answers. And that's what's going to be published. So that's huge.

And there's a lot of aggregators that have pricing, whether it's G2 or Captera or Yelp on the local side or anywhere else where people can publish pricing. I definitely read it if people are talking about their experiences or pricing or things like that. So it's definitely a strategy where you have to figure out what your stance is, how you're going to portray and display your pricing.

It's one thing to be able to sell on a page with good marketing because maybe it's not a salesperson, but if you can explain the value of your pricing alongside with it, that's great for humans. But you have to be able to make sure that the machine readables, the bots are picking up that value as well. So if they quote a price, maybe you have a premium product along with that price comes, here's why it's still a value, even though it's the most expensive of the lot.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, for sure. So who knew AI agents hate the lack of pricing on SaaS websites and other websites just as much as humans do? Hooray.

All right. So my second link is just a super quick one. Who would believe it?

There is a bug in Google business profile. I know we're all really shocked, but this one is. So if you know that your business is established, you have reviews, it actually says that you have reviews on your profile.

And then you go to look at the reviews and it says you have no reviews yet. That is a bug. I think this is Barry.

Barry Schwartz wrote about this. And so a Google spokesperson sent me a statement and it says it is broken. We will fix it.

Hooray. So basically, yes, I can see quite a lot of people coming into the Google business profile community saying, you know, I've lost all my reviews. That's actually something else.

There are lots of people that are losing their reviews, but this isn't that issue. This is actually a bug. So I imagine this will get fixed very soon if you are seeing it.

Tell us, Julian, tell us something else.

[Julian Hooks]
So this last article is a little self-promotional, but not really. So this one is my article. Don't worry, I'm not selling anything, doesn't matter.

So this one is actually my article that I had published in Search Engine Land a little while ago. And I think it's very valuable to the little guy or anyone in any position, but very valuable to any business that's on a budget that wants to start understanding how they're showing up in AI search. And that includes Google AI mode, which there's not really any good reporting on yet from Google.

So whether it's Google AI mode or Google AI overviews, again, this can also tailor to regular search as well. And then, of course, the LLMs, ChatGPT, Claw, Perplexity, you can do all of them because it's very cheap to do visibility this way. So my article is basically about how in a weekend for under $100, I was able to vibe code an LLM or AI search visibility tool with a software called Repl.it that I think I paid $20 for or $25, and then some API credits from Data4SEO. And I really go into how someone with very little technical knowledge, because you're just able to speak to the vibe coding software and kind of tell it, this is what my problem is, this is what I'm trying to solve for. You can say, maybe I don't understand the technicalities of X, Y, and Z. Help me, walk me through it.

And I give a lot of tips on ways you can bypass a lot of frustrating roadblocks that I ran into while trying to do this. But the gist of it is, if you're a small business owner, there's a ton of SaaS companies that have popped up that are selling AI visibility. Some of them are very expensive.

Some of them are cheaper, but only give you maybe one option. You can only do ChatGPT, or maybe you can only do two things. So if you want to look at Google AI mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, get regular Google search results, Google AI overview search results, Bing, Bing AI search, you can get everything for pretty much pennies for every scan that you want to run.

And we just go through how to set that up and how to start tracking kind of your AI visibility and all these different LLM tools for extremely, extremely cheap. And it's very versatile. You can switch up the prompts.

You can track hundreds of different things. And it just really opens the door to people who want to track, but maybe don't want to spend several hundred dollars on these tools, because maybe that's just not where they're at, and they don't have the budget. But if you have a weekend, a couple days a week to kind of sit down at your computer and walk through these steps, you can really get something up that's a great in-house tool for yourself.

You don't have to build a full-out SaaS product, but you can build a little dashboard for yourself that can run daily, weekly, however, and track the things you want to track, where you want to track it for a very nominal price. And so that's what I walk through there on that article.

[Claire Carlile]
I love that. Thank you. My final link is a post from Elizabeth Linder from Kickpoint, and I picked up on this because it was featured in the Women in Tech SEO newsletter.

And it is a piece that Elizabeth has written, which is about, it's an AI prioritization framework. So basically she talks about how when you open LinkedIn, it can be very overwhelming because everyone is building stuff and this workflow, this and this automation, this, and you just feel like this is a lot for me to learn. And how am I going to do all of these things?

I think yours is a really good example of where you would get to if you run through her process, because I think that what you have done there is totally, yes, that's where you would get to if you run through your process for yourself. So it's not about just one single task. It's definitely not about that.

It's about how you do this personally and how you approach this. And so she talks about the goal of the framework, which is to help you figure out exactly how this is going to, what matters to you in your role and for your clients, and then you start learning intentionally. So rather than the way that these things are sort of popularized or the way that people think is, you just learn AI, but AI isn't one thing.

It's not one thing. You can't just go and learn AI. You have to work out what you're going to use to help you do the things that you do as part of your role and your task anyway.

So she talks about a self audit to start off with. So you look at your professional needs, your client types, what your existing technical comfort is before you start adopting these new tools, because the description of what you've said in your previous post, I feel like I would still be a little bit uncomfortable about doing that myself. So I need to sort of look inwardly and go, where do I sit in this?

And then, so she talks about this sort of self audit, thinking about what you do every day, who you do it for, and where you feel the most friction in your work. And then she goes on and gives you this really, really nice framework. She talks about the AI learning database, where to start your learning, filtering what content and resources are worth your time, because sometimes it can feel like you need to read everything and do all the things.

I know my list is very long about all this stuff. And then she talks about maintaining momentum. So it's a big piece, but it's definitely worth, it's like you're saying, it's not going to take you a weekend to read this, but it would take you an hour to sit down and actually think about, okay, and mapping these parts out.

She's got some good links at the end. She links to learningaisearch.com, which is from the absolute queen of curation of learning resources, Elaida. So your link should be in there, Julian, if it's not already.

And it's interesting because Elizabeth herself did the AI course that Brittany did, Mueller, that I always talk about. So I feel like she's very qualified to help people start their AI journey or to understand what they need to do and what they need to learn. And I love her and she's clever and she's the best.

And it's a very readable person centred piece of content. So unbelievably, that is the end of our six links of happiness that we have shared with you. So I'm going to say a big thank you to Julian.

Thank you, Julian.

[Julian Hooks]
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Claire. Always a pleasure.

[Claire Carlile]
No, but you always turn up and I love you and thank you for always being happy to share stuff with me and with us. So, and that is it, dear readers and listeners and watchers. Thank you for joining us today and make sure you come back soon when we will have more local marketing news.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.

[Julian Hooks]
Bye.