Social Media is 90% Fake, AI Local SEO Playbook, More AI In Maps | E33 The Whitespark Local Update

We are back with another episode of the Whitespark Local Update, where our host Darren Shaw and special guest Celeste Gonzalez discuss:

📝 Google Already Knows Everything About You — And Their New AI Features Make It Worse (Near Media)

📝 Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign (Lane Brown)

📝 Google Maps just got an AI facelift (Claudia Tomina)

📝 The new playbook for localized AI search optimization (Darren Shaw)

📝 Google Ask Maps: How to optimize for visibility (Rich Sanger)

📝 Google Offer Posts are getting more prominence (Michael B. Snow)

Creators and Guests

Guest

Celeste Gonzalez

Celeste Gonzalez is an SEO and SXO strategist specializing in local SEO, search experience optimization, and AI-driven search. As Director of RooLabs, the experimental SEO testing division at RicketyRoo, she pioneers data-driven strategies that go beyond traditional SEO to understand how people actually find brands, and what they feel when they do.

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.

[Darren Shaw]
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update Podcast with me, Darren Shaw, and with our special guest, Celeste Gonzalez.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Thank you so much for having me, Darren.

[Darren Shaw]
Celeste, you might know her from Rickety Roo, but she recently took a new position with Last Mile Retail as their content product specialist. I think I got that right. Yeah, so Celeste is one of the most interesting people to me in local search because she's got a nice Gen Z perspective, and she talks a lot about TikTok and social media and how those things can impact local search, but she's involved in all areas of local search.

And so thanks for joining us today, Celeste. Claire is on a family trip, so I brought in special guest Celeste this week.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
I'll do my best to try to fill in Claire's shoes, but those are very big shoes to fill.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, well, I've seen you on other podcasts. I'm sure you're going to do an awesome job. Speaking of, what do you got to present to us today?

This is a podcast where we talk about whatever has been happening in local search. We talk about interesting articles. And so what do you got to share?

[Celeste Gonzalez]
OK, first piece to share, a little bit of podcast-ception here because I'm going to talk about a podcast. So Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal shared recently a podcast titled Google Already Knows Everything About You. And what Mike had shared was that they kind of had a discussion about Garrett Sussman's talk at SEO Week.

And for background, he ran a test where he used different Google accounts, his personal one, a brand new one that didn't have any sort of data, and they kind of filled it with seed data just to see what the AI mode recommendations would be across certain types of products and seeing how much personalization affected those recommendations. So one of the really interesting things that he found there was he got lots of recommendations from brands he had already interacted with from email. Yeah, I was just kind of showing you how important that is.

But what Mike did was his own research. He's been using Gemini for about six months now to see what does Google already know about him. He doesn't have personal intelligence turned on.

And basically, they found that Google already knows everything about you and you don't need to turn on personal intelligence for this stuff to work. He was categorized well, they got his socioeconomic, political status, all of that pretty much correct. So yeah, it just lets you know that Google kind of already has everything it needs to have on you.

[Darren Shaw]
Privacy is dead. It's like I was thinking about it yesterday, actually, I was I was going to go and just search some stuff. And I was like, God, you know, everything I type into this AI is telling the Google or whoever I'm using, just everything about me.

And then once you sort of ask these questions, it just helps the system infer more about you. I'd be like, OK, who do you think Darren Shaw is? What do you think he likes in his personal life?

It's like they just know everything. It's kind of crazy.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
No, it's so. So Mike had brought up one of the things that he typically searched for these really specialized bikes that are pricier. And he said one thing that was slightly off about him was the age guess.

And, you know, Greg had just made the joke like, well, maybe because you're doing these longer like bike treks, it underestimated because of ability in that sense. So, you know, there's lots of estimations based on things that you're not even thinking about where it could just be a simple product search. And they're like, OK, these are more expensive bikes.

You probably make more money to be able to buy these more expensive bikes.

[Darren Shaw]
I was actually thinking a little bit about that in terms of how Google is going to monetize AI. And I think it may be the greatest personalized monetization that ever happened. I think they're going to know so much about you that when they are selling ad space, they're selling ads.

They'll be like a person goes to a large language model and they're being very specific about what they want. And we know every little detail about them. We can send you send your ad to the exact person who's the most likely to buy.

And so advertisers will pay more for that. I think that's the monetization play. And that personalization is just gonna be so powerful for that.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Yeah, I think it's a pretty easy play to get into that. I mean, I know these LLMs have, you know, the ads are not fully integrated with ChatGPT yet. Claude has said, like, we're not doing that.

That was a whole, like, Super Bowl campaign. But it's only a matter of time.

[Darren Shaw]
It's like, well, Google for sure. Yeah. All right.

Well, my first link is this one's out of my lane because it's not local SEO. But I think it's so interesting. And it's like, it's kind of painful.

So Lane Brown wrote an article for Vulture magazine, probably seen some stuff on Vulture. They're pretty big. But it's the article's called Your Feed is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign.

So he kind of profiles this founder of a company called Fluttify. His name's Joe Lim. And Joe Lim estimates that 90% of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.

And so basically what Fluttify does is they have 65,000 dummy social media accounts that are used to drum up attention on behalf of whoever pays them to flood the feeds with your content. And so the way they do is they make these clips, like often used in the music business. And so we want this new artist, this artist's new track to go viral.

So they'll take a clip and then 65,000 social media accounts all start sharing this clip. I believe they interact with each other to amplify each other's stuff. It's a whole damn system built to manipulate the feeds.

And the one example he gave was Justin Bieber. And so Justin Bieber is a very interesting example because the dude's already mega famous. He's already a super celebrity.

He doesn't need this. He would think he's going to go viral on his own. Okay, new artist trying to break in.

They're going to hire this company. They're going to try to amplify their new content to get in front of people. But someone as already as famous as Justin Bieber is doing this as well.

And it's like the comment in the article is even the most streamed artist in history with 287 million Instagram followers, that's how many Bieber has, he's headlining Coachella. He paid clipping campaigns running during his performance. Basically, the point is, nothing breaks through without artificial juice.

That's what the article is kind of getting to. It's like, if you really want to break through and go mega viral, you've got to artificially pump the juice with these systems. And so I'm like, what?

This is awful. This is like, we as a population are so manipulated. And actually there is an interesting one to talk about with you, Celeste, since you're quite active on the social media and you think about these feeds and you think about particularly social media for businesses.

And so I don't know. What do you think of this?

[Celeste Gonzalez]
I want to ask you, do you think you've seen any of these specifically for musicians? I know I definitely have.

[Darren Shaw]
I don't think I have. My feed is so curated. It's just like you are an old SEO business dude and we're going to show you SEO stuff.

Like my feeds are just like my wife can't believe my feed. It's the most boring feed ever. And so I haven't seen it.

You've seen this. You feel like you've seen these manipulated clips.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
I feel like for me, most of where I've seen this is Twitter, actually.

[Darren Shaw]
OK.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
And I've seen it for bigger artists as well. So that's why I'm like, OK, Justin Bieber. It's still surprising that it's him, especially because he was headlining Coachella and everyone was very excited for his return because he had been gone for so long from performing live.

But I've seen it for lots of larger female rappers. I've seen it for K-pop groups. And that's not discounting how large those fan bases are.

But I'd see it more so in a sense of with these clips. I'm thinking fan cams because a lot of them have these clips of their favorite artists. If you don't know what a fan cam is, it's just clips of them.

It could be them walking around, could be them in a photo shoot, paparazzi clip, whatever it is. They compile it together to, you know, 20, 30 second clip and put their new song on it. And you'll see it like, you know, people will post about their favorite artists.

So they could be like, oh, posting like, you know, I love Justin Bieber. Here's his music. And someone's like, Justin Bieber, you should be listening to this artist.

And then they'll post the fan cam. And I will see some accounts interact with each other. And I'll see the same video, that same fan cam posted over and over.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. Why would multiple fans have the exact same clip?

[Celeste Gonzalez]
It's the exact same. So I'm like, yeah, I've definitely seen this type of marketing and it's gotten me to. I'm like, oh, let me see.

Like that looks I like this person's outfit or oh, what is the song that they're sharing? So I've definitely fallen victim to this.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, I think it's going to and it's going to get worse with A.I. One of the predictions from from Lim. He says this era ends in three to five years, not because it gets fixed, but because marketers will pivot to manipulating the A.I. agents that humans will increasingly trust to tell them what's worth their attention. So that's very interesting.

Like in three to five years, you won't let the algorithm decide. You will all will all have a very curated feed by our agents. This is what you should see.

And then there's going to be a whole back end market trying to be. How do we manipulate everyone's personalized feed? Right.

Yeah. Which I guess is what they're kind of doing. Anyways, we're we're all doomed.

The Internet is ruining everything. A.I. is making it worse. And let's what's your next link?

[Celeste Gonzalez]
OK, well, I'll go on something a little more lighthearted then and move to my third link rather than my second link. So Claudia Swamina. I know we love her on this podcast.

[Darren Shaw]
We love Claudia. Hi, Claudia.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
So she had recently shared some new A.I. features on Google Maps and what those look like. Editorial summary. So this is on the business's main carousel photo.

When you go on a Google business profile, you'll just see a little summary of the business on the actual photo. There are also Gemini review overviews. So now sort of like Amazon or like, you know, when you go look at products, when you scroll down to reviews, you get a summary of what the reviews are.

So you don't have to read all of them. Now you get that on Google Maps. There's also a hot pink live alert to catch the user's attention better.

So if you're looking at a restaurant, it'll say like live 5 p.m. And, you know, is it busy? Is it not busy? And then the delivery or on site hours will show.

So you don't have to specifically click in to see them. So kind of makes it nicer for the user to have maybe a little a little win for AI.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. AI is not all bad. And those are really interesting new features.

And I think that that I knew that that summary stuff must be coming because TripAdvisor has been doing it for over like two years. Those review summaries are actually really good. So good.

Keeps getting better. So then the question is, how do you how do you fix that? If it's wrong, the AI summary, you got to find the source of the data and then try and fix it.

That's a tricky one.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
And on my end, when I was just looking after, I saw she posted it. I was just I mainly look at coffee shops as examples lots of times when I'm trying to see these new features. So the big one, Starbucks saw every single feature.

The small ones, I did not get everything there. So like the locally owned ones, I was not able to see all these features. On some of them, all I got was the reviews overview summary.

And I was like, they had a decent amount, but not necessarily seeing the summary on the carousel photo or, you know, the hot pink live alert stuff yet.

[Darren Shaw]
Interesting. All right. Well, somebody pay attention to my next post is my post.

It was my post on Search Engine Land. So I recently published, I titled it something different, but the editors, they go rogue over there on Search Engine Land. And they called it the new playbook for localized AI search optimization.

And so this is basically my brain dump of what I think people need to be doing. So we talk about traditional local SEO, which is mostly, okay, you build your website, make sure it's got your good services pages. It's well optimized.

You build out a Google business profile, make sure you're managing it. It's 100% complete. You're uploading photos on a regular basis.

You're using videos. You're using Google posts. You're building out some citations and you're getting reviews.

That's like the local SEO playbook. Right. And so this is like, okay, that now in today's world is table stakes.

And so in this article, I'm talking about what do you got to do now? What do you have to do in order to compete? And so I list like 10 different little areas that you need to focus on.

You've got to be working on a YouTube strategy. I think every small business should have YouTube. I think every small business needs to be working on social media.

Those social media channels that have gone dormant for years because you're like, nobody cares about what Bob's Plumbing is posting. Well, you're not wrong that the humans probably still don't care what Bob's Plumbing is posting, but it's great content. And it's a great amplifier for the AI era.

And so seeing that you're active on social is important. Getting involved in local community stuff is very important. And so this is actually, it's like for the longest time, it was like local optimization.

Now it's like evidence optimization. So like everybody is a local business. Okay.

There's a hundred local plumbers in your city. What are the ones that are going to be the difference makers? And those are the ones that there's outside evidence that they are very good.

That's the thing you're trying to amplify. And so my article on Search Engine Land kind of digs into that and talks about what you need to be thinking about and doing in the new world of AI, local SEO.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Yeah. I completely agree with social media, obviously. But I can say like, even with the plumber stuff, like what I noticed had worked for one that was doing TikTok was they just posted a lot of gross content and it was like the drain clogging, like the drain unclogging and stuff like that.

And it just, it attracts people. People love seeing gross things like that. And of course you're thinking, okay, what's the business value of this?

Like how's it actually going to bring someone to be a customer? I think it's just kind of going back like to marketing principles and basics of users need a lot of touch points. I think before when they used to teach in schools, like seven touch points before they make a purchase.

So if that's the way they're coming across you, like eventually, especially you keep watching it, the feed, like algorithm keeps boosting it to you. You'll build that association and you'll know of a name to call when something happens. But you know, long-term game.

[Darren Shaw]
For sure. And that's the thing. It's like, I think it might be annoying for the local plumber to be like, Oh, now I have to be a social media celebrity.

And we're like, well, I know it's annoying, but yes, you do. It's like, if you really want to be super successful, then you have to start thinking about it. And I think the nice thing is that for a lot of businesses, they have employees who are on the younger side who grew up with this, who would consume this, they know how to do it.

And so I think businesses just need to start tapping into that. So there are technicians that are out in the field. They record the growth stuff.

They even post it. And the business owner, you don't need to worry about it. You just empower your staff to do some of this.

And I think they'll love it actually. It'll be fun for them. And so I think there's great opportunities there for almost any business.

What else you got to talk about, Celeste?

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Okay. Going back to Google Maps again. So I have a Search Engine Land article about Google Ask Maps, how to optimize for visibility.

And this also takes a similar approach with the evidence optimization that you had talked about. And basically Ask Maps is more recommendation driven. It's depending on how the business is understood and positioned.

So this article gets a lot into the positioning and the evidence aspect. So similar to the NAP consistency that we're all used to, other things that can be consistent about the business as well, that can be reinforced through your reviews, your obvious website content, and then the third party platforms because it's not just the basic, what you're putting out there on the website, but it's everything that's being said about you. Is it consistent from place to place?

So with Ask Maps showing fewer businesses, you just want to have the added layer to make sure that the confidence is there for you to be recommended for those very specific searches that people are doing in Ask Maps. So it's now more about the specialties and the attributes of the business.

[Darren Shaw]
Like the most minute details. You think like, okay, only one in a hundred customers might ask me about this. Put it on your website.

Make sure it's mentioned in your Google business profile. You know, ideally, if you get a really weird, rare edge case project, try to get that person to write a review and talk about it in their review. Like all those things.

And I really think about review diversification too, outside of Google business profile. Like that article that you're referencing is talking about that too. Like you need to be present on the broader web, just really working on that.

And it used to just be links. Be like, oh, I got to get a link from a website. But now it's so much more than that.

It's like entity optimization. That's the new world.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
And I like to say too, like in this age, there's no such thing as TMI. Like every single detail matters. Like again, the coffee shops are like my big example.

I really always try to look for sugar-free options. It's very hard to find any place that actually puts that on their website or has it on social media. So maybe the review, I can find it that someone wrote it in some place and it's hoping that I'll be able to catch it somewhere.

So that is part of thinking of the greater web. Okay. Maybe someone posted that on social media and they're like, Hey, there's sugar-free options.

So it is a way it could come up, but it's like, and why not reinforce that by making sure it's on your website, on your own social media, you know, wherever else you can place it. And you know, in local, I do think we are pretty well equipped to deal with this consistency aspect of it that everyone's talking about because of the NAP stuff that we've dealt with since the dawn of time.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. We're pros at consistency. Other spots like, you know, sugar-free is a great example.

The Google business profile has a services section that so many businesses are ignoring. You can talk about services. Even though we're talking about a coffee shop and that's a product, not a service, make a service, call it sugar-free drink service, whatever you want.

And then the same thing. There's a product section in your Google business profile. You can add that as a product.

And I think all of that plays in there. I think that the, we used to talk about ranking factors where all the products aren't a ranking factor, right? So people ignore them.

Now everything's a ranking factor. It's just content. And so everything matters.

And it's not really, we shouldn't call it a ranking factor because rankings don't really exist in AI. It's more like a visibility factor. Are you known for that thing?

Well, you can't be known for it if you don't tell people that you even offer it. So I think it's a great, I love that sugar-free example. The other final link I have for today is just really a small post from Michael B.

Snow, Mike B. Snow. He says he's noticing that Google is testing a very visible offers call out separate from the recently ad events stuff on knowledge panel.

So when you open up the Google Maps app, I think he actually, he's on a mobile browser. So in a mobile browser, he's seeing a huge little bar across the top on these profiles for offers. And so I'm really noticing that too.

So Google, there's been a number of posts recently where Google was pulling in like today, tomorrow, specials, things that are happening. Google wants that data and they're surfacing on your Google business profile. So the takeaway here is make offer posts on your Google business profile.

This is a new test. I think they're going to roll it out. When you have done this, when you've made a Google post that has an offer, then it's likely going to get increased prominence in Google Maps.

And that can help your business profile stand out from the alternatives. And you know what's great about an offer? An offer is directly like we have a special on right now.

You can click, you can buy it. So it's like a major conversion. It's the very best post type really, in my opinion.

So I just thought it was very interesting that he's caught this test that they're giving more prominence to offers. They used to a long time ago and then they got rid of it and now it's back. So I'm excited to see that.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Yeah, that's pretty cool. I wonder how much of that has to do with sort of like the content freshness there as well. The fact that this is like a limited time deal and it's like, okay, this is right now we should be pushing this to see what can happen.

[Darren Shaw]
That's a good point. I actually think that's exactly part of it for sure. And the same thing with events, right?

So you can make a regular post an event post or an offer post. And I think that regular posts are good. You should definitely be doing, but I really love Google seems to care a lot about event posts and offer posts.

So, all right. I think we did it. I think we did a whole podcast and thanks a lot for joining us Celeste.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for bringing those great links and great conversation.

[Celeste Gonzalez]
Yeah. Thank you for having me.

[Darren Shaw]
And as a reminder, we always appreciate your reviews on Apple and Spotify and we appreciate your comments on YouTube. And thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time.