Reddit & Socials in GBP, Google Personal Intelligence & AI Search | E31 The Whitespark Local Update

Local search keeps changing, and Claire Carlile and Darren Shaw are here to make sense of it. This week, they cover:

📝 How Google’s Personal Intelligence is Quietly Revolutionizing Your Search Results with Garrett Sussman (Near Media)

📝 AI Citation Ranking Factor Analysis (Cyrus Shepard)

📝 RIP AI Overview Tracking (Dana DiTomaso)

📝 Google is now pulling Reddit threads directly into Google Business Profiles (Darren Shaw)

📝 Google is now pulling social media posts directly into Google Business Profiles (Darren Shaw)

📝 Google Suspended This Profile: Their Calls Stopped Overnight (Sterling Sk)

📝 It Works Until It Doesn't: AI Content Strategies That Backfire (Lily Ray)

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, hello, and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update with me, Claire Carlile.

[Darren Shaw]
And with me, Darren Shaw. This is the podcast where we tell you what has happened in local search in the last week, or sometimes two weeks. And I don't know, we've probably got some cool stuff to talk about today.

Claire, what is first on your list?

[Claire Carlile]
First on my exciting list of things is a video on the YouTube with lovely Garrett Soosman, let's give some love to Garrett because he hasn't had enough mentions on the podcast in general.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, he's great. We love Garrett.

[Claire Carlile]
I'm going to start my Garrett Soosman tally today. Number one, thank you, Garrett. So it is an interview with Near Media, and it is how Google's personal intelligence is quietly revolutionizing your search results.

So Garrett in this has a little chitty chat with these two about his talk that he did at SEO Week, which was a big conference in New York. It was a week long. It's the only conference, I think, that gives me a bit of fear of missing out.

And he talks about Google's interpretation, well, Google's personalization and how personalization is going to affect search. And that got me thinking, because I do like to talk about the historical context of these things. It reminded me of how when I first started in local SEO, and we used to talk about personalization, and then Google was a bit like, well, the only personalization is really your location.

And then as sort of local search marketers, that made us feel a bit special because we were this personalized piece. Anyway, this is no more. Obviously, the SERP is at some point going to be very AI mode-ish.

And so Garrett is talking about Google personal intelligence, which currently is in opt-in. I don't have it. I don't have Google Apps, and I don't have access to it.

I'm quite interested. But basically, it will mean that at the moment it's opt-in, you are giving Google permission, like it really needs it, to use information from, I think it's email, Google photos. I don't know if it's YouTube as well.

So Gmail calendar photos, and incorporate findings from that into your AI mode for hyper-personalized experience. And Garrett talks about two things about... Obviously, Google has most of your data already, if you're open to the Google infrastructure.

It does for me. And he talks about explicit context and implicit context when we make a prompt. So explicit context might be, I'm with my family of four, including two toddlers, and I'm gluten-free, and I'm looking for somewhere to eat.

And then the implicit context that Google is going to use is your search history, your Gmail, your past clicks, your photos, your calendars, stuff like that to make it more personalized. So then he talks about that. And then he also presents some...

I think he's going to probably talk about the data that he got from when he did some testing around these personas that he created, one of which was actually himself. One was a completely clean persona with no access to any of this stuff. And the other thing was a persona that had personalization turned on, and they obviously just fed it with some seeded stuff.

So that's it. It's really interesting to think about where that's going, what that's going to look like, and then what we will do as marketers to take advantage of the opportunities or to do proper marketing, hopefully, which means that we think more about all of the different channels of how we will reach people.

[Darren Shaw]
Very interesting to think about what do we do? How do we get into people's personalized results? It's like, oh, make sure we got to trick them, trick them to click a link to go to our website.

Somehow we got to get them on our website, get them to search our business, get them to... Yeah, we got to trick them. That's the key to marketing in the future.

You got to trick them.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, right. That's right.

[Darren Shaw]
Interesting. All right. I got a link somewhere in here.

Let me see. I was going to talk about Cyrus Shepard. We love you too, Cyrus.

He's on a tear lately. He's publishing all this insane research, like really good stuff. And here's another one.

He published AI citation ranking factors. What? I love ranking factors.

He published this article where he went through, through all the data. And just to clarify, AI citations are clickable links to sources that the AI engines use to support their answers. So, you know, an AI overview on the right panel, you're going to see the links.

Those are the actual, that's what we call an AI citation. Different than a local citation, right? Local citations, a directory listing.

That's what that is. Those little links. So, he talks about what are the most prominent things.

And so, number one on the list, URL accessibility. Can the bots crawl your page? That's important.

So, that's number one. That's where things like speed might come in. If your page is slow, the AI bots would be like, too slow.

I'm out of here. Just like the humans would be. So, there's that.

There is search rank. This, to me, is the most important factor and most interesting factor because how you rank in Google's traditional search results correlates extremely strongly with how you appear in AI results. So, what's happening there?

Fan out rank. So, how you rank for all the fan out queries as well. Like if this article ranks really well.

So, you know, the real interesting, and then there's a whole list. I don't know how he's got. I'm calling it 20.

He's got 20 different factors. And then he goes from like top to bottom of like what's the most important to the least important. Very similar to a report you may be familiar with, the local white spark, local ranking factors.

[Claire Carlile]
I think I've read that.

[Darren Shaw]
You did read that one? Good.

[Claire Carlile]
I've read that. Yeah, it's quite good. It's quite good.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. Thanks for reading my content. So, here he also provides the steps to earn more of these.

And he really leans into this, the overlap between traditional SEO and AI citation signals is significant. He puts this in italics, is significant. It's true.

And he says, it really comes down to relevance, trust, topical authority, and extractability. So, it's just SEO. It's kind of just SEO with the little tweakies that we keep talking about on this podcast, where you got to make sure your content is structured in a good way, and that you've done a little bit of research into what are the query fan outs and trying to make sure that your content is covering those additional topics.

And so, all that stuff, because fan out rank is number three on these. So, for me, I don't know, I guess I'm just obsessed with AI visibility these days, because almost everything I talk about is AI visibility. Actually, my next link though is not.

[Claire Carlile]
Imagine a query fan out and what that looks like when it becomes personalized. So, the idea that knowing what query fan out is going to be, it will become a nonsense.

[Darren Shaw]
That's interesting. Yeah. And actually, when you talked about Garrett's research, that personalization stuff, if I think about my Google photos, I do have Google photos.

I honestly have 15 years worth of photos in Google photos. And it's a lot. Everything, like my phone automatically syncs to Google photos.

So, my whole life is in Google photos. It's crazy to think that how personalized that is. That's some serious personalization.

[Claire Carlile]
Think of the products, think of the places. Exactly.

[Darren Shaw]
Every place I've been, everything I've taken a picture of is like, it even knows what model my furnace is, because I took a picture of it to send to the furnace guy, like all the details that are in my photos.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah. I mean, yeah. When it comes to personalization, like plugging your Google photos in is going to be gold.

My second link is something that Dana DiTomato added to, well, it's more of a sad thing than an exciting thing, really. The little thing that some of us set up so we could track visits to our website that come from AI overviews, featured snippets, or people also are. So, basically, Google used to add this funky parameter to the end.

And Dana had a really good solution where you use tag manager and some funky stuff in GA4 to let you segment those out to see how they performed on your website versus other stuff. Anyway, it doesn't work anymore. So, is that an interesting link?

Well, it is in terms of if you used it and then you find it's not showing any data, it's because it doesn't work anymore. And wouldn't it be great if Google Search Console gave us a little bit more granular data about certain features?

[Darren Shaw]
I feel like there was some hint about that.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah.

[Darren Shaw]
We'll look forward to it. I think Bing does it. Bing does a good job of that.

It's like Bing Webmaster Tools or whatever it's called. I think they do a good job of it.

[Claire Carlile]
I mean, that's excellent. For the 10 people that come to your site via Bing, you can really smash out some...

[Darren Shaw]
Such valuable data, Bing data. It's so good. Yeah.

I wonder, because I've been exploring this thing called SEO Gets lately.

[Claire Carlile]
SEO Gets?

[Darren Shaw]
It's kind of like Search Console, but with all the features of Search Console that they didn't just figure out to make. And so these guys are making it and it's a really great product. And so I wonder if they've got some AI visibility tracking.

So if you've lost this, and you want it, I have no idea if SEO Gets has it, but you can go and check that out. Okay. So my next link slash...

It's like a double link. It's like a two-part link. Google on desktop has launched some exciting new features.

So I published two posts on LinkedIn over the past little while, and people are very interested in this. So I figured I should talk about it on the podcast. So one, there's a new panel.

So as you're browsing through the local finder results, you will see two new panels. One is called About This Place, and it's pulling in little snippets from reviews, menu highlights, and guess what? Reddit.

Reddit threads are getting pulled into your Google Business profile now. So this is very like, what the heck? And so the weird thing is, is that sometimes the Reddit threads don't even mention the business.

So it's like, I am going to deep dive on this and figure out what these Reddit threads are, why they're coming in there. But the takeaway there is like, if you are not thinking about Reddit, it's like, Google's telling you, you should maybe start thinking about this. And so my strategy and advice is to just go and look at your panel, look at the threads that are being pulled in.

And then if there are threads where they're mentioning your business, then you should engage. Hey, Bob here from Bob's Denver plumbing. I heard you were looking at you had mentioned me, and I just wanted to thank you for mentioning me.

And yes, we do provide that service of whatever. So just engaging, get created, create, create an account for your company and get in there and just just respond. And here's another strategy that you could start thinking about.

If you are self promotional on Reddit, you will get absolutely skewered by the people on Reddit. So don't do that. You have to engage and be helpful.

That's the only thing you can do on Reddit. You can you can mention your brand only if someone else is kind of mentioning it. And then you'd be like, Oh, yeah, that's correct.

Whitespark local ranking grids are the best. Thank you for telling us that. So you can engage that way.

But mostly just being helpful. Someone asks a question, you provide your helpful advice, and you do not even mention your brand, just getting involved and getting engaged in and where it makes sense, delicately sprinkling your brand around might be helpful to anyway, that's right strategy. I think if local businesses are not thinking about Reddit, Google just told you read is important.

Part two of my updates to that panel in a local finder is the social media updates. Big shout out to our good friend Valentina Vasileva. And I don't know, I don't know what magic tools she has to find these things.

She's like first to like break the news. So she's like, there's a new feature. We're like, what?

How did you find this? So quick. She's on top of it.

So anyways, this is a new panel in the local finder results that pulls in your social media updates. And it is very interesting because it also shows you that Google care. Both of these are showing you that Google cares very much about what the broader web is saying about you.

And so your own social channels, what are you saying on those social channels, Google wants that pulled into your Google Business Profile. And so the strategy there, of course, is to use your social profiles, put the links on your profile. So connect your profiles.

And, you know, be active on social Google's very interested in things like there's a special tonight. Oh, next week, we're having an event and like all of these things. Google's not getting that data through Google posts, because people are still not like they were hoping they were hoping a Google post was going to be their social network for local businesses.

But they're like, okay, well, let's, we'll keep that feature because it's good. But we got to start getting that social stuff in there. So lots of businesses are very active on their Instagram, their Facebook, actually only this is interesting.

I dug through quite a few, I only saw three social channels ever get pulled in Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, I refuse to call it that letter, I should know I should do. I should start calling it the social network formerly known as Twitter. No, no.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Darren Shaw]
Start using that. Anyways, those are the three that are getting pulled into that social updates, social media updates, I think it's called. And so I don't know why I know TikTok.

I don't know why I know YouTube. It's interesting, maybe because those are more video channels. Yeah.

Anyways, that is all I have to say about that.

[Claire Carlile]
I think that's enough.

[Darren Shaw]
Stop talking about it. Exactly. What's your next link?

[Claire Carlile]
Okay, my my last link is on YouTube. It is Elizabeth and Joy from Sterling Sky who do a stellar job of basically spending an hour doing a huge teardown of people's websites. And also it's good.

It's just like, you know, nice interaction, people have got questions about suspensions, or they're like, why is this happened? Or it might be other stuff anyway. So I really enjoyed that hour.

I think sometimes, when you want to learn stuff, you have to just spend the time watching and listening. Not everything can come from a guide. And especially when there's the nuances of dealing with suspensions, it is so nuanced, you know.

And I think that spending the time watching something like this is going to be helpful for businesses or for agencies that have to solve these types of problems. So give that a watch. One of the things that Elizabeth mentioned at the start is something that's happening in the Google Business Profile community is an uptick in sort of mass suspensions that have been caused because of one account that has access to all of these, which has got an account level restriction.

So Elizabeth quite helpfully runs through this is the URL that you go to to check that this is how you solve that, you know. And one of the things that came through is, you know, every single business needs to go in, they need to look at who has access to their Google Business Profile, and they need to go in, and they need to audit that regularly, you know, and trying to make sure that the owner, primary owner, is a domain-based email and all of that type of shizzle. So it's a really good reminder of all of those things, and also Elizabeth, you know, does some little giveaways with other URLs that you can use to get support.

So it's definitely worth watching.

[Darren Shaw]
Yes, you got to watch out. You might, you may be like seven years ago, you hired that dude on Upwork and Steve, and Steve's still on your account. And uh-oh, Steve was doing some nefarious business, and now he's taken down every Google Business Profile he has access to.

So yeah, go and take a look. If you see Steve on there, you better get him off.

[Claire Carlile]
Steve needs to go, like, there's a line through Steve, goodbye.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, exactly. All right, my last link is from Lily Ray. Lily Ray has published a big article, It Works Until It Doesn't, AI Content Strategies That Backfire.

Man, I don't, there's nobody else that talks about this as strong a voice as Lily. She's like, you guys, I see what you're doing. You are generating AI content at scale, and oh yeah, look at your awesome case study.

So what she did is that she looked at 220 sites that had publicly been like, AI generated content, it's amazing. We are getting 2.5 million views per month. And then every single one of them has this pattern where it's, they call it, I think Glenn Gabe coined the term Mount AI.

So if you look in analytics, it's like this, and then this. Now you get this mountain of like, it looked great, and now it has been destroyed by an update. And so that's what I mean.

She means it works until it doesn't, it's working great. And then Google's like, no, they just shut it down, right? And so she lists eight recurring content patterns that are risky for SEO and AI search.

And this is a warning sign for you. Basically any AI generated content at scale is concerning. And so what she's seeing are things like people doing comparison pages at scale.

They're doing these like, what is X glossary pages, AI generated at scale. So it's like, oh, overnight we just launched a glossary section on our website that has 10,000 new pages. Watch out, that content is maybe fine until it just gets totally trashed by Google.

Self promotional listicles. She says that there was an unconfirmed Google update around January 20th, that appears to have hammered that strategy. So people were making these like, best, you know, with Whitespark data would be like best local SEO tools.

And then we list Whitespark at the top. And then instead of our actual competitors list a bunch of like unknowns. So you just list yourself as number one.

And so that strategy, which was a good strategy, until it wasn't, for AI search visibility has now been trashed. So anyways, anything programmatic and at scale, watch yourself. She does talk a little bit about AI generated content.

It's not bad. It's totally cool. You can use AI in your content strategy.

The key is it should have a human in the loop. So it's not programmatic. You need a human working on these things.

Don't automate at scale. And AI assisted content is probably a better way to say it than AI generated should still demonstrate EEAT and include original data and original thought. And, you know, kind of obvious.

But anyways, this is a great article from Lily, warning businesses of the risks of AI generated content at scale.

[Claire Carlile]
Can I share a little vignette about one of those?

[Darren Shaw]
I would love to hear it. Yes.

[Claire Carlile]
Yesterday, when I was laying on the sofa, wondering if I was a famous person, I did a little, I did a little search in Gemini for, you know, who are the top UK local SEO experts and agencies expecting to see it draw on something like, I don't know, Google business profile product experts, or I don't know. I don't know. I knew I thought there'd be something.

And so it basically pulls from a list written by, so it names at number one, a chap called Hridoy Chowdhury is ranked as one of the top local SEO specialists in the UK. He's known for data driven strategies and managing a vast portfolio of local business projects. This comes from a listicle from his website.

Of course. And at the bottom, it says, I am the UK's top local SEO based in Bangladesh. Based in Bangladesh.

[Darren Shaw]
It beats the UK's number one, but it's based in Bangladesh.

[Claire Carlile]
So I'm sure, I'm sure like, you know, fair play, but you know, so it hasn't stopped working as a.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, it hasn't. But I think, you know, it's to Lily's point, you know, it works until it doesn't. And so, but also to this guy's point, he's like, well, I'll just ride this.

I'll just ride this train as long as I can, because he'll take it, right? And then once it stops working, he's like, okay, well, it doesn't work anymore. I'll do something else.

But he got the benefits of it while I was working.

[Claire Carlile]
He did. I'll spam someone's photos and emails. So I appear in personalized search.

[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, exactly. That's a good, that's a good strategy. You just show up at conferences and get and just go take selfies with as many people as you can get into their Google photos.

And then you will become the UK's number one local search expert.

[Claire Carlile]
It's the way forward.

[Darren Shaw]
Okay, well, nice to see you, Claire. Thanks, everybody, for the listening and the watching of our podcast. And if you enjoy listening and watching our podcast, please go leave us a review on the Apple on go to our YouTube channel and leave us a comment there too.

That would be wonderful. And subscribe. I don't do that.

Do the subscribing. It's all I got.

[Claire Carlile]
Good. That's it. We're finished.

[Darren Shaw]
Bye, everybody.