The Near Memo

Send us Fan Mail Garrett French, Valerie Cecil and James Wirth of Citation Labs rejoin Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2. After laying out the six layers of AI visibility in Part 1, they get into how an agency runs against that model: comparison content on satellite sites, narrow "query fan-out placements" that fill what AI answers are missing, and why models pass over the same facts when they sit on a brand's own domain. They also cover how a 250-person, fully remote team uses Cla...

Send us Fan Mail Is attribution dead? Not quite, says Dana DiTomaso of Kick Point, but it isn't healthy, and it was always a little fictional. Universal Analytics hid the gaps. GA4 and privacy law put them in plain sight. Dana joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to explain how much of your traffic you can really track, why a purchase that starts in ChatGPT can show up as four different channels, how a simple regression in Google Sheets forecasts bookings weeks ahead, why branded search is...

Send us Fan Mail AI answers get brands wrong all the time: old pricing, expired offers, comparisons nobody updated. Garrett French, James Wirth and Valerie Cecil of Citation Labs explain how they find where a brand drops out of an AI answer and what they do to fix it. James walks through the six layers the team audits (returned, retrieved, cited, mentioned, recommended, and framing), Garrett explains how they build 50–300 word prompts from customer-service logs and sales pages, and Valerie c...

Send us Fan Mail Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide) and Mark Kabana (Places Scout, now part of Yext) rejoin Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2 of our conversation. We get into how agencies are turning "AI visibility" into a product, why clients can't tell what it's worth, and what a Local SEO Guide × Local Falcon study found about where ChatGPT gets its local answers — no Google reviews at all, and a review-count plateau at around 200. Then the uncomfortable part: a 100-location fran...

Send us Fan Mail Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide) and Mark Kabana (founder of Places Scout, now VP of Data Innovation at Yext) join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal fresh off Brighton SEO San Diego for an open-agenda conversation: what the conference floor actually said about local's place in the industry, why a single search rank may already be a dead concept, and how permissioned, agentic browsing is quietly showing up inside everyday consumer AI tools. Topics include: why AI vendors alre...