The Podcast Deets

1️⃣  How the Ranking Factors Study Works

Timestamp: 00:00–07:20

Darren Shaw explains the methodology behind the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Dozens of experienced local search experts evaluate more than 180 potential ranking factors, scoring their impact across multiple areas including Local Pack rankings, organic results, conversions, and AI search visibility.

2️⃣ Reviews, Behavioral Signals & Traditional Local Ranking

Timestamp: 07:20–24:30

The panel discusses the growing importance of reviews—particularly review recency—and how Google likely uses them as a proxy for real-world engagement. They also debate whether behavioral signals like clicks, engagement, and brand demand may now outweigh traditional SEO signals such as links.

3️⃣ AI Search and the Future of Local Discovery

Timestamp: 24:30–43:30

The conversation shifts to the rise of AI-driven search interfaces such as ChatGPT and Gemini. The group explores how LLMs evaluate businesses differently—placing greater weight on mentions across trusted sites, curated lists, and industry citations rather than traditional link signals.

Key Takeaways

1. Reviews remain one of the most powerful ranking signals

• Volume, rating, and recency all matter.

2. Behavioral signals may be Google’s strongest advantage

• Clicks, engagement, and brand demand may increasingly drive rankings.

3. Link signals appear to be declining

• Content engagement and real-world mentions may matter more.

4. AI search prioritizes reputation across the web

• Expert lists, industry sites, and brand mentions play a larger role.

5. Google still has a structural advantage

• Google Business Profile data + browser behavioral data give it unmatched insight.

👇 Watch by topic:

00:00 Introduction – Darren Shaw & the Ranking Factors Study
01:10 Methodology of the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey
04:30 What's New in the Latest Survey
07:20 AI Search and the Future of Local Discovery
14:00 Review Signals and Why Review Recency Matters
18:30 Review Spam and Google's Enforcement Challenges
20:40 Surprising Findings and Divergent Opinions
24:30 The Decline of Link Signals
27:00 Behavioral Signals and Google's Data Advantage
30:20 AI Ranking Factors and Expert Lists
36:50 What Businesses Should Actually Focus On
41:10 Darren Shaw's AMA and Final Thoughts

Full Transcript of the Near Memo – Episode 247

Greg (00:10)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Near Memo with David, Mike and Greg. And today, very, very special guest, three verys, very, very, yes, super special, super excited to welcome Darren Shaw of Whitespark, who is now the steward of the Local Search Ranking Factors study started originally by David Mihm in 2008. And we wanna sort of unpack in a...

Mike Blumenthal (00:17)
Very, very, very, very special, special guest.

Darren Shaw (00:20)
So special.

Greg (00:36)
in a relatively short time, we could spend a lot of time talking about this, but we don't have hours and hours, but unpack what the main findings were, what was really interesting about the study and some implications of some of the things. And what's changed from previous years, because there's always changes. citations was a big, it was an example of that, where it was important, not important, are there other things like that going on? So Darren.

Why don't you give us a kind of overview of the methodology for people that don't know the background and any sort of caveats that you would attach to the findings and then we'll jump in.

Darren Shaw (01:15)
Sure, yeah. So the methodology is it's a grueling two hour survey. It takes about two hours to get through it. And it's really grown in annoyance since David was running it. So I keep making it longer and harder to do. And fortunately, the local search experts except for you, Mike, fortunately, most people are willing to keep doing it. I ask Mike every year and he's like,

David Mihm (01:26)
Thank

Darren Shaw (01:41)
He actually this year you straight up ignored me. I think you responded to any request that I had to ask you to

Mike Blumenthal (01:49)
I didn't realize they

were a person. I thought they were general. I thought everybody was giving me a hard time. You were just sending out a mass email. It went right to my spam folder.

Darren Shaw (01:59)
Yeah, it is sad to me, Mike, not to get your insights into this survey, but I understand. So, I understand. I'm going to get him right now. Yeah. This is where everyone needs to go to hear Mike Blumenthal's ideas on the local search ranking factors.

Greg (02:06)
You're gonna get them right now though. You're gonna get them right now.

Darren Shaw (02:17)
But yeah, so it's a huge survey. takes a really long time. you know, David used to do it as spreadsheets and then I took that over and it was an Excel spreadsheet. And then I built this whole custom tool and now I've moved to SurveyMonkey for the past couple of editions. And it just, it's this long survey. so what, there's two key components to it. One is the open-ended questions. So I ask a number of open-ended questions and people type their responses. I love that section of the report.

And then the other area of the report is the scoring of the factors and you score them across four different areas. So like, let's take a factor like keywords in your web page title tag, your landing page title tag, the page that you link to from your Google business profile. You're going to take that factor and you're going to score it from zero to five on how impactful you think that signal is.

for Local Pack rankings, local organic rankings, how impactful it is for conversions, like will it drive conversions, and how new for this year is how impactful it is for AI search. And so that would be like being visible in ChatGPT, in Gemini, and any of these sort of large language models. So that is the methodology. You did say the word.

caveat and I would say it's really important to know that this is not the inner workings of Google. We don't really have much insight. It's an opinion piece for sure. It is based off of what these people that I invite to do the survey. They've been doing local search for a very long time. They have clients they are in the trenches doing this work. And so it's really about like what are you seeing working.

if you could get 47 of the best local search experts in the world in a room and then ask them like, Hey, tell me what's happening. That's what this report is. And so I find it just like a really valuable report, but it is for the caveat is like it's opinions and some people's opinions are divergent and some people's opinions might be wrong. I don't know. It's opinions. Yeah.

Greg (04:27)
Okay, is there beyond the AI material, which you said was new, is there anything else that's different or new for 2026 versus previous surveys?

Darren Shaw (04:37)
I would say that I went a little crazy with the addition of new factors. 47 new factors were added to the survey. So it really expanded the length that it took to do the survey. But I worked really hard with my team. So my marketing team that I meet with all the time, we just really spent a lot of days going through the factor list, removing things, adding things, renaming things. So we really

revised the factor list this year. And so that's where 47 new factors came from. It's like a lot of stuff that we see happening, especially over the course of two years, because I haven't done it since 2023. There's new things that keep coming up like, and, we added those as factors because we want to say, okay, well, yeah, sure. We think this is a new factor. We've heard about people saying that this is impacting ranking. So we add that to the, to the survey.

and then we get to actually see where does it fall in the list. I would say that's what's what big and new to the survey this year would be the addition of the factors and then the addition of the whole new section on AI. But also I put a little bit more emphasis on the local services ads this year too. So I wanted to really highlight the local services ads section and I took all of the answers from the local services ads.

And I tabularized that data so that I could score it and figure out like what appears to be the most important. And so I expanded upon that. got more answers this year than I got previous edition. And I really think it's a critical thing. I know you guys do a lot of work in like PI law and it's like, if you're not in the LSAs, it's like, well, you're not getting a lot of leads. So LSAs become more more important. Google's doing a great job of monetizing their search.

Greg (06:24)
Yeah,

Congratulations, Google.

Darren Shaw (06:26)
Yeah, exactly.

Greg (06:27)
So let's jump into the findings. There's a lot of stuff in here. I just want to say this is an enormously valuable tool for people. And it's free. You don't charge for it. You don't turn it into a lead form. It's a sort of a gift to the industry. And I mean, obviously David started it, but it's just super valuable. so I think everybody appreciates the work that goes into it. What are the...

Mike Blumenthal (06:50)
Did your children recognize

you after you were done? I mean, after you came back home and were done with the tabulation?

Greg (06:53)
Yeah.

Darren Shaw (06:56)
Barely because actually I got

back from a trip. I went to the UK for Brighton SEO and I picked up COVID. So I was actually locked in the guest room quarantined for 10 days, which is when I got most of the like final work done on this like analysis report. So I truly was locked in a cave for 10 days finishing the report.

Greg (07:15)
Well...

God wanted you to finish it, so that's what happened, I guess. If you can filter out just through the density of all of this, what are the kind of main findings, the top level findings, if you had to present them on one slide at an event?

Darren Shaw (07:22)
I guess so,

Alright, that's a good question. I would say the top-level findings as a general rule and we see this every time we put it out, a lot of the fundamentals basically are the same and that's what we see almost every time that we release this this survey. But I'm always looking, I'm like trying to find like what's new what are the things?

The biggest thing that is new is we have a whole new search interface with AI mode, AI overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT These interfaces are changing the way that people discover information, including local businesses. So there are some people that rather than going to a Google search, they will type in to ChatGPT, hey, could you recommend a plumber in Chicago? And so they're going to get a list of results and.

ChatGPT will even put them on a map and they'll show you the results and then they'll explain why they pick those ones. And it's like, so what drives that? Because I really do think that's the future of search. think that Google is going to flip a switch and instead of the traditional search results, we're going to see AI driven as the default. And so that is majorly important. and I think there are a lot of the insights.

Mike Blumenthal (08:48)
I would just add to that,

Darren, I don't know if you followed, I did some searches now in legal and particularly in PI, but many they have, at least for the last week, are now showing AI overview local results instead of pack results, just to emphasize your point there.

Darren Shaw (08:50)
Yeah, you do.

Exactly.

Is coming. Yeah, this is this is where things are going. So the big insights from this year that we're seeing that's different. It's just being able to see what the consensus is amongst the local search experts about what you can do to improve your visibility in those LLM driven results. And so that that whole section is full of very interesting. I've taken all the factors.

So all the 187 factors have been scored for like, how does that, how do you think that impacts AI results? And so you will see that the chart itself or the list of factors for AI results is quite different than the list of factors for your traditional Local Pack map results. So the things that are at the very top of this list do not really match because to rank in local packs and Google Maps,

There's so much Google business profile stuff that is is playing into that and I think that the Google business profile stuff is being considered on Google's versions of the LLMs, but this question is pretty broad and wide open and so it's like All LLMs are we talking about ChatGPT? We're talking about Claud We talk about Perplexity because they may have different things So it's a little bit tricky to try and condense it into just AI search

because the different interface, it's almost like Google's ranking factors versus Bing's ranking factors. They're potentially different. And the same thing could be said about ChatGPT versus Gemini because in Gemini or AI mode, Google has a much richer database of Google business profiles. But as of the publication of this, I don't really think Google's doing a good job of pulling in data from their own local database. They seem to be like doing the LLM thing, which is mostly based on the website.

and the broader web reviews and mentions on industry sites.

David Mihm (11:01)
Yeah. I

would say I've I'm in labs. I'm sure all of us are. like I've been served a heavy dose of Web Guide in the last, I would say, two weeks. And I think Web Guide does a way better job of sort of leveraging Google's entire corpus of data about a business and about a topic than the than their typical Gemini or AI overview results do. I've been a pretty big

Greg (11:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Shaw (11:19)
⁓ exciting.

David Mihm (11:27)
proponent of Web Guide since it first rolled out just in terms of the user interface and also the quality of the results seems much, much higher to me. And I wouldn't be surprised if, well, I'm certainly rooting for the product team that's running that to sort of gain influence with Liz Reed for that to be the go-forward model. I think that that's a much more, from putting myself in Google's shoes, I just think that that positions them much better.

Darren Shaw (11:30)
Mm-hmm.

David Mihm (11:50)
in terms of result quality versus ChatGPT and all these other players.

Greg (11:54)
And it's less jarring, People keep talking about how AI mode is the future of Google search results. I don't think that that's true. It might be that AI mode kind of takes the place of AI overviews in some sense. But totally agree with David that the Web Guide is a much more user-friendly interface and it allows them in fact, I think to do,

Darren Shaw (12:02)
Mm.

Greg (12:17)
It's similar, somewhat similar to what they've got today, but cleaner and sort of better done. It's a better version. But, you know, we'll see what happens. They have to reconcile some of these things. They've got three or four things running around and they need to kind of bring them together eventually, which, you know.

David Mihm (12:33)
And

guess I would say that's what makes the timing of this particular survey for me, I think really interesting. Like it's, it's kind of great to have a kind of what I think is probably like the last sort of traditional local search result, uh, as the, as the kind of dominant paradigm of search. I wouldn't be surprised if early in 2026, we see something radically different, uh, from Google. Uh, once they get through the holiday period and they make sure they're not shooting themselves in the foot with respect to ads over Black Friday.

Darren Shaw (12:54)
Mm-hmm.

David Mihm (13:01)
But I think that this is going to be a really interesting snapshot of like, okay, in sort of the final phase of this paradigm, here's what mattered. And we're going to see, think, very different set of factors. If you do the survey next year or in 2027, I think it's going to look a lot closer to what the AI results say in this year's survey.

Darren Shaw (13:20)
Yeah, I love that. And actually, I was thinking the same thing as you were describing Web Guide I was like, it's so great that we captured this right before this. You can feel that paradigms shift happening. And so it'd be so interesting when I do the next edition to compare the two. I love that.

Greg (13:36)
In terms of the variables, I these are the same factors just ranked differently by the contributors and review signals is in the same place. It's got different weight, but it's in the same place in the Map Pack and in AI search. And then, know, other things are there, but they're shifted in different positions. You know, I think we talked a lot about reviews.

Darren Shaw (13:42)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Greg (14:01)
Were there any interesting review specific findings this year that you saw or that you've seen to date?

Darren Shaw (14:08)
Yeah, so

for people that follow Local Search closely, they probably saw a lot of people talk about review recency being a factor that in previous editions of the survey was maybe not quite on people's radar. And so we've seen that factor really increase in importance. Before most people were kind of thinking along the lines is it's like a numbers game. How many reviews do you have? That seemed to be like the number one thing like

You've got a good rating. You've got lots of reviews. You got more reviews in the competition. That seemed to be the thing that was most important for reviews. As of this edition, we're seeing an awareness that how recently you're getting reviews seems to be a major factor as well. like, You will actually see it happen for any of those brands that do the review burst requests, where they have a mailing list and then once a quarter they email the whole list and they say, Hey, can you leave us a review? And then they get a burst of reviews. You'll see them.

jump up to the top of the rankings. It'll have a positive impact and then they will slow down. It kind of tapers off until they get a new influx of reviews. And so the recommendation going forward is you need to be asking for reviews on a regular basis. If you stop getting reviews, you will slow down. Google cares about how fresh your reviews are. And that makes sense. Like if a business totally stops getting reviews, let's say you got 2,000 reviews, but they haven't gotten one in six months.

It's a little bit of a signal that that business is like, are they shutting down? What's happening in that business? Maybe we are not going to show that one of the results because nobody appears to be going there anymore. So I think that Google's algorithm is looking at this and review recency becomes one of the review specific factors that we're seeing some shifts in mind in thinking around.

David Mihm (15:41)
Yeah.

It's almost part of the behavioral signals bucket in terms of is this business still getting visits? Is it still selling things? Are people still booking things with it? I think it's absolutely, go ahead Greg.

Darren Shaw (16:02)
Totally.

Mike Blumenthal (16:02)
Thank

Greg (16:02)
It's it's.

No, it's totally, you're right, exactly. I didn't think about it that way. It's an engagement signal.

Mike Blumenthal (16:11)
Right. I mean, it's

roughly equivalent to a brand engagement signal. So it's not clear to me that it is the review specifically, or is it just a bigger part of just this engagement picture? We don't know. But driving that engagement, regardless of whether it's the review or the engagement, doesn't really matter, But you could interpret it as engagement, not as a review specifically. Maybe if people went and searched your brand that many times,

Darren Shaw (16:16)
Totally.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Blumenthal (16:34)
In the corner, you'd have equally good results. Who knows? Right, exactly.

Darren Shaw (16:36)
Yeah, even if they didn't write a review, they just did the thing that went to

your profile. They spent a bunch of time on there that that might have the same impact as someone doing the same thing, but then typing a review.

Greg (16:47)
Right, of demand, recognition of demand is a kind of a proxy for other values that are important. The other thing that I wanted to mention quickly is, isn't the sort of burst of reviews kind of scenario problematic from a review fraud perspective as well? You know, if you're getting, you know, if you go periods of time without any reviews and then here all of a sudden there's a lot of reviews that show up at once,

Isn't that as sort of a trigger potentially for some sort of algorithmic fraud review?

Darren Shaw (17:19)
will answer quickly and then I want to hear Mike's take, but basically I do not see Google doing much about review fraud. It's like, is a very arduous and difficult task to try and get review fraud taken down and Google's not taking action themselves. You have to beg and plead and use the product like make it happen. Basically. Yeah. Mike, what do what do you got to say about that?

Mike Blumenthal (17:19)
can answer that. Okay.

Greg (17:37)
You have to get an article in the New York Times and then they'll do it.

David Mihm (17:41)
Hahaha.

Mike Blumenthal (17:42)
So the answer to your question

specifically, Greg, there is a threshold of volume that will trigger the little red box warning that this business is getting, but it is very, very, very high. In other words, we've seen it. mean, Claudia has a good example of it, Tamina, where she had a client that opened a store and had a big influence on business. And then I don't know if she incentivized people to leave review, but the volume was so high in a couple of days that

Darren Shaw (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Blumenthal (18:08)
she got the flag. So the answer is yes, but it's a very, high number to trigger it.

Greg (18:13)
I think there was a point of sale review request scenario there also, if I remember her. Yeah, yeah. And Google, you know, that's a different conversation. So we're, yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (18:18)
Yes, it was point of sale, right?

But it speaks to this issue of does Google ever

do this? And the answer is yes, they do do it, but they don't want to do it too often. They never do it too often.

Greg (18:33)
We can call their enforcement capricious, whimsical. So what about any, I mean, you may not have an answer for this. I think you alluded to this during the prep. Were there any sort of outliers or major disagreements among the contributors?

Darren Shaw (18:37)
Sure, that's a good word. Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (18:37)
Lazy. Cheap.

Greg (18:54)
that you could, you know, that sort of pop out like there's somebody over here, I'm not asking you to name names, somebody over here really has a theory about something and it's very different than the rest. Was there some of that?

Darren Shaw (19:07)
I'm gonna name names because I think he would find it funny. Andrew Shotland, he put in his scoring, and I was surprised by it, that he scored like Google ads, like presence of like running ads across all the factors is like, you know, two. Everyone else is scoring this zero. And I'm like, that's interesting.

And also I have a lot of respect for Andrew Shotland the guy knows what he's talking about. He's he's an OG of local SEO. And so I emailed him, I asked him about it. And he was like, Well, I, I don't think it's a direct factor. But from a behavioral signal standpoint, it's interesting to think about the impact of ad and I think that that's where he's coming from. It's like, he's not scoring it super highly. But there is a thing there. And I was like,

It's divergent. He is divergent from what the most people are talking about with ads. It's like, ads don't impact ranking. Google's, you know, it's been tested and it's like, yeah, no, nobody thinks ads directly impact ranking, but it is cool to see some of these differences and then dig into them. Like what's happening there. And it's like, I agree. I think Andrew's right. I think that if you are running ads, then there's

potentially a ranking impact because the ads get more visibility, more brand search, more activity around, even from the LSA or even from like the, know, they just create more brand search and more activity on your website and you know, sure. All right, so that's cool. That's one of the ones that I noticed. I personally have a divergent opinion from what seems to be most people.

Greg (20:24)
It's a brand thing.

Darren Shaw (20:45)
on one specific factor, is whether or not you're showing your address on your Google business profile or you're hiding it. And there's a number of cases that make my take on this. I'm just like, what is happening here? Because one, I have seen two cases where we removed the address from the Google business profile and the rankings did not change at all. Perfectly stayed in exact place.

No change. So there's that. But let me just quickly explain. The idea is is that if you are a business that has an address showing on the profile and then to get into guidelines compliance Google says you don't serve customers at your location you need to hide your address so they remove the address. It is 100 percent true that very like a massive amount of people will see the rankings disappear. So as a result people think this is a ranking factor showing your address and your profile. Yes you're going to rank.

Not showing it. In fact, they people think this is such a huge ranking factor that it came in in this survey as number seven, the seventh most important thing you need to focus on. Because of that case where I've hidden the address and see no movement in rankings, it makes me think there's more going on here. And then I have other cases which are also quite interesting. Other cases I have seen was you remove the address.

And yes, it looks like you stopped ranking in Chicago. And now what you're ranking in a suburb of Chicago, what's happening there? Your rankings moved? that's because when you originally created your Google business profile, you created it here. You removed your address. Google only has one address still on record for your business and it's the previous address. So your pin, your ranking kind of position moved back to where you originally verified. So that's something we see happen all the time. You hide your address.

and you're ranking shift back to where you originally verified. The other case is I've seen this happen where.

David Mihm (22:38)
Hmm.

Darren Shaw (22:42)
The guy tells me, no, I'm telling you, Darren, I never moved my address that was on the profile was exactly the same as the address that I verified at. But when I removed my address, my rank has disappeared and I found them. They were 200 miles north in the desert. And so it's interesting to think about that. It's like, I think there's a bug. It's like, if you remove your address, Google is like, Oh no, where

Where is this business? I don't know where to locate them anymore. And so it throws a pin on the map somewhere, or I don't know how it works, but I think Google's system gets confused. And so I found this guy by doing a massive like statewide grid in our new local ranking grids. And I found the spot and then I could zoom in and be like, yeah, he some for some reason he's now ranking up there. So when you hide your address, do you lose your rankings? I think no, I think your rankings just

Mike Blumenthal (23:18)
Thanks

Greg (23:40)
They just become irrelevant to your business.

Darren Shaw (23:42)
They go somewhere

else. no, now you're ranking in the desert. You're ranking in you're ranking where nobody lives in the middle of middle of farmers field. So this is one factor where I, you know, you asked me about like divergent opinions. I may be the only one that thinks this but I'm like, I got to do more research on this because it's it is quite fascinating.

Greg (24:01)
No, there's logic there because Google probably does need to locate the business in order to respond. so even though their guidelines require you to remove your, I mean, the guidelines are at odds with what the machine is doing in the background in some way. There's some inconsistency there.

Darren Shaw (24:08)
Yeah, they got us out of PIN somewhere.

Yeah.

Yeah, something something's going on. There's more to the story that I don't have the answer to yet. I'm still researching.

Greg (24:28)
So what about any surprises? mean, we're talking about sort of divergent opinions or outliers. What about any surprises that popped out at you? You don't have to go deep into the data, but just things. Yeah, dude.

Darren Shaw (24:33)
Yeah.

David Mihm (24:36)
Okay.

Can

I share my biggest surprise, which is that if you look, I love this graphic at the top of the report this year, Darren, I know you've done it previously, but like just the, where you're grouping factors and, and showing what their sort of percentage importance was over the last X number of surveys, right? So you have 2018, 2019 all the way to today and the sort of starting to get precipitous decline of link signals, I think is very, very surprising. Um, again, I think that this is something

Darren Shaw (24:52)
You're the waiting.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, me too. I'm surprised too.

David Mihm (25:09)
You know, if we're just talking about AI results, I can kind of see that maybe link signals, you know, may not be as important for those, but based on the results that we're seeing in our user research and everything else, I mean, it still seems to be playing, uh, they still seem to be playing quite a strong role, uh, at the very least for organic results. Um, but even with respect to, to GBP, I think you see far fewer results today that are getting by purely on a spammy business name and 500 reviews than you used to.

Darren Shaw (25:36)
Mm-hmm.

David Mihm (25:37)
I think link signals still play a pretty big role in Google's sort of traditional results. I was surprised to see that, that just kind of continued fall off over the last five or seven years. So.

Darren Shaw (25:47)
Yeah, I think it's a reflection of like the general SEO sentiment about links. I think that you see in the broader world of SEO, a lot of people saying, I ranked a whole website number one with no links. Like you see people talking about that, right? And so the shift to content-based optimization and being really good. And actually I think what it is, is the, what people are becoming really aware of is

You can have great content with no links, but it's being shared in Slack groups on emails. It's being shared everywhere. And so it's getting all of the engagement behavioral signals and that's enough to keep it up. And so people are like, you don't need links. You need what Google really cares about, which is

Are the humans of the world engaging with your content? Do they like it? If they do, then we should rank it. And so this is a smart move from Google because it becomes more difficult to manipulate because they're looking for the real world signals and they're getting it from the behavioral signals. And so that's why we see links becoming like used to be like, this is actually how the algorithm really works, but they really increase their dependence, I believe on the behavioral signals.

And you called that out a long time ago, David. You were like, this is the future. This is how Google needs to do it. And yeah, you were right.

David Mihm (27:09)
I

still believe that behavioral signals are a big piece of the pie and I think still an underappreciated piece of the pie. I'm just surprised that kind of everybody seems to be sort of throwing links in the garbage. I think it's a bit of a premature death. yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren Shaw (27:21)
Yeah, I would agree that it's like, don't throw them out. You definitely still need the links. Yeah.

Greg (27:27)
Well, on the beat.

Mike Blumenthal (27:27)
Well, we've learned with Google,

we've learned with Google, they never throw an algorithm out. They reduce its importance. They keep them forever. So there's that. And, and it used to be, like you said, that people did follow links as a behavioral signal much more frequently than they do today. So, I mean, obviously all of that points to multiple factors, but how do you agree with David? Don't throw them off.

Greg (27:47)
Well,

there's an argument on the behavioral signals point. I mean, there's an argument that like, as we were discussing with reviews just a few minutes ago, that in some way, most of these things are proxies for behavior or are point to behavior or engagement. And they're just different channels of behavioral expression in a certain way. I don't wanna go too far with that, but I mean, I'm just sort of piggyback on David's point a little bit.

Mike Blumenthal (28:13)
Well, when you own the

browser market, you have those signals at a much higher rate than otherwise, right?

Darren Shaw (28:17)
you can see.

Greg (28:20)
Right. So why do you think, the antitrust trial exhibits and the API link and all the discussion about clicks and brand rewarding brands and all of that, that behavioral signals is kind of flat. It's flat versus last year. What do you think is going on there? You think people are just sort of tentative or uncertain? They don't think that, or they just, why do you think?

Darren Shaw (28:20)
Yeah, it's really interesting.

I know.

I don't have an answer

To your question, because I'm surprised. So you're asking me about surprises, I'm surprised. I thought you should see an inverse relationship of the link chart and the behavioral chart in my opinion. So why is it flat? I don't know the answer to that question. And I think there is some challenges with completing the survey. You think about how does a person fill out that section, the weightings? And so I got to...

Greg (28:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Darren Shaw (29:08)
Google spreadsheet, they put in the numbers and it tells them if it's calculated to 100 and they have to just be like, how important are Google business profile factors? How important are link factors? How important are these factors? So they gotta do these weightings. And this chart, I think it's very important to talk about this chart being one piece of the pie.

There are actually three other charts that I probably should have put in here. Maybe I'll make them post. But this is just local packs. So to rank in the Local Pack and Maps that's what we're looking at for the changes over time. I should make that more clear because this chart might look quite different for the changes over time for organic, local organic and for, well, I don't have the changes over time for AI search, but it would look different.

Greg (29:41)
Mm-hmm.

organic.

Darren Shaw (29:59)
And so maybe we would see the behavior, maybe people just think the behavioral stuff is more of a websitey signal for local organic. So you might actually see an increase in behavioral on the local organic side, but they're not really thinking that it's as important for activities on your Google business profile. So it's possible that that's why we see a little bit of difference there.

Greg (30:22)
Let's talk about the AI findings, because that's completely new for this year. And obviously, it's a hot topic of conversation. And we've seen this sort of pendulum swing from ChatGPT is taking over to a lot of SEOs now saying, you don't really need to pay that much attention, or it's all the same SEO. Just do good SEO, and you're taken care of. And it's such slight traffic anyway, you don't need to pay attention to it.

Darren Shaw (30:40)
Yeah.

Greg (30:45)
not why did you include it, what are the sort of interesting findings there? mean, we did already talk about the different order of the findings, but what else would you say about that?

Darren Shaw (30:56)
Yeah, I would say that it's quite insightful. actually really like this data and I really like the expert Q &A answers to like, what are you seeing working for AI search? So I think it's just a really interesting thing to be thinking about, especially if you think about Google switching to Web Guide or AI mode or Gemini, like these types of things. So it's like getting ahead of local search. But...

It's like, you know, to your point, a lot of SEOs are saying that it's the same. There's no different. You should have been doing all this SEO stuff before. You don't have to worry too much about it. If you're doing good SEO, you're doing good AI SEO. I won't, I won't say that other acronym. I won't say it. I'm not saying it. Yeah. So, you're, doing good AI SEO if you're doing good SEO.

Greg (31:36)
Don't use the offensive acronym. Okay.

Darren Shaw (31:44)
And so that is true to a point, but the reality is I think a lot of people were not putting enough emphasis on the things that the LLMs seem to really care about. And so if you were doing all those things before, then like Gold Star, you're doing great, but you know, there's only so much time in the day. And so these are some signals that appear to be very important for AI search that I think people need to start thinking about. And so my list for that is getting

listed on Expert Curated Best of Lists like best hot dog stands in New York city. Like, you know, those kinds of lists are really powerful. And so people don't write them. And if you are featured on them, then the LLMs are picking up on that and being like, well, they're listed on all 10 of the best lists in the city. So they must be good. And so it makes sense.

Mike Blumenthal (32:33)
Did you make a distinction

between curated lists and just Yelp algorithmic lists from trusted sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor?

Darren Shaw (32:40)
Yeah,

I don't have that this that distinction in the factor list. The factor is let me just find it. The factor.

David Mihm (32:48)
Presence of business

on expert curated best of and similar lists. Yeah

Darren Shaw (32:52)
Yeah, I know what's cool about

that factor, David is that this a factor you've had that in the list since like 2010 or something like that you've always had.

Greg (33:00)
Well,

it's a kind of a local citation, right? I the past. I mean, AI seems to rely very heavily on those kinds of lists when they exist. You know, the Eater and these Roundups.

Darren Shaw (33:03)
Yeah, but it's like the best local citation you could get.

Mike Blumenthal (33:13)
But they also rely on non-curated lists that are algorithmically generated from trusted sites. Yelp, TripAdvisor.

Greg (33:17)
Well, yelp.

David Mihm (33:18)
So that's, I would argue

Darren Shaw (33:18)
Yelp is a great example.

David Mihm (33:20)
that that's number five, which is authority of third party sites on which reviews are present.

Darren Shaw (33:25)
Yeah, yeah,

or industry relevant domains, just like having a listing on those like, but but then you're still not in those. I do think it's interesting question, Mike, like, separate those two types of the ones actually expert curated, the type that you cannot manipulate, you just have to be good to be listed, or the type that is algorithmically driven by the directories. I do think that it might be worth

David Mihm (33:30)
Yep. Yep.

Darren Shaw (33:53)
pulling those out as two separate factors and they are currently not. But it's interesting. ⁓

David Mihm (33:57)
I just, takeaway

is I, this to me looks like a set of ranking factors that Google has sort of been striving for, for a really long time, right? There's a lot of unspammie stuff here, just in terms of being mentioned on all of these various websites. ⁓ You know, you don't see links anywhere at the top of the page. You know, it's, yeah. And so it's about unstructured citations, you know, prominence on these big domains, presence on lists.

Darren Shaw (34:07)
Right.

Yeah.

Right? Yeah, I care about links.

David Mihm (34:23)
Like it's more sort of traditional PR type stuff, which I think Google has probably been, you know, attempting to rank businesses that do that well for a long time. And AI is finally, you know, we see it in Web Guide frankly, like sort of allowed them to sort of leapfrog all these old, you know, keyword stuffing and review spamming and all these other techniques. So I think it's a really interesting, you know, I'm

Mike Blumenthal (34:44)
Although I would

contend they've been doing a knowledge graph in local for years, these things, right? I mean, separate from organic.

Darren Shaw (34:49)
Yeah.

David Mihm (34:50)
But

yeah, but we still, mean, I would say that these are, these are less spammable than Google business profiles are today, for example. So.

Mike Blumenthal (34:58)
Right.

But these are the factors that have long been involved in locals. What I'm saying is citations, expert curated lists, we've known them noted and highlighted and emphasized by Google. So I don't see this as a huge change, but.

Darren Shaw (34:59)
I think there's a very

Of course. Yeah.

There's one thing very interesting to me about the AI search visibility factors, and it is a distinct lack of behavioral signals. So if you look through this list, like they are not in there. And that's because I think people are thinking about this from the ChatGPT perspective, right? So they just don't have access to that data.

Another reason why I think Google has a stranglehold on this industry and it's because it's like one, yes, they've got the ultimate database of local businesses. So from, from a local search perspective, Google will continue to be king in my opinion, because nobody else has the rich data that they have in their Google business profiles. Businesses care about keeping their profile up to date with fresh information, real information. They populate the hell out of it. Just builds up Google's data set.

And so especially in an AI driven world, Google has so much data there. But they are also the keepers of the behavioral signals. They have all that data.

Greg (36:09)
Well, mean,

now you have Atlas. It remains to be seen how widely adopted it is. both for Plexity and ChatGPT release browsers, I think, exactly for this reason. Yeah. ⁓

Darren Shaw (36:18)
Yeah, good luck to them. I don't see

that really catching up because Google is such a head start.

David Mihm (36:23)
There's not exactly a warm reception for Atlas

Greg (36:24)
It's not.

David Mihm (36:26)
in the tech press from what I can see.

Greg (36:28)
Well,

Darren Shaw (36:28)
Yeah.

Greg (36:29)
all the security issues are problematic. But I'll tell you that I'm using it a lot and I like it. I mean, I'm using it in tandem with Chrome. I'm using it as like the substitute for the Mac, the ChatGPT client that sat on the desktop. That's how I'm using it. It's just to quickly access it and not have to go back and forth to tabs. We're kind of going to bump up against our time pretty soon.

A couple more things to talk about. So you mentioned just a few minutes ago that people can't do everything, right? In the context of, if there's a list of a hundred things you should be doing, nobody gets to that final set of factors. What are the biggest difference makers here that people should really understand? I mean, you've got it all laid out in terms of the weightings, but if they had to focus on a manageable list of things, what would those be?

Darren Shaw (37:19)
I would say, know, well, it depends on what you're talking about. AI, you're talking about local packs.

Greg (37:25)
Let's

talk about traditional local search.

Darren Shaw (37:27)
Yeah, then

it's, you know, getting your primary category, right. It's super key. is reviews, reviews, reviews. It's just review volume pays multiple dividends because of course Google is using the reviews directly as a ranking factor, but it also really drives behavioral signals, which and conversion. It's just so powerful reviews have, should be your number one focus. If you do not have a review strategy in place, like do it today, you've got to fix your review strategy.

Greg (37:43)
And conversions, obviously, that's the...

Darren Shaw (37:55)
Ongoing strategy and you need to continue refining it and tweaking it because it is so powerful in local search and it will 1000 % pay the dividends for you later when you know Web Guide becomes the default because Google has all that data. All those reviews will continue to become will continue to provide value. So it's like the reviews reviews reviews for sure

I would love to see people put more emphasis on behavioral signals. I think it's true on both the Google business profile side of things and on the local organic website side of things. You want to make sure your title tags are click worthy. You want to make sure the reviews are making your profile click worthy. You want to have videos on your profile so that your profile is engaging. People dwell on it. They spend more time in it and you want to make sure that your

profile and your website are answering the questions that people are interested in so discovering what those questions are and then making sure that everywhere on the internet you're answering. People don't even think about this: make sure those questions are being answered in your citations like when you write your business description I can tell you what the vast majority of businesses have done. They wrote a description for their business in

2007 when they started their company and that description has been used on every citation on the internet since then. This is like you got to now rethink that write a really good description in semantic triples: This business is this and this business does this you want to make it very clear and understandable for the robots what you're doing and I think that it's like You know

Citation description optimization is a hot new tactic for 2026. I think people need to be thinking about that. you know, you've got it There is a shift in how you optimize a web page that we're seeing happening because we're realizing that the LLMs are interpreting things a bit differently. No more long long pages just 10,000 words being more succinct being more clear in your writing being more like

Greg (40:05)
Structured.

Darren Shaw (40:05)
very descriptive,

less flourish, just saying we are this, we do these things and then writing it in that format for the robot and then also adding the like, and this is why you wanna hire us for the conversions for the humans, right? There's this shift happening in the way that we write website content and optimize website content. But I would say.

Those are the huge takeaways, like the huge things that you really have to be focusing on is just kind of like, how do you present yourself on your website, your Google business profile and the broader web and reviews, reviews, reviews, reviews. You just got to keep reviews coming. They do not only get your reviews on Google, diversify your review strategy, particularly on those industry specific sites because we are like, look, the LLMs care about your reviews on other sites, but everyone on this.

podcast would be saying, yeah, Google's always cared about it. You should have been doing this for a very long time because Google was using it too. You're just finally becoming aware of it. so yeah, review diversification would be another thing I would say.

Mike Blumenthal (41:09)
As they say, I resemble that remark.

Darren Shaw (41:11)
Totally. Yeah.

Greg (41:13)
So we could talk about a whole bunch more things, but I think this has been a great kind of discussion of the, of at least at a high level and you should definitely check out the report itself, which is available on the WhiteSpark website. think linked from the top of your homepage. If it's, if it's still there, any sort of final words of wisdom from anybody here about the report or about local SEO or the future of local SEO that you want to throw in?

David Mihm (41:39)
I want to promote Darren's Ask Me Anything on Reddit coming up next week. So if you have questions and you or you want to sort of get into a conversation with Darren, Darren share the details because I don't I just know what's happening.

Greg (41:42)
⁓

Darren Shaw (41:43)
yeah. Thanks.

Yeah, so I don't know if you'll publish this by the time it's happening, but on Monday. Well, you are fast. What a production team. So yeah, Monday, November 10th I'm doing an ask me anything about the local search ranking factors on the WhiteSpark subreddit. So if you just look for WhiteSpark on Reddit, you're going to. Find our subreddit and pinned at the top will be an ask me anything, so I'll be answering any questions that anyone has about the local search ranking fact.

David Mihm (41:55)
I think we're hoping to publish it today. Yeah.

Greg (41:55)
Yes, yes, yes.

Darren Shaw (42:18)
And I'm gonna keep it open to it's like gonna ask me anything anytime. It's an AMAA So it's gonna be running forever and so anytime anyone has a question that's the place to go to ask because the LLMs love Reddit and so this is be like a nice addendum to the local search ranking factors

Greg (42:38)
Well,

so I was going to say this is not only a sort of an opportunity to get questions answered on the local search ranking factors, but it's a demonstration of a Reddit strategy, a Reddit optimization strategy.

Darren Shaw (42:51)
Yeah, leading

by example. That's what I'm trying to do here.

Greg (42:55)
Yeah.

All right, well, thank you.

David Mihm (42:56)
building your prominence

on a key industry relevant domain for SEO.

Darren Shaw (43:00)
It's perfect,

Greg (43:01)
Exactly.

Darren Shaw (43:01)
yeah.

Greg (43:01)
Although Reddit did say the other day, I think in their Q3 earnings call that they're not seeing traffic from LLMs, which is kind of interesting. I think this is a longer conversation which we don't need to get into, but I think the analytics are problematic here and drawing definitive conclusions about what's going on.

David Mihm (43:06)
I saw that. Yeah.

Darren Shaw (43:17)
The very

problem, LLM data is just impossible. There's not good data. Yeah.

Greg (43:21)
Right,

right. All right, well thank you very, much, Darren, for taking the time to talk us through this. And I'm sure we'll be talking about it more in future weeks. And there's a lot here to digest. And thanks for doing the survey again. ⁓ And everybody, thanks for.

Darren Shaw (43:35)
Yeah. And thanks to you

guys. Yeah. Honestly, I love you guys so much. You are the greatest in the industry and it's an honor to do this survey. It's an honor to, for, for me, for David to entrust me with that survey. He, he developed something really special in this industry and, for me to run with it, it's just, it's, it's, an honor of my life. So thank you, David. Thanks to all of you guys.

Greg (43:56)
And it's,

yeah, thank you. Thank you again. Thanks for listening.