Small business marketing runs on last-touch instinct rather than measurement — so as consumer journeys sprawl across Google, social, reviews and AI, owners overcredit the channels where they can see a response and underinvest in the Google surfaces and review volume that still decide most local purchases.

Myles's Three Surprises

Myles names the three findings that stood out to him at (05:02); a fourth, on reviews, comes later (24:25).

Takeaways

• Owners rank Google fifth; consumers still start there. Asked for their top two sources of new customers, owners put word of mouth and social media first and AI tools (23%) third, with the website and Google tied at 22%. Yet 61% of consumers start a local search on Google or Maps and 71% use Google at some point. Myles recalls BrightLocal data from roughly ten years ago in which about 75% credited Google and SEO. (05:02–05:55, 12:01–12:48)
• "They came from my website" is a last-touch illusion. Without call tracking, an owner cannot see that leads arrive through the Google Business Profile, Mike argues. A form fill on the website probably began with a Google search for the category, not the brand. Multi-touch analytics defeat professionals, so small businesses fall back on what they can see. (07:46–08:27)
• AI confidence runs ahead of AI evidence. 65% of owners say they are working on AI visibility, which Myles calls an incredibly high number. Mike's reply: how many times have you looked for yourself in your AI? Greg adds that owners live in AI tools for their own business questions, which inflates its weight in their minds. AI and Google came within a point of each other as customer sources. (03:22–04:08, 08:55–10:19)[^1]
• AI shortlists; Google verifies. Only 8% of consumers start a local search on an AI tool, and most then go elsewhere to confirm. Of those who start on AI, 43% go on to Google. Myles describes searchers moving through two or three platforms until they reach a trust threshold, then making contact. (10:20–12:48)
• Sycophancy skews owners' sense of AI. Myles thinks owners adopted AI so fast partly because it is conversational and built-in flattery makes them feel like a legend. They then project their own heavy usage onto customers. (11:34–12:01)
• Channel choice follows how a business trades. Visual businesses such as salons, restaurants, fashion and hotels lean on Instagram and TikTok. Credibility businesses such as legal and medical practices invest in the website to prove authority. BrightLocal's niche data shows health businesses leading on active websites (58%) and GBPs (52%). (15:35–17:24)
• Social wins because owners can see it working. Greg says DMs and inquiries act as a stand-in for analytics, and owners already use social in their personal lives. Myles contrasts that immediacy with SEO's black box, where fewer clicks now come back from a page full of ads and AI Overviews. (17:24–19:55)
• Asking for reviews isn't producing review volume. About 65% of owners say they ask for reviews and roughly half respond to them. Still, 47% have fewer than 20 Google reviews, the same share of consumers who won't use a business below 20. Myles's rule of thumb: to get 10 reviews, you probably have to ask 100 people. (24:25–25:57, 29:52–30:00)[^2]
• Review norms are local and situational. In Mike's rural market, 20 reviews is a lot, and a lawyer may have one or two. A dental cleaning or an insurance policy is hard to review warmly, and operational excellence decides whether asking works at all. Survey averages blur geography, which BrightLocal did not capture. (26:44–28:13)
• For referral-saturated businesses, the job is retention, not acquisition. Mike treats his handyman, plumber and HVAC people "like gold," a virtual Rolodex. Those tradespeople need reputation monitoring more than marketing. Myles argues they need a CRM for their best 150 customers; Mike adds answering the phone. Greg sees an opening for an AI-native, turnkey CRM. (30:35–32:29)
• AI could push agencies downmarket, if trust holds. Myles wonders whether a consultant using AI judiciously could serve 30 clients instead of 10 and cut fees enough to reach florists. Greg counters with the agency trust problem: overpromising, long SEO timelines and churn when results aren't visible. (36:32–38:29)
• Google's local lead is colliding with its ad math. GBP's account team pushes partners for richer business data, and Myles thinks Google fears ChatGPT more than social. Mike notes local now sits under Ads, which funds the AI build-out. Myles says he told Google LSAs cost too much for businesses that don't answer the phone. Meanwhile OpenAI is reportedly building a "Claim your business in ChatGPT" hub. (39:51–42:16, 44:56–48:13)[^3]

Related Reading

• Small Business Marketing Report 2026 — BrightLocal's survey of 1,002 US owners of 1–50 employee local businesses; the episode's subject.
• Customers still use Google, but small businesses don't think it's important — Chapter 1: channel rankings, niche breakdowns and GBP activity (85% have one; 35% keep it active).
• Small businesses can't keep up with consumer review expectations — Chapter 2: the 20-review threshold.
• 65% of small businesses are working on AI visibility — Chapter 3: confidence versus checking.
• 85% of small business owners make marketing decisions alone — Chapter 4: time, budget, complexity and ROI barriers.
• Google is #1 for local search, but three-quarters use more than one channel — the consumer side: 1,227 US searchers, multi-channel journeys and AI verification.
• Nearly half of consumers are asking AI for business recommendations — BrightLocal's LCRS 2026 AI cut: 6% to 45% in a year.
• OpenAI Working On ChatGPT Tools For Business — Search Engine Roundtable on the reported "Claim your business in ChatGPT" analytics hub.
• Deconstructing Google's Local Guides and Photo Updates — Near Media's earlier read on what Local Guides numbers say about Maps usage.
• 3 updates that make contributing to Maps easier — Google's own "over 500 million contributors" figure, checked live on air.

Practitioner Notes

• The legal vertical is the counter-case. Greg places law firms at the sophisticated, Google-focused end of the spectrum (21:19). Myles's credibility-business point, where legal and medical lead with the website, maps directly onto Near Media's Choosing a Lawyer consumer work. Treat the SMB averages here as a floor, not a picture of PI marketing.
• Audit GBP activity, not GBP existence. BrightLocal finds 85% of owners have a profile but only 35% keep it active. Greg suspects some "have a GBP" answers are owners who saw an unclaimed profile on a brand search (38:35–39:13). In onboarding audits, check last update, Posts, services and attributes, not just whether the listing is verified.
• Install call tracking before arguing attribution. Mike's opening question (03:17) is the practical fix for the Google-ranks-fifth finding. Until GBP calls and direction requests are counted, owners will keep crediting the website and word of mouth.
• Benchmark review counts against the local pack, not a national number. Mike's rural point and Myles's "dominate the competitive range" advice (28:22–29:01) converge: set targets from the competitors in the client's own market.

Concepts

• Trust threshold — The point at which a searcher, having checked a business across several sources, feels confident enough to make contact. Myles's description of how multi-touch journeys end.
• Last-touch illusion — Crediting the final visible step (a website form, a call) as the source of a customer, when the journey began on Google, social or AI. The reason owners rank their website above Google.
• Visual vs. credibility businesses — Myles's split between businesses that sell on how things look (salons, restaurants, retail), which gravitate to Instagram and TikTok, and those that sell on authority (legal, medical), which invest in websites.
• Everything everywhere all at once — Myles's shorthand, borrowed from the film, for what AI optimization asks of a local business: consistent, fresh presence on every surface consumers and AI models check.
• Operational excellence — Mike's recurring caveat that review volume and sentiment follow how well the business actually performs, on delivery and on answering the phone, not just whether it asks.
• Local as bulwark — Google's local data (places, reviews, Local Guides contributions, Android and Maps distribution) as the asset hardest for ChatGPT and others to replicate.
• The Rolodex effect — In tight-knit or rural markets, good tradespeople are kept by referral and loyalty, making them less dependent on, and less interested in, public reviews.

Pick your starting point:

00:00 Intro: BrightLocal's 2026 SMB survey
01:34 Survey methodology
05:02 Google ranked fifth by owners
05:55 Owners' confidence in AI visibility
07:46 The last-touch attribution illusion
10:40 8% start on AI; Google verifies
11:34 Sycophancy and AI adoption
15:35 Visual vs. credibility businesses
17:24 Why owners prefer social media
19:57 SEO confusion and GBP neglect
24:11 The review gap
31:40 CRM over acquisition
36:32 Can AI make agencies affordable?
38:35 What Google risks in local
41:50 ChatGPT's business hub & Local Guides
44:56 Google's ad conflict and LSA costs

Full Transcript

The Near Memo — Myles Anderson, BrightLocal

Clean reading transcript (final edit, recorded November 9, 2026)

Editor's note: This transcript follows the final Riverside edit of the episode, so timestamps match the exported video and audio (the edit opens with the Near Memo intro). Stutters, false starts and filler removed in the edit are gone here too, and the few doubled words still audible in the edit (mostly inside crosstalk) are collapsed for reading; short backchannel ("yeah," "right," "okay") has been folded into the main speaker's turn, and a handful of clear transcription errors are fixed. Wording is otherwise left faithful to what was said, including speaker-side slips, which are listed at the end.

Greg Sterling (00:11)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Near Media Podcast, The Near Memo. Today with Myles Anderson, co-founder and CEO of BrightLocal, which is a SaaS and services business, catering to local businesses and multi-location brands that market locally. Hopefully I didn't botch that description. But we've been teasing your appearance for the last couple of weeks and now you're finally here and BrightLocal, among other things, does a lot of interesting consumer and business research. Most recently, you put out the results of a survey of small businesses that had some very, very interesting findings about what they think is working, where they think their customers are coming from, their own self assessment of their marketing prowess. And some of those things really seem to fly in the face of what consumers do. And we wanna talk about those findings and then talk about their implications for the broader market. And I think that they also are reflective of some of the things that enterprises are doing or not doing as the case may be, sort of in broad strokes. So welcome, Myles. Thanks for being here.

Mike Blumenthal (01:14)
And some of those differences maybe due to just analytics not really dealing with multi-touch very well. So…

Greg Sterling (01:18)
Yes. That's right. Yeah, so welcome and thanks for being here, Myles, as always. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the survey. Give us the context, give us the history, the sample size, what you guys were trying to do and we'll get into it.

Myles Anderson (01:33)
Absolutely. So we have done a couple of different surveys that we'll probably draw on today. The first one was a consumer survey. We surveyed 1200 consumers in the U.S. to understand more about how they search and find businesses today. Obviously, looking at traditional channels, but then bringing in AI and understanding how that is influencing and changing, their kind of consumer buying journey. And then we did another study of just over a thousand U.S. kind of small businesses, one to 50 headcount They've got to have a physical local presence and they've got to be in the US. And that was just for business owners. So we've done a couple of previous surveys where we've talked to either kind of owners, managers or sort of principal kind of operators. This year was really just targeting owners of those small businesses all in the US or with a physical presence.

Greg Sterling (02:18)
Did you ask about whether or not they had a internal, external marketing person or were working with an agency?

Myles Anderson (02:24)
We asked them whether they were principally involved in making decisions around local marketing. And 98% yet said that sort of buck sort of stops with them. Around 7 or 8% of them said they had an in-house marketing person that they kind of shared some of the deliverable responsibilities with. But we didn't ask specifically whether they were using an external agency. So a lot of it is about the decision making choice internally. And absolutely the buck stops with them. They are primarily responsible for it, often in quite a lonely way that it's really up to their understanding and abilities to kind of, you know, sort of make decisions. I expect that quite a few of them do use either consultants or agencies or even freelancers to do some of the execution. But in terms of whether they've decided to spend their budget, deciding to figure out which channels work, a lot of that decision making, they are the kind of driver.

Mike Blumenthal (03:17)
Did you track any tactical things like do they have call tracking, for example?

Myles Anderson (03:22)
We didn't get into that, but I think there's a really interesting thing to consider. Cause I think a big part of where some of the data comes out in the study, particularly when they are very confident in many respects about their visibility in AI, it was one of the key surprising findings is that 65% of them, even up to 85% yeah, very confident that we are being found in AI by potential customers. I was just wondering What questions are you asking? What prompts are you putting in and what data are you... To track that. How biased is AI being? So, yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (03:50)
How many times have you looked for yourself in your AI?

Greg Sterling (03:53)
Well, I think that's what it is. Yeah, that's what it is that they're doing these very informal searches looking for themselves and they see themselves periodically and they probably make assumptions that they're being found. What you're saying about the business owner being the primary decision maker, often the person who executes the marketing, not always, is very consistent year over year for many, many years, I'll just throw in one survey result from 2024 where I was involved. We asked, what are the channels you use for marketing and what do you think are the most effective channels? We gave people the same list. These were small business owners. And more or less the lists are the same. I mean, there were slight changes in the effectiveness list, but they were pretty consistent. So business owners tend to think the things that they are doing are working. And it's bizarre. I guess if you're getting business and you're doing all this marketing and you think, well, it must be working because I'm getting business. So you make these assumptions. But why don't you give us at a high level what you thought were the most interesting or significant findings of the study?

Myles Anderson (05:02)
Yeah. The three that really caught my eye out of that were really intriguing. One is the kind of level of disillusionment that I think a lot of local business owners have with Google as a channel. So, you know, we asked them, you know, name two channels that drive most of your customer acquisition or your customers to your business? And they put Google in fifth. So word of mouth came out top, then it was social media. Then it was. AI and AI was, equally balanced with they come straight from my website, which is a curious one, given how did they find out your website in the first place? And then Google came out with any 20, 22% of businesses citing it as a really key channel. So it's something I found that pretty intriguing. And when I looked back, 10 years ago, look at some original data we had, you know, 75% of people said that, you know, kind of Google and SEO was a huge driver for them. So something has happened to dissuade or put off businesses from really thinking that Google is a channel to invest in and to take seriously. Second one is their confidence they had that they were being found in AI. And there were two things there, but 85% of them said that they were really confident that their businesses was being found in AI and being well represented. And then 65% of them said that they were actively managing and doing things to support their AI visibility, which I thought was an incredibly high number. And I was wondering how many of them correlate the work they're doing on their website, know, offsite stuff, to both AI visibility and to traditional search visibility. And I think the sort of third one there was that, just the ever sort of persisting challenges that they've got about investing in marketing. Cause you know, even though, you know, 98% of business owners say that they look after their marketing, you know, it's about a quarter of them say, actually marketing doesn't work for me. What's the point in doing it? It's not driving the leads. And then they've cite, lack of time, lack of knowledge, lack of budget, and then also lack of kind of visible ROI. And you mentioned kind of data points, you know, a second ago. And I think one of the key challenges is that most local businesses aren't that strategic with their sort of thinking about marketing and they're not particularly data driven. Making some quite big assumptions here. But I think a lot of them are going off gut and feel and instinct, rather than I've got some really concrete data about what's driving performance. And that's going to be where I put my money or put my time. So yeah, I think it's a really interesting psychological insight into how business owners thinking about the kind of growth of AI, how they see themselves within it, what's holding them back from investing in marketing. And then we lay that across the kind of consumer side of things, you see a real gap between how business owners think about the opportunity with marketing and what consumers are really doing, particularly when it comes to using different channels to find local businesses.

Mike Blumenthal (07:45)
An example of that, if they're not doing call tracking, they have no idea that their leads are coming from Google profile, right? So there's this gap in technology, but there's also a gap in attribution. I mean, there's this last touch attribution, like you said, about the website. Somebody called me from my website or sent a form for my website. Well, they didn't start on your website. They didn't search probably didn't search for your brand. They probably went to Google, found your website and or someplace and came to it.

Myles Anderson (08:11)
I went from there. Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (08:12)
Went from there, right? So that speaks to the complexity though. Analytics are too complicated for me to really understand with multi-touch, like with the complex journeys that we see in our user behavior. I don't know how a small business could ever expect to And then finally, some of this attitude change has to do with how successful the AI companies have been at propagandizing their products over the last two or three or four years. They've been in the news cycles almost every day. Good, bad, or indifferent. I think it was Gypsy Rose Lee said that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. I have clients say, gee, why does Google mean anything anymore if everything's going to AI, So a lot of contributing to that lack of the insecurity.

Greg Sterling (08:55)
The A the AI number and the Google number in terms of where the customers are coming from were comparable, right? In the hierarchy of channels that are driving customers, customer acquisition.

Myles Anderson (09:04)
Yeah, it was a percentage point. I think AI tooling drove, 23% said that's where customer is coming from and 22% said Google. So it wasn't a gulf between them. AI was, I don't think you would have seen the same result last year.

Greg Sterling (09:17)
Right. Back to the analytics point, there is absolutely zero analytics that they're getting. I mean, Google GA4 is starting to show some analytics from their own AI, I believe, but they have zero visibility unless they're seeing a click through from ChatGPT or something comparable. But we know from consumer behavior that the number of clicks coming from AI is far, far less than you know, traditional sources. So there's a leap of faith, maybe based on what Mike is saying, is that they're so enamored of AI that they're making these assumptions that may not be accurate. But the one final comment about AI is that they have adopted AI themselves. Small businesses were pretty early in adopting AI, which is in contrast to previous small business trends around marketing channels. And many of them do rely on AI to answer questions about various marketing things and business. So they're in AI probably all the time, asking marketing questions. And that gives the AI additional weight in their mind, I suspect.

Myles Anderson (10:19)
Yeah. I think you've really kind of nailed it there. I mean, you can't really look at AI from an attribution perspective and say that's what it is because we know that the number of clicks coming through are considerably lower than any other kind of channel. From a consumer study, the panel of 1200, we found that 8% started their search on an AI tool. But then the vast majority went somewhere else to confirm what they found. And so if you're looking at that kind of last click attribution, it's not coming direct from an AI tool because people have got like a multi-step journey as part of their kind of buying journey. You know, they're looking at one platform, they're going to two or three others potentially just to confirm and corroborate what they've seen. Then they're kind of reaching like a trust threshold. Like I'm confident in this business. And then they make contact. So AI plays an increasingly important role in that journey. It's not always the first place they start, it's not always the last place they end, but it plays a really important role in kind of building that picture and that building up that kind of level of trust. So it's really important, but I think it gets kind of blown out proportion one just by the hype and the kind of PR that it gets and they kind of, you know, it just sort of sucks up so much oxygen in that space. And then absolutely local business owners have really embraced it to an amazing degree, probably because it's conversational, because it continually tells you how great you are. You know, it's just got some wonderful inbuilt sort of sycophancy that makes you feel like a legend. The first time you kind of use it. And it does explain things in terminology that local business owners can probably kind of grab their heads around. So they're translating their own usage into like, if I'm using it like this, then everyone else has got to be using it, like, you know, to the kind of sort of same degree. So I think there is definitely an increase in users to consumers, but I think it's being, it's got additional percentage points being misattributed to it at the sort of sake of Google. Because actually what we really found is actually that still the majority of searches start on Google. It's like, I think it was 61% split across Google and kind of Google Maps. But then it was actually up to 71% of all kind of buying journeys touched Google at one point. Particularly coming from other platforms first, like found a business on ChatGPT. I'm not entirely sure whether it's really there or it's existence or I want more information. I'm just going to Google it. I'm going to Google Maps, get driving directions, get further information, and then purchase. So Google still plays that leading role from a starting perspective, but then also the leading role from a confirmation and verification perspective.

Mike Blumenthal (12:48)
I know you do citation work at BrightLocal. Do you also report on Google and Apple business calls and searches and website visits and driving directions or not? And I'm curious what you see in that.

Greg Sterling (13:02)
you mean from for maps? You talking about for maps?

Myles Anderson (13:05)
From within insights.

Mike Blumenthal (13:05)
Well g Google Insights, which is Google local search and maps, and Apple Insights or whatever they call it, which is Apple Maps. And do the trends there reinforce the lowering of confidence in Google as a source?

Myles Anderson (13:22)
I don't actually have any really current data on that. We are rolling out a sort of study where we've got about 300,000 connected GBPs that are kind of OAuthed the sort of platform. But actually we are releasing a kind of new kind of sort data analysis sort platform that anonymizes all that, enables us to kind of do that. But I haven't got any kind of fresh data to kind of talk about that with confidence.

Greg Sterling (13:43)
One of the things that I think we should mention is that, you know, we're talking about averages and we're making broad generalizations. There are some small businesses that are quite sophisticated. There are some that are quite savvy in terms of marketing and analysis. But you broke out several verticals. Retail healthcare automotive and maybe some others, a bunch of others. And there were differences in these verticals in terms of what they were focused on in as marketing channels. Talk a little bit about that Is there an explanation that you formulated for why there are differences by vertical?

Myles Anderson (14:18)
I think there is, just to lay the sort of scenes around, think what we see actually in terms of the signups for our platform. So traditionally, we've been very agency focused since the start and agencies, are by far and away the biggest segment of customers that we have. But interestingly, over the last year, if I look at the growth of the different sort of segments of people who are signing up for BrightLocal and using it, our agency segment has grown at about 8%. Year on year, but our SMB segment has grown about 45%. And it has been an amazing kind of hockey stick year for that particular segment, which really points to the fact that more business owners are feeling more emboldened about taking care of their kind of marketing. I think maybe driven by the information they're getting from AI, helping them understand, you know, what marketing strategy kind of needs to have within it. And also maybe as you said, they've become more technically aware. Actually interesting when COVID happened and a lot of local business owners went home and sat around wondering what was going to happen. About three or four weeks in, we suddenly saw them really getting one of the things I can do. I can get hold of my website. I can upgrade that. I can take hold of my kind of digital marketing. And I think that since then, they've become much more kind of digitally enabled and much more kind of technically aware. And I think AI has only accelerated that in a kind of general sort of sense. In terms of the kind of channel breakdown, what we found is actually the sort of social media as a channel. We remove word of mouth, not really necessarily a channel that you can kind of do much within. Social media comes out sort of above Google, even above the website. Lot of local businesses will have a Facebook page, they'll have Instagram business, and they'll rely on that enormously to... To generate awareness and drive customers, particularly in lifestyle focused businesses or businesses that are particularly visual. So beauty, hairdressing, know, sort of fashion, retail, restaurants, hotels, those where you can, in a sense, judge the quality of what you might buy off of imagery. Those types of businesses, really sort of, you know, make great use of Instagram and TikTok. They make much less use of X because, it's quite hard to describe the great food you produce or a great haircut just using text. And so they ignore the, I think they gravitate to channels that work for them based on the medium and based on their kind of characteristics. So if you're a business that trades visually, Instagram, TikTok, really great for you. If you're a business that trades off, let's say things that are more, if you're a legal firm or if you're a medical practice. There's a much higher level of credibility and authority that you need to establish. And so they are much more likely to invest in their website so that they can provide evidence of their kind of credibility and authority in that sort of space. And so you find a lot more sort of medical practitioners actually really investing in their website than investing in, you know, kind of sort of social media channels. And so I think it's not necessarily about personal preference to the business owner. I think it's more about What are the characteristics of your business that you trade on and which channels allow you to really accentuate that the most.

Greg Sterling (17:24)
I would say though that in many cases the small business is more comfortable with social media because they are often a user themselves in their own lives and they're familiar with how it works. Maybe not the intricacies of ads or analytics, they have a comfort level which is higher with social media than with Google Business Profile, for example. I've been told by small businesses that they get DMs, they get direct messages or they get inquiries from social media, which operates as a kind of substitute for analytics. They can see it working. They see the customers coming through there. That Google has versions of that with booking and there's messaging, social media I think feels much more intuitive for them in many cases. That's my sense.

Myles Anderson (18:10)
I would also absolutely agree. Think sorry, Mike, I've talked over you. Jump in.

Mike Blumenthal (18:14)
I was just curious if in Facebook you saw any trends over time in terms of small businesses. Clearly Instagram and TikTok are very visual. Do these same businesses use Facebook extensively? Has there been a change in Facebook utilization in these…

Myles Anderson (18:30)
It certainly dropped. It still came out as the number one sort of social channel overall, not by a huge leap on top of the kind of Instagram. And I was kind of surprised by that because I felt that Facebook hadn't modernized enough to really kind of hold on to kind of consumer interest, particularly I think in kind of UK and the US. I was always under the assumption that it was dropping off a lot more. I think it's incredibly popular in other kind of parts of the world. But as you know,…

Mike Blumenthal (18:53)
Particularly how little they show small business information to potential clients. Unless you're paying for it.

Myles Anderson (18:58)
But I think there's lot of community stuff that still happens on Facebook. And someone goes, who knows a plumber who's any good in my kind of town? And your people go, I've got a plumber, I've got a builder, or whatever happens to them. I think that's still an important need for them.

Mike Blumenthal (19:09)
And also advertising that I don't think you studied advertising in this survey, did you? Which I think might also be happening on…

Myles Anderson (19:13)
We didn't study advertising. We didn't separate advertising out from like non-pay. But I think going back to kind of Greg's point, think that was absolutely right. Think the joy of social media is It's quite straightforward. You know, what you have to do to get something out there is quite easy. You can see the response, you can see the results, you can see the numbers. It doesn't have the complexity of GBP It doesn't have the complexity of kind of SEO, which can sometimes feel like just a black box. I don't know. There are so many variables I've got to get right to drive. This number up. I don't even know it's working. And now that Google is, putting in more ads and AI Overviews, I'm getting less traffic out of there. But social media feels much more interactive, much more straightforward and much more gratifying because I can see the responses coming back to…

Greg Sterling (19:56)
Do you think that confusion, frustration, mystification around SEO among some percentage of small businesses is translating into a kind of rejection of GBP Not rejection, that's too strong a word, but lack of attention, let's just say. This is too hard and by extension I'm not gonna engage with GBP because it's just It all seems futile and perhaps a waste of time or something or the algorithm gods are too hard for me to, appease.

Myles Anderson (20:27)
I think it's certainly creates a real challenge for Google to not, how they can not lose the attention of business owners into doing it. But I think you then layer, think what is almost more pervasive is the fact that there's just less physical space being given to local businesses. There are less clicks being driven through those channels. And so there's a higher threshold to compete. It's constantly changing. There's a great deal of uncertainty and now I'm not getting the same level of traffic volume that I used to get. Know, like the effort is not being rewarded in the same way that it used to be. So I think it's a combination of those ingredients that as well they're kind of struggling to kind of maintain interest amongst local businesses.

Greg Sterling (21:09)
I we do a but…

Mike Blumenthal (21:09)
And the lack of understanding of the multi-touch world that consumers really go through. It's complicated shit show of who knows where they go.

Myles Anderson (21:14)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Greg Sterling (21:17)
We do a bunch of work in the legal vertical. We've done work in other categories, but right now that's an area of focus for us. And there are most of these law firms are pretty sophisticated marketers and they spend a lot of money and they are very focused on Google, among other channels. This represents sort of one end of the spectrum versus, you know. Others that may be like a florist or a caterer which may not be as focused on they maybe put all their effort into Instagram or TikTok or what have you. So there's a lot of variability in these different categories. And it one of the challenges of doing this work is really you know r reflecting or respecting that nuance and not sort of lumping everybody into a single bucket because a business with fifty employees or a hundred employees is very different than a business with two or one or three,…

Myles Anderson (22:11)
I don't think there are a standard set of norms that you can apply to, even every florist, some people are going to be, much more astute and aware and alert to how to use SEO, build a website, but there's other going to just disregard it entirely. So I think what we're looking at here is a kind of average across a whole sort of sample size from certain industries, but you've always got, you've got a core and you've got the sort of edges within each of these.

Mike Blumenthal (22:34)
And as you pointed out, there's differences within different types of businesses and right, a visual business versus an informational business. And the importance of the decision, how important is a haircut versus a divorce, right? There's just a tremendous amount of variation both within and between.

Myles Anderson (22:52)
I think the key, I mean, think really the if I had sort of one message to get out to sort of local business owners, it's to recognize that the consumer journey is multi-touch today. And that what's also, I think great about that is that the know, AI, when it looks to understand your business is also multi-touch, you know, it's looking across a lot of different touch points to understand about your business and to get as much clarity and consistency. In the same way mirrors what users are doing. They're trying to build up an understanding of your business from multiple touch points so that they reach a trust threshold where they're going to contact you. And unless you are actively kind of present in those places, being consistent, clear, fresh content, fresh reviews, you're going to miss out on the consumers themselves, but you're also not going to be giving AI what it needs to really kind of understand and recommend your business. So think understanding That multi-touch point. Just watching that you've seen that movie, everything everywhere all at once. So that was in the article. And I was wondering again, like, God, that just feels a bit like, you know, how to optimize for AI. Everything everywhere,…

Greg Sterling (23:58)
That's SEO. Yeah, yeah. Right, right.

Myles Anderson (24:01)
All of the time, which is probably not what most business owners want to hear because it's a kind of pretty high sort of threshold to maintain.

Greg Sterling (24:10)
Yeah. Well you alluded to reviews. Let's talk about reviews because there's some interesting findings around reviews in the survey and the a effort or lack of effort that is going into maintaining them.

Myles Anderson (24:25)
Yeah, so we broke the study down into a number of different, you know, sort of sub findings and what we found is that with reviews about 65% of businesses said they are actively asking for reviews about 50% or 49 said we you know respond to reviews and then it really sort of peters off from there where you know get out the bottom of your thing It's don't really do anything to do with reviews. And so I was encouraged to see that top level number that 65% of businesses are asking for reviews. But when we asked them to say, how many reviews have you got on Google? So this is a of self-reported number, they said. Actually, the majority them said, we've got under 20 reviews on Google. And then 50% of that had 20 upwards to kind of hundreds. And that was just a bit terrifying for me, because from our consumer study, a lot of consumers kind of draw a line in the sand at 20 reviews and say, just won't even look at a business has got less than 20 reviews because there's just not enough social proof there for me to feel confident in trusting that kind of business. So business owners appear to be putting more effort and attention to get reviews, but it's not translating into enough volume to win over consumers. I appreciate that reviews is always one of those areas that I always find quite recurringly frustrating when talking to sort of business owners about it. So I think Business owners get that reviews and reputation is really important, but not many of them really pursue it with enough intensity and focus to make it a really real asset to them. And again, there's lots of cases where this isn't the case, but in general, I put it akin to we all know that exercising is good for us, but actually sometimes it's just much more enjoyable and easy to do something else rather than exercise. And I think, managing and growing reputation feels like Same thing with local businesses. You talk to them about how important it is. You pointed about how it drives consumer trust and that's going to drive purchase. You now talk to them about how it drives visibility. It's a really important signal feeding into AI and they nod, they understand it, but actually getting them to really approach it with consistency and vigor to really manage their reputation. It just seems to sort of, they'd like to do something else. Their attention gets grabbed by something else that's going to easier, more manageable and more attainable. And they kind of go there. I followed a bit.

Mike Blumenthal (26:43)
Do you know the population size that these businesses exist within or serve? I mean a lot of you…

Myles Anderson (26:51)
Didn't know their small town, big town, example. Didn't get that taste.

Mike Blumenthal (26:53)
Right. So where I live, twenty reviews is a lot, across the board. Restaurants, you know, to lawyers, you'll be lucky if you see one or two. So it I think there's a geographic issue that's needs to be surfaced or could be surfaced to help understand some of that nuance. And the other nuance that I think always gets lost in these conversations is operational excellence, right? That if a business doesn't execute well, they're not going to get a lot of reviews, or they're going to get bad reviews. It's going to make reviews much, much harder, whether they ask or they don't ask, right? It's like a dentist. I go to my dentist, they execute beautifully, but it's a very painful experience. Doesn't matter how good they are. And before I'm out the door, I get a review ask. It's like there is no way I'm going to tell you what it was like sitting in that chair in a positive frame of mind. I'm not going to say anything because it was, I was sweating bullets, even though you were just cleaning my teeth, right? So I think that in healthcare also it's an issue. And you can see that in your numbers that people don't like being asked to some extent. There's a mismatch between the review strategies and business realities of whether it's operational excellent or a business that just is not easily reviewable. What am I gonna say about my insurance company?

Greg Sterling (28:13)
Well, you would talk about service, obviously, if the agent was pretty was a…

Mike Blumenthal (28:17)
You talk to the agent once a year if you're lucky. Right?

Greg Sterling (28:20)
Yeah. I…

Myles Anderson (28:21)
But that…

Greg Sterling (28:22)
I…

Myles Anderson (28:22)
Shouldn't stop them. I'm always just so surprised, particularly when I work with tradespeople in the UK. I must have over the years worked with 50, 60 different tradespeople for various things. One of them at most followed up with me afterwards to ask a review and inquire about it. That just felt like open, fertile ground for them to go and just to follow up. Maybe they're busy enough that they need to worry…

Mike Blumenthal (28:48)
I think trade services is a good example for asking.

Myles Anderson (28:52)
About it. But if I was a local business in your area, Mike, I would look at, the competitive range of reviews and go, I'm going to dominate That's an area that I can stand out like a beacon.

Greg Sterling (29:02)
There seems to be a contradiction between the idea that sixty five percent of these businesses are asking for reviews, which implies it's a stretch, but it does imply a process of sorts there. And then the fewer than twenty reviews number. Notwithstanding what Mike's saying about geography and, you know, certain categories of businesses may be harder to get reviews in than others. Over time, if you consistently ask for reviews, you're gonna get reviews. You're gonna get some reviews. It's another one of these strange juxtapositions between what we're saying and what the market is, showing. You didn't seek to verify the accuracy of those numbers, right? You just took them at their word. How many reviews do you have? Yeah.

Myles Anderson (29:46)
Yeah, we were speaking to we're speaking to the owners of businesses. So we do the word I think, you know, mean, getting you know, reviews is a numbers game. You know, if you want to get 10 reviews, you probably got to ask 100 people to kind of do it. I think the…

Mike Blumenthal (29:58)
Or two hundred people or five hundred people if you're a dentist, right? I mean it…

Myles Anderson (30:02)
But I would have thought dentists, you know, what an incredibly kind of personal interaction, you know, but it also has not botched your teeth. I would think that you feel pretty good. About the relationship. I've looked you in the eye for the last 20 minutes and I've, you know, hopefully saved you some pain. Yeah, I mean, it does, yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (30:16)
I've had your fingers in my mouth. That is not it's very stressful for me. I don't know about everybody else, but I am not reviewing my dentist as soon as I get out to the car. I'm sitting in the car just relaxing. So but the other thing that happens in rural markets and is from experience is a Rolodex, as it were, the virtual Rolodex is the most important thing in my life. If I have a good handyman, a good carpenter, a good plumber, a good heat and you know,…

Greg Sterling (30:45)
HVAC Yeah.

Mike Blumenthal (30:45)
Heat and cooling, I don't lose these people. I pay I tip I, give them referrals. I treat these people like gold. So I don't one, I don't feel the need to review them, but two, I feel they are close to being family for me because they can solve problems for me that I can't solve. And so it this word of mouth in different communities is different, right? Here it's largely word of mouth and The good people do really well and they enter this category that you had of the 26 percent of people who don't need more business, right? Now those folks have a different issue. They have reputation management instead of marketing as their really their objective. So they should be tracking reviews regardless to make sure that their customers are happy. But usually they know when they leave a job whether their customers are happy or not. So it like all this stuff, there's a big range.

Myles Anderson (31:33)
Yeah, you're right. They don't need marketing. I think what they do need though is they need CRM. You I think a lot of local businesses really…

Mike Blumenthal (31:41)
Yes, absolutely.

Myles Anderson (31:43)
Don't, I mean, you said you've got a Rolodex of your, people that you trust, you know, do they have the equivalent where they've got their 150 customers who they know will bring them as much business as they could ever do? And what do they do to kind of maintain and nurture that?

Mike Blumenthal (32:00)
I agree. And not only that, but what do they do to answer their damn phone? Right. Operational excellence on the incoming side is just as important as operational excellence on the delivery side. And I think those businesses…

Greg Sterling (32:11)
Well, it…

Mike Blumenthal (32:12)
Need that for sure.

Greg Sterling (32:13)
It's an opportunity for some native AI company to radically simplify CRM and make it, you know, kind of turnkey. Nobody's done that yet, but there's somebody will do some version of that. I mean, because simplicity is key for this market. And…

Myles Anderson (32:31)
And I think that's a really interesting opportunity for marketing consultants around if you want to become a really kind of consultant and advisor. We focus a lot on acquisition as the service that we provide, the value we provide. But actually, if you were able to solve and improve the CRM, the repeat purchase of a business through you recommendation, installation management of a sort of CRM system, you generate more revenue for that business than you could ever do, from the kind of acquisition side. I actually see that as being an evolution, probably powered by AI and AI sort of solution that, you know, you can really kind of make your own in a kind of niche way as an agency, if you kind of put that as one of the sort of services that you kind of bring in.

Greg Sterling (33:19)
Let's talk for a couple of minutes before we wind up or wind down, as the case may be, about the grand sweep of time and what your empirical or anecdotal observations are about the differences between then and now in the small business market. The consumer market, there are two arguments about the consumer market. One is the consumers have always done a version of what they're doing now, which is they look at a lot of different things. They make a decision and then they make a purchase off and offline, but sometimes online. And now it's just become apparent to everybody that's what's going on. And AI is just a new wrinkle in that formula. My instinctual feeling is that small businesses in a certain way are the same as they've ever been. You know, they face similar challenges that they've always faced. The technology is somewhat different. There's some additional sophistication with people, but there's the lack of time, the lack of money, too many choices to make, and so on. What is your sense of what's really changed and what remains the same?

Myles Anderson (34:21)
I think for businesses, the fundamental challenge is still there. Lack of time, lack of knowledge. And that's kind of the problem that agencies and marketers were kind of invented to solve, right? To kind of sort of, to help local businesses do that. So I think those things persist. I think consumer behavior, I mean, 20 years ago, you A lot of the channels we have today didn't exist. And so it was a much more straightforward process. Picked up the yellow pages. You asked someone your recommendation, you went with it. Now you've got your fingertips. You've got all these touch points at which you can look to find and verify information that you get. I think we are incredibly adept at moving quickly between those channels to kind of get you to this kind of trust threshold. You know, I was buying a car this weekend. And I needed to buy a car from this garage. Actually, secondhand car garages in the UK are pretty notorious for being sharks. They don't have a great sort of reputation as an industry. And I was really trying very hard to sort of piece together this digital footprint for this kind of car garage that I wanted to buy. And I went to about seven different places to really try and get to enough information. But I was able to do it in about 30 minutes. And really get a clear picture of how long this business had been in trading for its reviews, it's sort of past sort of directorship and ownership, because they're going out of business all the time. And they're a bit sort of shady like that. But anyway, I was able to do it very rapidly. I think AI is that it's another step in that process, you know, it'll increasingly get, you know, bigger and bigger. But I think people won't always rely on it and trust it. And it's got that obviously, background of hallucinations that really lower the kind of trust threshold. So I think for businesses, they've got to understand that consumers are always going to have this multi-touch point approach to understanding about business. And they've got to represent themselves really well on all those fronts. And that's got to be social, it's got to be the website, it's got to be within Google, it's got to be directories, it's got to be review sites. And then that all feeds into AI to a certain degree. So I think that's the case. I think what I wonder about with where local businesses are getting support from agencies is that if your budget's an issue, and that's always held them back from potentially investing in marketing or using agencies, is the availability of AI going to really reduce the cost of delivering that service? i.e., as a local, as a, if you're an agency or a consultant, you've got 10 customers using AI astutely and judiciously, you know, rather than using it carelessly and weekly, is that going to enable you to suddenly serve 30 businesses? And in doing that, are you going to be able to reduce the cost of what you offer so that you're more accessible to the businesses that aren't lawyers or aren't medical practitioners? Now, the florists who maybe have not used a marketing consultant because actually they just couldn't afford the fees, but are you going to be able to bring down your fees through the correct and judicious use of AI as a delivery mechanism? So that you make it more accessible to bigger market. And I wonder whether that is actually going to expand the kind of pool of possible customers that are available to kind of marketers and kind of consultants over time. That's the question I have rolling around my head kind of quite a lot. Is the market going to explode with opportunity for agencies and consultants because of this?

Greg Sterling (37:34)
Well one of the historical problems with agencies is that there's a lot of skepticism, right? There's a lot of as you say, short sort of shady entities running around selling visibility on Google or visibility in AI answers, as well as many good and ethical agencies, but that kind of difficulty in determining who's legit is problematic for a lot of these businesses and many times they'll sign up with a marketer or an agency and then there's churn because of a lack of confidence that the agencies really the money is well spent, right? Which goes back to the analytics problem to some degree. And I think there's a lot of skepticism and distrust among business owners of marketers because of excessive promises or in some cases long time horizons. People used to say, well, you need six months for SEO to do anything, right? And you have to show quick wins, otherwise people are going to churn out. Let's close with your speculation about Google because this is one of the most interesting parts of the survey is the disappointment, disillusionment, lack of engagement with the Google Business Profile. Eighty five percent or a large percentage said they had a Google GBP which could be in some cases just people checking the doing brand searches and seeing that they have a profile that they haven't claimed. I mean, is that a possibility also, do you think or…

Myles Anderson (39:01)
It be just them trying to generate reviews. They might see that as being active on Google. They might have a very thin,…

Greg Sterling (39:07)
Right, but…

Myles Anderson (39:08)
Limited attributes and services, but they've tried to get a review.

Greg Sterling (39:13)
Yeah, a lot of the people we have on this program and that are in this local search world are, emphasizing now you have to be engaged with Google Business Profile. It's now a living thing that's feeding AI and Google Posts and constant review solicitation and offers and inventory. You really have to treat it as something that has to be tended all the time. And most of your respondents are not doing that. Only a minority are doing that. What do you think is at stake for Google in losing out to social media in terms of engagement and you know, by these small businesses?

Myles Anderson (39:50)
So we have a direct relationship with an account team, a Google Business Profile team. And so we meet with them on a quarterly basis, we talk about, they said you want us to be driving a lot of engagement for them across small businesses. They're quite good at reaching out to the brands and getting brands to put their data into Google. Pitching us and pressing us to go and get richer data. So things like social links, know, menus, they're always looking for richer information. So I think they use that a lot to try and build up a clearer picture, about a local business. And so I think they are very focused on engaging with local businesses as much as possible. They certainly are worried about the encroachment into their space. Social media is at a certain degree, but I think they're also now leveraging social media as a way to understand a business better. Like rather than fight it, they're looking to kind of incorporate it and make them more of a hub experience. I think they're feeling more threatened about AI and ChatGPT becoming, know, essentially stealing their, you know, their kind of traffic and sort of searches. So I think they're going to continue to invest really heavily in it. They do have, they're obviously much more focused on selling ads and engaging with local businesses to try and get them to buy ads from them. And I think the challenges they've got is that the ads are incredibly expensive. I think particularly LSAs for lot of businesses don't deliver enough real kind of leads through. And because local businesses are poor at answering the phone, then they will get charged a lead for one that they've no idea about. So I think Google's in a difficult position in terms of how it wants to engage with local businesses. It really wants to engage them to drive, more revenue. But also it sees that local is such a kind of bulwark for them against the likes of ChatGPT because they've invested so much in building up the data about it. Actually, interestingly, did you see that ChatGPT announced? This week that they're building a of business,…

Greg Sterling (41:53)
GBP…

Myles Anderson (41:55)
A business center. Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be curious to see, because that for me has always been like, they buy their data, trading data off the likes of sort of Foursquare and other sources, they've done the partnership with Yelp, but those data sort of is pale in comparison to kind of Google's fresh kind of data engine. So it's great that they are doing that, because I think businesses are crying out for a way to take control of their data.

Greg Sterling (42:16)
It was inevitable if they were really gonna compete in local, that was an inevitable development. It'll be really interesting to see have Google and Yelp and others trained businesses to recognize this as an important thing and then will they go in and self-serve? And will that impact ChatGPT's, the richness of ChatGPT's data and move the needle for them. It'll be very interesting to see all that.

Myles Anderson (42:43)
It will. Think they're going to be behind Google in terms of the whole Local Guides base. What have they got? 120 million Local Guides that sort of, you know, sort of feed updates.

Greg Sterling (42:51)
No, no, it's five hundred million they've claimed. It can't be the…

Myles Anderson (42:53)
10 billion.

Greg Sterling (42:55)
It can't be the case that they're all equally active, but they've claimed that they've got something approaching five hundred million.

Myles Anderson (43:01)
Wow, I didn't realize…

Greg Sterling (43:02)
Mike is fact checking me in real time. I think that's right.

Mike Blumenthal (43:05)
Well,…

Myles Anderson (43:05)
I thought it was on.

Mike Blumenthal (43:05)
No, I'm gonna ask. I that is a great question.

Greg Sterling (43:09)
Are you asking ChatGPT?

Mike Blumenthal (43:11)
No, I'm asking Claude.

Greg Sterling (43:13)
Okay. Same thing.

Myles Anderson (43:13)
The last I had was about 120, but a sizable kind of contributor base to it. And it provides a lot of freshness into that kind of platform. And I think that's what people have come to expect from a local platform. Then Google's obviously got the embedded apps. You've got all the kind of Android sort of phones. You've got kind of Google Maps embedded. Don't think those…

Greg Sterling (43:31)
Yeah, they've g they…

Myles Anderson (43:33)
Things are like so hard to shift out of consumer behavior.

Greg Sterling (43:37)
Well they've got a massive what's the number, Mike? Not…

Mike Blumenthal (43:40)
Well, twenty nineteen the number was a hundred and twenty million. So we d that's six years old.

Greg Sterling (43:43)
Yeah, that's it's six years old. Seven years old.

Mike Blumenthal (43:46)
So I don't know if there's more current data than That's…

Greg Sterling (43:49)
Yeah, there totally is more current data.

Mike Blumenthal (43:52)
Let me find it. Keep going.

Myles Anderson (43:55)
The number's gone down and they've not updated it because they don't want the number to look less, would be a cynical view.

Greg Sterling (43:57)
Well, I think that you know, Google has always sort of not given local its due on a company wide level. But local is the thing, as you say, bulwark is the perfect description that protects Google against defections to other sources because that is the you know, you could say shopping, the shopping corpus or whatever, but local is really the thing that is really differentiated from everybody else.

Myles Anderson (44:25)
Yeah, and incredibly hard to replicate without massive investment and the honing of the sophistication around it.

Mike Blumenthal (44:30)
So on this number, just to note, 2023 hundred and fifty million and twenty five hundred million is according to this. But Google's in a tough…

Greg Sterling (44:40)
That's what Google said. Google…

Mike Blumenthal (44:41)
This yeah, in a Google bulletin and five hundred million Google said, right. So…

Myles Anderson (44:44)
Really? Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I hadn't, that's an incredible growth, isn't it? Yeah, I'm going to a Google conference next week in Zurich. I'm going to try and query that number.

Mike Blumenthal (44:56)
But Google has this problem. They have this massive local data set. But they've moved the whole local org under ads. And ads is charged with funding their whole AI build out. All their free cash flow is going to that. The ads are no longer a good deal, as you point out. This is a tremendous sort of conflict for Google where they're no longer just interested in delivering great ads at reasonable prices. They're interested in delivering ads at great prices, right? And it's a tremendous conflict where they may, basically compromise their huge lead in local through greed, I guess. I don't know what it is, but I think it's a tremendous conundrum for them.

Greg Sterling (45:42)
Well, they should be they should…

Myles Anderson (45:42)
I agree. It's a really challenging position.

Greg Sterling (45:45)
They should be making it much easier for businesses to interact with them. They're doing some things. They've definitely stepped up their outreach to businesses with more webinars and more communication. And they've got a very interesting tool, you know, Gemini in GBP or whatever they're calling it, where you can ask questions about analytics or get general strategy advice around marketing. And that's very interesting.

Mike Blumenthal (46:05)
And this AI assistant that they're providing is potentially interesting that integrates with your RCS messaging system is also interesting where there's an AI agent. You know, they're doing interesting stuff, but they've never successfully sort of stuck with any of this stuff and they've never successfully built up the trust in the small business market to drive these people to ads. I don't know.

Myles Anderson (46:26)
Yeah, I think they take local incredibly seriously. And I went to a conference in London last November. They basically said that there's an element of local on almost every team's roadmap across all the product teams in Google. This was before they moved it onto ads, by the way. And they really recognized the kind of value and the importance and the lead they had in local and how much they wanted to kind of cement that and to kind of lean on it. But I think the conflict always comes around the monetization of it and how they need more Local, you know, they need more local businesses to buy ads, but the ads are almost too expensive per unit for local businesses, for the majority of local businesses to really engage in it. I did point this out to them when I met with them and said, look, you know, I think you'd get a lot more traction with local businesses if the ads just weren't so expensive and people and businesses could generate better ROI on them. You know, They're not efficient phone answering machines, local businesses. They have a lot of friction, a lot of sort of wastage. And if every click is costing them upwards of $25, not many them have got that budget.

Greg Sterling (47:29)
Well they've created that problem because when LSAs were initially introduced, it was designed to be a really simple ad to provision and cost effective. And then they introduced the auction and then they made LSAs kind of imperative because they're at the very top of the page and they're filling the pages with garbage and making organic traffic harder and harder to get. So they're forcing people to buy those ads, and the more competition there is, of course, the more that the ad costs. And the less valuable it's perceived to be some of those leads are not being closed because of the small business is not answering the phones or what have you. But anyway, Google have created this problem for themselves. They need now to introduce another simple unit that's cost effective, but they're not gonna do that for the reasons that Mike stated. But anyway, we're out of time. We could keep going and going. Fascinating research. And as I said, maybe at the top or in the green room, I think some of these challenges that are reflected in your small business survey data also exists in large organizations and enterprises which are struggling to figure out the customer journey and maybe have an overly simplified attribution model as well. But thank you very, very much, Myles, for joining us and we'll have you obviously back again. And you can now ret r retire…

Myles Anderson (48:39)
Yeah, I that.

Greg Sterling (48:41)
To your evening. It's Like nine eight seven PM? Okay. All right, not too late. Yeah. Okay all right, great.

Myles Anderson (48:45)
No, it's only quarter past seven. Quarter past seven, it's not too late. But yeah, it's a real pleasure, guys. Love talking about this. Excellent, excellent viewpoints and questions.

Greg Sterling (48:54)
All right. Well we will see you next time and thanks everybody for listening.

Myles Anderson (48:58)
Thanks. Bye.