@darrenshawseo

I see the announcement yesterday from the Google Io conference that Google is rolling out AI mode how does this impact local search so I've been thinking about this how how does this change local search and let's take a look so if you run a search like you know please and this is interesting cause you're not really running searches anymore you're running more queries you know what's gonna type into an AI

chat Denver plumbers they're gonna type something like please recommend a good plumber in Denver so this is a a new local search query and you can see in AI mode what are you gonna get here based on the reviews and ratings here are some highly recommended plumbers so one thing to notice right out of the gates is that there's not really a local pack anymore Gee tacalac has pointed this out

in a comment on 1 of Joy Hawkins post he showed how AI mode looks and where's the local pack so now we don't have local packs but what do we have we have AI generated local result and so I don't know here's four businesses call this the local pack you have a new four pack and it's these four businesses are being recommended by AI and it'll tell you why it's recommending

these one of the things I find really fascinating here is that when you click on one of the results you get to see the Google Business Profiles These are the Google Business Profiles for these businesses the presentation is a little bit different but what is this?

This is driven by your Google Business Profile so local search remains pretty similar I'm sure there's gonna be some nuances that we will continue to discover but all the things that you're doing to optimize your Google Business Profile drive reviews ensure you have the right category set optimizing your services optimizing your website telling Google and the other crawlers what your business is about all of these will continue to factor in

into this AI driven AI mode search um and another thing that I keep thinking about is like you know in the organic SEO space there's a lot of talk about you know SEO being so much harder local is a little bit safer from that and one of the reasons for this is Google Maps Google Maps is not going anywhere this is a massive platform and Google Business Profiles aren't going anywhere

you still see Google investing into new features new ways of reaching businesses new ways of helping businesses enhanced through Google Business Profile so from a local search perspective we're I think we can continue to see everything that we're doing continue to grow continue to evolve in kind of exciting ways it's good time to be in local SEO we get to learn new things and see the new interfaces and you know

what we've been doing this for the last 10 15 Years where Google keeps making changes to things.

And so this, this shift is not that much different than all the other shifts that we've seen before. It's actually maybe a little bit bigger. Quite a bit happening behind the scenes with all of this, how these results are being driven.

But we are used to shifts and changes and you know, no different here.

It's an exciting time and I'm really glad to be a loca seor right now.