The Unpredictable Future of Local in AI Search Featuring Michael Carini

Garrett: All right, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search produced by SEO Week and iPullRank, and a very special episode from our sponsor, Lastmile Retail. I’m joined today by Michael Carini, who is the founder and CEO at Lastmile. Thank you so much for joining me today, Michael. How are you doing, man?

Michael: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Garrett: I’m excited for this conversation because I come from a background in local SEO, and that’s what you guys do, and the local space and the local SEO is changing so dramatically right now. The last 12 to 24 months have been wild, and it’s rapid. Every day, something new. What is your perspective on the current state of SEO?

Michael: Here’s what I think is a really interesting thing, and we actually celebrated 10 years last month. I know, it went fast. But what we’ve seen now really for the first time is a shift along two axes. Google over the 10 years I’ve been doing this has often experimented with different kind of mediums and presentation for localized search results. But now what we’re also seeing is not only this new medium with generative search results and AIO and all that stuff, but we’re actually now seeing a channel shift as well. Now we’re seeing customers start to branch out beyond Google, and I think what’s going to be significant ways, although the metrics aren’t great yet and it’s kind of hard to measure, but you actually have people doing local searches on channels like Perplexity and ChatGPT and other emerging platforms. I think you’re starting to see a balkanization of search that we haven’t really experienced for a long time.

Garrett: It’s so interesting. I’ve already enjoyed really playing with it, because to your point, I was on ChatGPT the other day and I was testing out AI mode and ChatGPT and I was asking both platforms, testing local, to what extent are they getting it right? Because they’re still figuring it out too. And I was like, okay, based on being 10 minutes away from a pizza place, what’s the best pizza place based on the reviews that you can pull and seeing how it’s pulling in that content, are you like kind of like, what are you seeing on your end?

Michael: We’re seeing a pretty big, I think, content gap right now. So, if you think about what Google has been doing over the last 10, 20 years, is they’ve been building kind of proprietary ways to get rich local information into their ecosystem. And so that’s everything from merchant center where you can send them in-store inventory to hotel kind of meta search where you can send them specific rates in real time. And so there’s a lot of kind of infrastructure that Google has specifically created around sucking in great local content and then being able to present that to customers as a competitive advantage. So, I think if you start looking at Perplexity and ChatGPT and those other channels, they are going to have kind of a pretty steep hill to climb to catch up there.

But today, really the problem is they only can access what they can crawl right from your brand’s website. And that’s where I think right now there’s kind of a gap because if you look at the local pages that a lot of brands put out there, speaking frankly, they’re very thin content, very limited content. And ChatGPT and other crawlers really can’t kind of access things like e-commerce APIs or hotel APIs that do have that rich local content. But that’s kind of a walled garden. So, I think where we’re going to very quickly see things evolve is connections into these other gen AI systems to try to get them better content quickly.

Garrett: I love it. And it’s so important and interesting because to your point with ChatGPT, it’s like they don’t have to deal with Google when they’re looking for information. They’re actually going to Bing’s index for the most part, or maybe building their own index we think. So, it’s like you can’t just depend on a Google business profile for your whole local presence. How, generally speaking, is like Lastmile adapting to search?

Michael: Yeah. One of the big things that we are laser focused on this year is information architecture. So, when we look at a lot of, because we’re unique in that we really only operate for large enterprise organizations. Those are our client base. And so, what we’ve been doing is spending a ton of time on refining like what is the best way to structure your local information on your website to optimize not only for Google crawling, but also for these other generative platforms.

And so, what we often find is in these big enterprises, information architecture has always been something that just kind of happened by circumstance. And you have in many cases, local information spread out across, in some cases, dozens of sub-directories on these large sites. And it makes it really, I think, confusing and hard to understand really what all the offerings are, both for customers and for crawlers. And so, we’ve been really focused on building kind of best practices around how to restructure your information. And we’re already kind of seeing really nice gains from some of those optimizations.

Garrett: It’s so interesting to me because I feel like in local and in SEO in general, we’ve heard this like drumbeat over and over now about brand and how brand continues to be important. But like enterprises have that kind of built in advantage, but it’s like, it’s not enough. You also need the content. So, you show up for those more specific granular types of searches, conversational search on like ChatGPT.

Michael: And that’s the other side of the coin is how do I make, put more local content out there in a way that’s accurate. If I put all the same set of products on all of my local pages, that’s not really reflecting reality in many cases. So, what we’ve also been doing is building a lot of tooling around, how do we access both programmatic sources of data, things like those inventory databases, stuff that’s locked away in the point of sale or whatever it might be. And then actually get that out there onto, we don’t just make local pages, we make full kind of microsites, but you don’t want to put 50,000 products on a microsite. So, you actually need kind of a rules engine and tooling around how do I know what specific product services offerings to put in front of the customers and the crawlers.

And so that’s been a really interesting kind of intellectual challenge, but the tooling we’ve built has gotten pretty good at that. And so, I think that’s starting to give the brands we work with a really nice advantage as these platforms emerge to say, “Hey, we have really fine-tuned control over what we surface to the customer.”

Garrett: It’s so interesting and it’s so important to me because you’re not completely at the behest of the Google ecosystem as these other platforms emerge and as people’s behaviors do shift and people actually go to the LLMs platforms for local commerce and local retail. So, what’s next? I mean, we’ve got all this talk about agentic AI and people using their own agents to go to it. We got local evolving and AI curated results. What do you think is next for the future of search?

Michael: Yeah, I think we are really at the very ground floor here in terms of what we’re going to see in terms of these platforms’ capabilities. I had a good chat with Greg Sterling a few weeks ago. We were talking about just how immature the commerce part of GPT is right now. Like if you do certain, even in Perplexity, if you do certain local searches, “Hey, what store has this thing near me?” How often you’re getting like, “Well, we kind of know…” We do all cell phone stuff, right? We know T-Mobile sells iPhones, so we think maybe they have it. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s kind of the level of information depth and quality you’re getting today.

And so, I think you can only really go up from where we are now. And so, I think you’re going to see as a lot of these platforms start trying to kind of shift from heavy investment to monetization, right? They’re going to start paying a lot of attention to the customer experience around commerce and around buying and really refine those interfaces. And the brands that can kind of best power that information are the ones that are going to win.

Garrett: I love that. It’s really interesting because I feel like as this behavior, the search behavior kind of becomes more common, the expectations are going to be raised. Like right now we don’t expect them to get it right. Like you’re almost used to this consumer experience of like going to the store and them not having it. You just be like, “Damn it, I knew that was going to happen and yet here we are.” But it’s like you’re setting brands up for not having that disappointment experience for their consumers.

Michael: Right. And then the other thing here is on the brand side, we’re trying to set expectations with our clients and prospects, which is everyone’s been used to seeing incremental growth in search every year, right? Especially as their brands grow. I think that period might be over or at least suspended right now. But the problem that we’re facing is there really isn’t good source metrics on this yet, right? So, we see already AIO is definitely cannibalizing organic traffic, right, for our clients. But it’s not like Google’s putting good information on AIO in search console yet. So, we’re kind of trying to say, “Hey everyone, let’s take a breather. The sky is not falling down, but search is for sure changing.” And I think that’s another kind of looking towards the future area that’s going to be really, really important is how do we start measuring brand visibility across these new mediums and channels?

Garrett: It’s great because it is so frustrating for like, as we’ve made sort of this kind of paradigm shift to performance marketing, there’s this expectation to be able to monitor and attribute everything and that’s just not the case with this. And then finally, Michael, you guys are hosting the Monday night opening party soiree. Are you going to be there? Are you going to talk to everyone?

Michael: I’m so excited. We’ve been talking to you guys, Mike King. We are very, very excited for what’s to come. I think this is going to be kind of the event for SEO this year. And we are just really grateful to be a partner here.

Garrett: Well, thank you so much. I’m excited. I’m excited for Monday night and the opening night soiree that’s being sponsored by Lastmile Retail. I’m excited to talk to you, Michael. This is going to be awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this podcast with me today.

Michael: No, thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Garrett: There you go. So, you guys, if you haven’t, we’re under basically two weeks at this point, to SEO Week, April 28th to May 1st, New York City. If you haven’t gotten your tickets, you can get the full event or just get Monday and join us for the Lastmile Retail party Monday night. We will see you there. Can’t wait for it. Thanks for watching. Catch you later.