Google’s New AI Search Rules Create a Challenge for MULO Brands
Google recently published its first official guide to optimizing websites for generative AI Search features. For single-location businesses, the guidance is fairly straightforward. For multi-location brands (MULOs), the same principles apply, but the complexity of executing them scales dramatically with every location you add. Here’s what the guide says, and what it actually means if you’re […]
Why MULO Brands Are Investing More in Creator-Led Marketing
Creator-led marketing is rapidly evolving from an experimental tactic into a core component of many brands’ growth strategies. As consumers spend more time with creator-generated content and place greater trust in peer recommendations than traditional advertising, marketers are increasingly turning to creators as a scalable channel for customer acquisition, engagement, and brand building. The trend […]
Why MULOs Need a Localized Unstructured Citation Strategy
Citation management for multi-location businesses has long been a structured affair, consisting of claiming listings for each location, ensuring NAP data is up to date and consistent across those listings, and repeating for every location in the portfolio. These types of structured citations still matter for local SEO, but with the advent of AI-powered search, […]
AI Is a Multiplier: Why Better Data Drives Better Results
For too long, the conversation around AI has centered on capability. What it can do. What it might unlock. But capability without underlying quality will only scale the wrong things. AI amplifies the marketing data that’s already there. Done right, it accelerates insight, boosts creativity, and enables rewarding collaboration. Done wrong, it amplifies risk, bias, […]
Broadcast Is Losing Ad Dollars Despite Massive Reach
The advertising industry has spent a decade solving for targeting. Most of the major platforms have gotten quite good at it. That is not where broadcast is losing. Broadcast is losing on proof. The buyers moving budgets to Netflix, Amazon, and programmatic platforms aren’t doing it because those platforms have bigger audiences. In most markets, […]
AI Search Is Rewriting Local SEO for Multi-Location Brands
Local search visibility has been one of the most stable areas of SEO for years, relying on conventional techniques like keyword matching and search positioning. However, search behavior is now changing due to the implementation of AI-generated answers. Users are expecting synthesized suggestions for local businesses rather than sifting through a list of options. The […]
The Agency Offering Your Clients Need: Citation Intelligence for AI Search
Most local SEO agencies have a citation management offering of some kind. They might audit client listings, fix NAP inconsistencies, claim the obvious missing directories, and report back to the client. This process gets the job done as a basic optimization to check off, but it was designed for improving traditional local rankings — not […]
The Website Is No Longer the Center of Local Discovery
For years, multi-location brands built local marketing around a fairly simple model. A customer searched, clicked a result, visited the website, and made a decision from there. Visibility was measured through rankings and traffic. Persuasion was expected to happen on the site. Performance was judged largely by what could be tracked after the click. That […]
AI Made Marketing Faster. It Also Made It Harder to Control.
Generative AI is accelerating creative production, but it’s also making performance harder to control. As more teams generate more assets, consistency drifts and optimization becomes less clear. The next phase of AI in marketing isn’t about speed … it’s about structure. For midsize marketing teams, generative AI has unlocked unprecedented speed. Campaigns that once took […]
Why AI Describes Locations Differently
Picture two locations of the same quick-service restaurant brand, both in the same metro area, both with solid review scores, both with optimized Google Business Profiles. Yet when you ask ChatGPT to recommend a spot in each of their respective neighborhoods, one location gets highlighted at the beginning of the AI-generated response with specific dish […]
Reviews Are Now a Growth System for Multi-Location Brands
For years, many multi-location brands treated reviews as a reputation issue. Something to monitor. Something to clean up. Something to escalate when a location had a public problem. That framing is outdated. Reviews now sit much closer to performance than many brands still acknowledge. They influence whether a customer trusts a location enough to call, book, […]
AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature
Once again, the advertising industry is in the midst of a technological gold rush. The current hype around AI reflects a familiar pattern: sweeping claims, breathless predictions and a rush to declare that it will finally “fix” everything. It won’t. While AI has transformative potential, it isn’t a cure-all to some of advertising’s biggest problems. […]
Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem
Meta is automating ad execution, but the bigger problem for brands remains unresolved: deciding where to invest across channels to actually drive growth. The era of needing specialist teams to manage campaign execution is ending. Platforms are taking over more of that work, handling campaign construction, delivery optimization, and in-flight management within their own environments. […]
Why Restaurant PR Matters for Local Growth
A great PR campaign can make or break the future of a restaurant location. But in the case of multi-location restaurant brands, this requires strong collaboration between local or franchise leadership and the overall brand to ensure a consistent, coordinated effort. The unique challenges of restaurant PR Running a PR campaign for a restaurant is […]
Your Locations Show Up in AI – But Are They Recommended?
A consumer asks an AI assistant for a local business recommendation near one of your locations. Your brand location appears in the response. By most current measures, that’s a win — and it is. But for MULO marketers managing local search performance for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations, presence in AI-generated responses is […]
“Why Aren’t We in ChatGPT?”: The New Question Agencies Must Answer
A new question is starting to surface in agency client calls: “Why aren’t we showing up in ChatGPT?” At some point recently, you’ve probably gotten this call. A client — one with solid Google Maps rankings, an optimized Google Business Profile, and a steady stream of reviews — asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a […]
Why AI Is Forcing Marketing to Move From Channels to Intent
For decades, marketing teams organized their strategies around channels—search, social, email, and paid—each measured and optimized separately. But as AI increasingly mediates how buyers discover, compare, and choose products, that channel-based model is breaking down, forcing marketers to rethink their infrastructure around something far more important: customer intent. That channel-based structure shaped everything from budgets […]
The Missing Piece in Multi-Location Marketing: Location-Level Attribution
Multi-location marketing has become dramatically more sophisticated over the past decade. Brands now operate across dozens or hundreds of markets, running paid search, local SEO, social campaigns, listings management, and reputation programs simultaneously. But while marketing execution has scaled, measurement often hasn’t kept up. Multi-location brands often rely on dashboards that show total leads, conversions, […]
How Community-Focused Messaging Drives Loyalty for Multi-Location Brands
There’s a reason the phrase “shop local” continues to resonate. For multi-location brands and the agencies that support them, it’s not just about geographic proximity — it’s about relevance, trust, and shared identity. Consumers don’t build loyalty because a brand is loud. They build loyalty because it feels connected to their community and reflective of […]
The Local Media Paradox: Turning Community Trust into Measurable Confidence
Despite commanding some of the highest levels of consumer trust in media, local media continues to lose brand advertising budgets to platforms with far weaker audience relationships. The problem isn’t reach or relevance, but an inability to measure and communicate the value of trust in terms brands can buy. Local media owns something the rest […]