This post was sponsored by GatherUp. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

If your business has a great local, word-of-mouth reputation but very few online reviews, does it even exist?

That’s the existential riddle facing local businesses and agencies in 2025.

With Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) now reshaping the search experience, visibility isn’t just about being “the best.”

It’s about being part of the summary.

And reviews? They’re no longer just trust signals. They’re ranking signals.

In This Article

This article breaks down what’s changing, what’s working, and how agencies can keep their clients visible across both traditional local search and Google’s evolving AI layer.

Reviews Are Now A Gateway To Search Inclusion

Reviews have long been seen as conversion tools, helping users decide between businesses they’ve already discovered. But that role is evolving.

In the era of Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), reviews are increasingly acting as discovery signals, helping determine which businesses get included in the first place.

GatherUp’s 2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report shows that businesses with consistent, multi-channel review strategies, especially those generating both first- and third-party reviews, saw stronger reputation signals across volume, recency, and engagement. These are the exact kinds of signals that Google’s systems now appear to prioritize in AI-generated results.

That observation is reinforced by recent industry research and leaked Google documentation, which suggest that review characteristics like click-throughs, content depth, and freshness contribute to both local pack visibility and AIO inclusion.

In other words, the businesses getting summarized at the top of the SERP aren’t just highly rated. They’re actively reviewed, broadly cited, and seen as credible across sources Google trusts.

Recency Is A Signal. “Relevance” Is Google’s Shortcut.

More than two-thirds of consumers say they prioritize recent reviews when evaluating a business. But Google doesn’t necessarily show them first.

Instead, Google’s “Most Relevant” filter may prioritize older reviews that match query terms, even if they no longer reflect the current customer experience.

That’s why it’s critical for businesses to maintain steady review velocity. A flood of reviews in January followed by silence for six months won’t cut it. The AI layer, and the human reader, needs signals that say “this business is active and trustworthy right now.”

For agencies, this presents an opportunity to shift client mindset from static review goals to ongoing review strategies.

Star Ratings Still Matter, But Mostly As A Decision Shortcut

During our recent webinar with Search Engine Journal, we explored how consumers are using star ratings to disqualify options, not differentiate them.

Research shows:

• 73% of consumers won’t consider businesses with fewer than 4 stars
• But 69% are still open to doing business with brands that fall short of a perfect 5.0, so long as the reviews are recent and authentic

In other words, people are looking for a “safe” choice, not a flawless one.

A few solid 4-star reviews with real detail from the past week often carry more weight than a dozen perfect ratings from 2021.

Agencies should help clients understand this nuance, especially those who are hesitant to request reviews out of fear of imperfection.

First-Party & Third-Party Reviews: Both Are Necessary

AI Overviews aggregate information from across the web, including structured data from your own website and unstructured commentary from others.

• First-party reviews: These are collected and hosted directly on the business’s website. They can be marked up with schema, giving Google structured, machine-readable content to use in summaries and answer boxes.
• Third-party reviews: These appear on platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Reddit. They’re often seen as more objective and are more frequently cited in AI Overviews.

Businesses that show up consistently across both types are more likely to be included in AIOs, and appear trustworthy to users.

GatherUp supports multi-source review generation, schema markup for first-party feedback, and rotating requests across platforms. This makes it easier for agencies to build a review presence that supports both local SEO and AIO visibility.

AIOs Pull From More Than Just Google Reviews

According to recent data from Whitespark, over 60% of citations in AI Overviews come from non-Google sources. This includes platforms like:

• Reddit.
• TripAdvisor.
• Yelp.
• Local blogs and industry-specific directories.

If your client’s reviews live only on Google, they risk being overlooked entirely.

Google’s AI is scanning for what it deems “experience-based” content, unfiltered, authentic commentary from real people. And it prefers to cross-reference multiple sources to confirm credibility.

Agencies should encourage clients to broaden their review footprint and seek mentions in trusted third-party spaces. Dynamic review flows, QR codes, and conditional links can help diversify requests without overburdening the customer.

Responses Influence Visibility & Build Trust

Review responses are no longer just a nice gesture. They’re part of the algorithmic picture.

GatherUp’s benchmark research shows:

• 92% of consumers say responding to reviews is now part of basic customer service.
• 73% will give a business a second chance if their complaint receives a thoughtful reply.

But there’s also a technical upside. When reviews are clicked, read, and expanded, they generate engagement signals that may impact local rankings. And if a business’s reply includes resolution details or helpful context, it increases the content depth of that listing.

For agencies juggling multiple clients, automation helps. GatherUp offers AI-powered suggested responses that retain brand tone and ensure timely replies, without sounding robotic.

How Agencies Can Make AIO Part Of Their Core Strategy

Google’s AI systems are designed to answer user questions directly, often without requiring a click. That means review content is increasingly shaping brand narratives within the SERP.

To adapt, agencies should align client visibility efforts across both search formats:

For Local Pack Optimization

• Keep Google Business Profile listings fully updated (photos, categories, Q&A).
• Build and maintain steady review velocity using email, SMS, and in-person requests.
• Respond to reviews regularly, especially nuanced or negative ones.

For AIO Inclusion

• Collect first-party reviews and mark them up with schema.
• Rotate requests to third-party platforms based on vertical relevance.
• Capture reviews with photo uploads and detailed descriptions.
• Build unstructured citations through community involvement, media mentions, and event participation.

Download Our Complete Proactive Reputation Management Playbook for Digital Agencies for templates and workflows to operationalize this as a branded, revenue-generating service.

Reputation Is No Longer Separate From Rankings

AI Overviews now appear in nearly two-thirds of local business search queries. That means your clients’ next customers may form an impression—or make a decision—before ever clicking through to a website or map pack listing.

Visibility is no longer guaranteed. It’s earned through content, coverage, and credibility.

And reviews sit at the center of all three.

For agencies, this is a moment of opportunity. You already have the tools to guide clients through the shift. You know how to structure content, build citations, and amplify voices that resonate with customers.

Reputation management isn’t optional anymore. It’s infrastructure.

About GatherUp

GatherUp is the only proactive reputation management platform purpose-built for digital agencies. We help you  build, manage, and defend your clients’ online reputations.

GatherUp supports:

• First- and third-party review generation across multiple platforms,
• Schema-marked up feedback collection for AIO relevance,
• Intelligent, AI-assisted response workflows,
• Seamless white-labeling for full agency control,
• Scalable review operations tools that can help you manage 10 or 10,000 locations and clients.

Agencies who use GatherUp don’t just react to algorithm changes. They shape client visibility, and defend it.

To learn more, watch the full webinar for actionable strategies, data-backed insights, and examples of AIO-influenced local search in the wild.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by GatherUp. Used with permission.

Source link

We all want to be satisfied, even though we know some people who will never be that way, and others who see satisfaction as a foreign emotion that they can’t hope to ever feel.

Newspaper Ads Canyon Crest CA

Click To See Full Page Ads

Click To See Half Page Ads

Click To See Quarter Page Ads

Click To See Business Card Size Ads

If you have questions before you order, give me a call @ 951-235-3518 or email @ canyoncrestnewspaper@gmail.com Like us on Facebook Here

]]> https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/how-to-stay-visible-in-googles-ai-era/feed/ 0 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/google-says-barely-indexed-sites-can-mean-google-isnt-convinced-of-the-site-overall/ https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/google-says-barely-indexed-sites-can-mean-google-isnt-convinced-of-the-site-overall/#respond Thu, 17 Jul 2025 04:02:35 +0000 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/google-says-barely-indexed-sites-can-mean-google-isnt-convinced-of-the-site-overall/

Google’s John Mueller replied to a question around indexing issues on a site and said that if the site is hosted on a strong platform and is technically sound, and “it’s barely getting indexed, often that’s a sign that our systems aren’t convinced about the site overall.”

John wrote this on Bluesky:

If you’re hosting your site on a strong hosting platform, in a technically valid way (which you can test for), and it’s barely getting indexed, often that’s a sign that our systems aren’t convinced about the site overall.

Just to step back, this is not new. John and Google representatives have said this before. Google spoke about being on the edge of indexing because of being on the edge of Google’s quality threshold. He has said that if you find yourself needing to often submit your URLs to the index manually, that can be a sign of quality issues. Low quality content that is not indexed is not surprising to Googlers. Pages that may be deindexed, may be deindexed over quality issues. Google has said a page needs to pass quality to be indexed. Google has been saying they do not index everything for years, Google simply won’t index all your pages and it is impossible for Google to index everything, Google said.

John then went on to talk about the type of content this site is publishing, he wrote:

These situations are always hard. If you’ve recently moved to this domain, sometimes it takes time to settle down. I wonder (without an official-Google hat on) if the strategy of creating “SEO content” lightly related to the topic of your actual business is ideal – will people really convert?

Obviously every site & business is different (looking at those reading on SER,SEL,SEJ,etc), it just sometimes feels like folks focus on building out a topic, ranking pages for the topic, when their business is actually not directly tied to random web traffic for that topic.

I guess John reads this site. 🙂

In any event – none of this should surprise any of you but it has been a while since John spoke about quality and indexing.

Here is a screenshot of this conversation, so you have the full context:

Forum discussion at Bluesky.

Source link

We all want to be satisfied, even though we know some people who will never be that way, and others who see satisfaction as a foreign emotion that they can’t hope to ever feel.

Newspaper Ads Canyon Crest CA

Click To See Full Page Ads

Click To See Half Page Ads

Click To See Quarter Page Ads

Click To See Business Card Size Ads

If you have questions before you order, give me a call @ 951-235-3518 or email @ canyoncrestnewspaper@gmail.com Like us on Facebook Here

]]> https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/google-says-barely-indexed-sites-can-mean-google-isnt-convinced-of-the-site-overall/feed/ 0 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/63-of-known-attacks-blamed-on-competitors/ https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/63-of-known-attacks-blamed-on-competitors/#respond Thu, 17 Jul 2025 01:01:33 +0000 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/63-of-known-attacks-blamed-on-competitors/

Cloudflare released their 2025 Q2 DDoS Threat Report, which names the top ten sources of DDoS attacks and cites businesses targeting competitors as the largest source of DDoS attacks, according to surveyed respondents who had identified their attackers.

Survey: Who Attacked You?

Cloudflare surveyed customers about DDoS attacks, and 29% claimed to have identified the sources of those attacks. Of those who identified the attackers, 63% pointed to competitors, the largest of whom were businesses in the crypto, gambling, and gaming industries. 21% of the respondents who identified their attackers said they were victims of state‑sponsored attacks, and 5% said they had accidentally attacked themselves, something that can happen with server misconfigurations

This is how Cloudflare explained it:

“When asked who was behind the DDoS attacks they experienced in 2025 Q2, the majority (71%) of respondents said they didn’t know who attacked them. Of the remaining 29% of respondents that claimed to have identified the threat actor, 63% pointed to competitors, a pattern especially common in the Gaming, Gambling and Crypto industries. Another 21% attributed the attack to state-level or state-sponsored actors, while 5% each said they’d inadvertently attacked themselves (self-DDoS), were targeted by extortionists, or suffered an assault from disgruntled customers/users.”

Most Attacked Locations

One would think that the United States would be the most attacked location, given how many businesses and websites are located there. But the most attacked location was China, which climbed from position three to position one. Brazil also climbed four positions to second place. Turkey dropped four positions to land in sixth place, and Hong Kong dropped to seventh place. Vietnam, however, jumped fifteen places to land in eighth place.

Top Ten Most DDoS-Attacked Countries

1. China
2. Germany
3. India
4. South Korea
5. Turkey
6. Hong Kong
7. Vietnam
8. Russia
9. Azerbaijan

Top Attacked Industries

Telecommunications was the most attacked industry, followed by Internet and Information Technology Services. Gaming and Gambling were the third and fourth most attacked industries, followed by Banking/Financial and Retail industries.

1. Telecommunications
2. Internet
3. Information Technology and Services
4. Gaming
5. Gambling and Casinos
6. Banking and financial Services
7. Retail
8. Agriculture
9. Computer Software
10. Government

Top Country-Level Sources Of DDOS Attacks

Cloudflare’s data shows that Ukraine is the fifth‑largest source of DDoS attacks, but doesn’t say which areas of Ukraine are responsible. When I look at my logs of bot attacks, the Ukrainian‑origin bots are consistently in Russian‑occupied territories. Cloudflare should have made a distinction about this point, in my opinion.

The country of origin doesn’t mean that one country is shiftier than another. For example, the Netherlands rank as the ninth‑largest source of DDoS attacks, and that may be the case because they have strong user privacy laws that protect VPN users and are well positioned for low latency to both Europe and North America.

Cloudflare also provide the following note about country-level origins:

“It’s important to note that these “source” rankings reflect where botnet nodes, proxy or VPN endpoints reside — not the actual location of threat actors. For L3/4 DDoS attacks, where IP spoofing is rampant, we geolocate each packet to the Cloudflare data center that first ingested and blocked it, drawing on our presence in over 330 cities for truly granular accuracy.”

Top Ten Country Origins Of DDOS Attacks

1. Indonesia
2. Singapore
3. Hong Kong
4. Argentina
5. Ukraine
6. Russia
7. Ecuador
8. Vietnam
9. Netherlands
10. Thailand

Top ASN Sources Of DDOS Attacks

An ASN (Autonomous System Number) is a unique number assigned to networks or groups of networks that share the same rules for routing internet traffic. SEOs and publishers who track the origin of bad traffic and use .htaccess to block millions of IP ranges will recognize a number of the networks on this list. Hetzner, OVH, Tencent, Microsoft, the Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba are all usual suspects.

According to Cloudflare, Hetzner dropped from first place as the origin of DDoS attacks to third place. DigitalOcean was formerly the number one source of DDoS attacks and was pushed down to position two by Drei‑K‑Tech‑GmbH, which jumped six places to become the leading source of DDoS attacks.

Top Ten Network Sources Of DDOS Attacks

1. Drei-K-Tech-GmbH
2. DigitalOcean
3. Hetzner
4. Microsoft
5. Viettel
6. Tencent
7. OVH
8. Chinanet
9. Google Cloud Platform
10. Alibaba

DDOS Attacks Could Be Better Mitigated

Cloudflare noted that it has a program that allows cloud computing providers to rapidly respond to bad actors abusing its networks. It’s not just DDoS attacks that originate at cloud and web hosting providers; it’s also bots scanning for vulnerabilities and actively trying to hack websites. If more providers joined Cloudflare, there could be fewer DDoS attacks, and the web would be a lot safer place.

This is how Cloudflare explains it:

“To help hosting providers, cloud computing providers and any Internet service providers identify and take down the abusive accounts that launch these attacks, we leverage Cloudflare’s unique vantage point to provide a free DDoS Botnet Threat Feed for Service Providers. Over 600 organizations worldwide have already signed up for this feed, and we’ve already seen great collaboration across the community to take down botnet nodes.”

Read the Cloudflare report:

Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks skyrocket: Cloudflare’s 2025 Q2 DDoS threat report

Source link

We all want to be satisfied, even though we know some people who will never be that way, and others who see satisfaction as a foreign emotion that they can’t hope to ever feel.

Newspaper Ads Canyon Crest CA

Click To See Full Page Ads

Click To See Half Page Ads

Click To See Quarter Page Ads

Click To See Business Card Size Ads

If you have questions before you order, give me a call @ 951-235-3518 or email @ canyoncrestnewspaper@gmail.com Like us on Facebook Here

]]> https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/63-of-known-attacks-blamed-on-competitors/feed/ 0 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/daily-search-forum-recap-july-16-2025/ https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/daily-search-forum-recap-july-16-2025/#respond Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:00:22 +0000 https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/daily-search-forum-recap-july-16-2025/



Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his expertise in the search marketing industry. He only provides consulting services to expert SEOs and also performs search marketing expert witness services. Barry graduated from the City University of New York and lives with his family in the NYC region. You can follow Barry on Twitter at @rustybrick or on LinkedIn and read his full bio over here.

36,908 Articles as
barry.schwartz

Source link

We all want to be satisfied, even though we know some people who will never be that way, and others who see satisfaction as a foreign emotion that they can’t hope to ever feel.

Newspaper Ads Canyon Crest CA

Click To See Full Page Ads

Click To See Half Page Ads

Click To See Quarter Page Ads

Click To See Business Card Size Ads

If you have questions before you order, give me a call @ 951-235-3518 or email @ canyoncrestnewspaper@gmail.com Like us on Facebook Here

]]> https://4ebusinessmediagroup.com/daily-search-forum-recap-july-16-2025/feed/ 0