Yes.... but the stacking and how you layer the geo and poi articles has massively changed from the training. They have to be done with information gain and semantic relevance now or they can devalue the site as a whole.

@Sivagopi Appadurai Let me add an important layer to what I said, because with 50 locations there's a real trap to avoid. If you build 50 near-identical "Sell Gold in [City]" pages, Google will read them as doorway pages — thin gateways that exist only to funnel people to a contact form. That's the fastest way to hurt a single-theme site, not help it. The locations still matter, but the geographic content has to earn its place by being genuinely valuable on its own. The shift: geographic content that amplifies, not funnels. Two kinds of geo content do the heavy lifting, and the key is that both have to be topically tied to gold and to your actual market — not generic city filler. Geographic authority pieces — real local intelligence for the person who has gold to sell. Not "Welcome to [City]," but things like the local precious-metals market, where the historic jewelry or antique district is, local consumer-protection rules around selling valuables, what estate and probate looks like in that county. Someone landing cold on that page should learn something useful even if they never call you. Point-of-interest pieces — and here's the part most people miss: the POIs have to connect to why people sell gold, or they're irrelevant. A guide to the local city park does nothing for a gold buyer. But the county probate courthouse, the historic jewelry district, a well-known local auction or estate-sale house, an annual coin or collectibles show — those are topically relevant, because they sit right where inherited gold, estate jewelry, and collector coins change hands. That's your audience's world. Keep the mix honest. The bulk of the site should still be the actual subject — how gold pricing works, karat differences, spot price, scam avoidance, what to bring when selling. The geographic pieces are a portion of the content, not the whole strategy. When educational depth outweighs the location pages, the location pages read as legitimate. When it's 50 location pages and little else, they read as doorways.

@Erik Isbrandt It's live. This one's 1-on-1 consulting — high-ticket and intentionally limited, since it's direct access. If you're interested, DM me and we'll see if it's a fit.

Yep, this is the real deal — Liz Reid's I/O post, May 19. A few things worth pulling out beyond the headline, because "AI first" is the easy part to repeat and the hard part to act on: Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model in AI Mode globally, and the bigger structural shift is the move into "Search agents" — agents that run in the background and intelligently reason across the web to surface what a user needs at the right moment. For local especially, watch the booking piece: Google is expanding agentic booking into local experiences and services, and for categories like home repair, beauty, and pet care it will call businesses on the user's behalf. That rolls out to everyone in the U.S. this summer. That last part is the one I'd sit with. When the search layer starts calling the business, the question stops being "do we rank" and becomes "are we even legible to the machine that's doing the asking." Structured, accurate, machine-readable business data — hours, services, real-time availability, consistent NAP — goes from nice-to-have to the thing that determines whether the agent can transact with you at all. A gorgeous website the AI can't parse is invisible in that flow. The other quiet shift: Personal Intelligence is expanding to nearly 200 countries with Gmail and Photos connections. Results are getting personalized to each user's context, which means "the rankings" become less of a fixed board you can screenshot for a client and more of a per-person thing. We'll need to reset how we report wins. The practical takeaway for the room: the fundamentals didn't get less important, they got more — accurate listings, real reviews, clean structured data, genuine authority. AI search just punishes the gaps faster than the old blue links ever did. The clients who win are the ones whose information is so clean and consistent the machine can confidently put them forward. Curious what others here are seeing in AI Mode for their clients' queries yet — anyone tracking it directly?