Two big Google updates for SEOs this week

and more local SEO developments

June 08, 2026

Hi!

I feel like AI Local SEO is changing every hour 😅 I hope these emails help you keep up.

Here’s what happened last week 👇️

1. How to improve your page for AI visibility and rankings

Mark Williams-Cook has done it again: He built a brilliant tool that analyzes your page, finds gaps in your content, and shows you what you should add to improve it.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Go to intentgaps.com

  2. Enter the URL of your website page and click “Fetch page”.

  3. The tool will scan your page, detect the topic of the page, and pull in related questions from AlsoAsked. You can choose which questions to include or remove

  4. The tool will generate a scorecard telling you if your content fully answers, partially answers, or completely misses those questions.

Basically, it shows you the questions your page should be answering. I love it.

And with AI search becoming more important, this matters even more. If your page doesn’t clearly answer the questions people are asking, AI tools probably won’t recommend it.

2. The clankers are coming 🤖

Google just announced a new personal AI agent that can work for you 24/7. It’s called Gemini Spark, and it runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud.

But what even is an AI agent?

An AI agent is like your personal assistant. Compared to AI chatbots or LLMs like ChatGPT that mostly answer your questions, an AI agent can actually perform tasks for you.

For example, a chatbot can tell you: “Here are some hotels in Paris:…”. But an AI agent could go a step further and compare hotels, check prices, look at availability, and actually complete the booking for you.

This is going to be a massive shift for SEO and local search. Your website won’t just need to be optimized for humans anymore. It will also need to be optimized for AI agents that are trying to understand your business, compare your services, and decide whether to recommend you.

Thoughts? Share them on LinkedIn!

3. How do you optimize your website for AI agents?

There’s an awesome tool that will tell exactly what you need to do 👇️

Instagram Reel

4. Two big Google updates for SEOs this week

1. Google Business Profile data is coming to Google Analytics.

You’ll soon be able to connect your Google Business Profile directly to GA4 and see local performance data inside Google Analytics. This means you’ll be able to report on things like:

  • Calls

  • Bookings

  • Direction requests

  • Website clicks

  • Total interactions

This is great because local SEO reporting has always been a little messy. You have website data in one place, GBP performance data in another place, call tracking somewhere else, and then you have to piece everything together manually.

2. Google will be showing us how our sites perform in AI Search in Google Search Console.

The new reports will show when your site appears in Google’s generative AI features, like AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover. You’ll be able to see things like:

  • which pages appeared in AI results

  • how many impressions they got

  • what countries they showed up in

  • what devices people used

  • and how that changed over time

Both updates are still rolling out, so you might not see them yet. I don’t have them yet either.

But I’m thrilled to be getting this additional reporting data!

Save this post on Facebook.

5. Catch up on the pod

Last week I was joined by the awesome Celeste Gonzalez, who shared her fresh Gen Z perspective on local SEO and social media.

For the longest time, local SEO was mostly about local optimization, but now it’s becoming more like evidence optimization.

And this is where platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram can be huge for AI visibility.

Reviews, photos, videos, mentions, and customer comments across multiple social media platforms all help prove that your business is real and trusted.

Posting on social media doesn’t just help customers understand your business better, it also creates the kind of evidence that can help with AI visibility.

Celeste and I discussed this on last week’s podcast, plus:

  • Google Already Knows Everything About You (Near Media)

  • Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign (Lane Brown)

  • Google Maps Got an AI Facelift (Claudia Tomina)

  • Google Ask Maps: How to Optimize for Visibility (Rich Sanger)

  • Google Offer Posts Getting More Prominence (Michael B. Snow)

Watch the episode here 👇️

🎧 Or if you prefer listening, find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Darren

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