Join Us tomorrow on our Thursday call of the State of AEO! We will be addressing the elephant in the room: ...are we really using AI? Link In the community calendar: Call Timezones: - Eastern Daylight Time (EDT): 1:00 PM (e.g., New York, NY) - Central Daylight Time (CDT): 12:00 PM (e.g., Chicago, IL) - Mountain Daylight Time (MDT): 11:00 AM (e.g., Denver, CO) - Pacific Daylight Time (PDT): 10:00 AM (e.g., Los Angeles, CA)

from the desk of Matt Diamanté ' - Hey Tony Google just dropped some massive updates to their review guidelines… and people are pissed. TLDR: • you can’t give an incentive to leave a review • customers can’t leave staff names in reviews • you have to ask everyone for reviews. Not just happy customers • you can’t ask for reviews while someone is at your business • you can’t ask them to leave a specific review or mention a product or service Here’s what Google has to say: Contributions to Google Maps should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business. Rating Manipulation includes Incentivized or Biased Reviews, which are not allowed and will be removed from Maps. This includes: • Content that has been posted due to an incentive offered by a business - such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services. • This includes content posted following requests for revision or removal of a review or rating in exchange for an incentive. • Content exhibiting unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions that are indicative of efforts to manipulate a place’s rating • Content that is based on a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest may include current or former employment, a contractual or consultory relationship, or other professional or personal affiliations that demonstrate a conflict of interest (such as industry competitors, familial relationships, etc.). We do not allow merchants to: • Offer incentives – such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services - in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review. • Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers • When soliciting reviews, merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included. This includes: • Merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews • Merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member.

This article has some great stats that can help potential clients see the value in implementing AEO: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/ai-traffic-to-us-retailers-rose-393-in-q1-and-its-boosting-their-revenue-too/

- Eastern Daylight Time (EDT): 1:00 PM (e.g., New York, NY) - Central Daylight Time (CDT): 12:00 PM (e.g., Chicago, IL) - Mountain Daylight Time (MDT): 11:00 AM (e.g., Denver, CO) - Pacific Daylight Time (PDT): 10:00 AM (e.g., Los Angeles, CA)

This might be an alternative to Anthropic's Claude issues: See Attached. (Found on Linkedin) Are you experiencing issues with Claude or any other AI service in your daily workflow?