Snap Emphasizes SMB Ad Growth in Q1 Earnings
In Snap’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, it pointed to SMBs as a growing source of revenue for its advertising and promotional products.
Mike Boland
May 8, 2026
Mike Boland
Mike Boland, senior analyst with Localogy, was one of Silicon Valley’s first tech reporters of the internet age as a staff reporter for Forbes magazine starting in 2000. His comments have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Google AI Mode Can Now Find Local Products in Stock
Google continues to add functionality to AI Mode. The latest enticing offer is the ability for users to ask the AI engine about availability of nearby products, including what’s currently in stock. This brings a longstanding functional aspiration for Google together with its latest AI-focused and buzzy products.
Mike Boland
May 7, 2026
The Eternal Question: Where Does SEO End and AIO Begin?
With the rise of AI engines comes the need to learn the still-opaque and quickly-developing art of AI optimization (AIO), also known as generative engine optimization (GEO). Just when you mastered SEO, this comes along.
Mike Boland
May 6, 2026
Doordash Simplifies & Streamlines SMB Onboarding
Doordash has announced a new suite of tools designed to onboard SMBs to its platform in streamlined and automated ways. Highlighting things like pre-populating their business details, menus, and other relevant info, the endgame is to attract more SMBs to the platform by lowering friction.
Mike Boland
May 5, 2026
Are OpenAI’s Ad-Revenue Growing Pains Slowing?
The biggest bombshell to recently hit the advertising world – a world already facing increased competition and fragmentation – is the entrance OpenAI. Its ad infusions in ChatGPT are slowly rolling out, and the headline has been the program’s growing pains. But are those pains being alleviated?
Mike Boland
May 1, 2026
Snap Shows Us How Revenue Diversification is Done
Snap has been on a clear revenue diversification path over the past few years. Branching out from its core business in ad revenue, it has launched subscription products such as Snapchat+. And with a subscription revenue run rate of $1 billion, that plan appears to be working, and gaining Wall Street favor.
Mike Boland
April 30, 2026
Federated Data and Model Training Propel the All-in-One Software Movement
The holy grail of SMB SaaS is to be an all-in-one (AIO) provider. Spanning several SMB functions – from marketing to operations – AIO providers can gain ARPU and lower churn. The latter happens as they’re embedded deep into critical operations such as payroll and point-of-sale payments.
Mike Boland
April 29, 2026
InMarket Spotlights Best Practices in Local Marketing
InMarket recently published a sort of public-service announcement that spotlights best practices in marketing physical brick & mortar locations. And in doing so, it drew out a few common tactics that represent a new playbook in location marketing.
Mike Boland
April 28, 2026
Vendasta’s AI Workforce is Deployed to 100,000+ New SMBs
Vendasta’s AI workforce, consisting of several role-based agents, has been selected by Italian digital marketing powerhouse Italiaonline to power its 100,000+ SMB customers. The centerpiece of this integration is an AI agent known as MARiO, which fields inbound calls and turns them into new business.
Mike Boland
April 24, 2026
Yelp Drops 35+ Features, Puts AI Assistant at Core of Local Search
Yelp this week announced its Spring product release. This comes every year with a treasure trove of updates across Yelp’s products and functions. This year’s theme is unsurprisingly AI – including user-facing features to find local businesses, and SMB-facing features for automated task completion.
Mike Boland
April 23, 2026
An SMB AI Killer App Emerges: Responding to Reviews
One of the places AI is being integrated in local business marketing is responding to reviews. This was an example cited several times at Localogy’s L26. What’s the opportunity to do this? What are pitfalls? And who’s doing it right?
Mike Boland
April 22, 2026
The New Online-Visibility Playbook Takes Center Stage
One of the biggest questions looming over the digital media sphere is the degree to which traditional SEO carries into the emerging art of AI SEO, or GEO. Though this is a moving target given the pace of AI market shifts, the answer appears to be that some, but not all, SEO primes the pump for AI SEO.
Mike Boland
April 21, 2026
Yelp Quantifies AI’s Trust Gap
Amidst all the AI excitement, one reality check we continue to raise is how the technology is held back by trust issues. Yes, AI is effective and impressive… but that doesn’t mean much if users don’t trust it en masse. These AI trust issues were quantified this week by a new study from Yelp.
Mike Boland
April 17, 2026
TikTok Expands Footprint with HubSpot Integration
TikTok’s footprint just got bigger. The company has formed a partnership with marketing automation and CRM platform HubSpot, which puts TikTok marketing tools directly in front of marketers. This should help TikTok as a customer acquisition channel, while helping HubSpot expand its functionality.
Mike Boland
April 16, 2026
CTV for SMBs: A Conversation with Magnite
As a sell-side advertising company, Magnite is in prime position to facilitate TV advertising. Then, last fall, it closed the loop on end-to-end video production and campaign activation by acquiring Streamer.ai.
Mike Boland
April 14, 2026
Are Massive Valuations Back? Yes and No
Back in January, Yelp acquired Hatch for $300 million. One thing that jumped out was the pre-money valuation and purchase price. Given Hatch’s $25 million ARR, the purchase price reflected a 12x ARR multiple. This begged the question: Are Covid-era software multiples back? The answer is yes and no.
Mike Boland
April 10, 2026
OpenAI Endures Growing Pains in its Ad Monetization
OpenAI is just a few months into its ad monetization program and still in early stages of feeling out the right models. This has naturally led to some backlash, or at least distaste from some brand advertisers. Though these growing pains are being felt, it’s likely that OpenAI will figure it out.
Mike Boland
April 9, 2026
Ring Gets Closer to Becoming the Next Local Media & Commerce Platform
Like many platforms do when they get to a certain stage of usage and engagement, Ring has opened up the opportunity for apps to be developed – via public SDK – to reach all those users.
Mike Boland
April 7, 2026
Keeping the Human in the Marketing Loop: A Conversation with Hiper
As AI takes over the world, there’s creeping recognition that it’s not a silver bullet. It excels in some areas of automating life and work, but not others. For Hiper Co-founder and president Melissa Telsrow, much of this boils down to a question of where human work carries an irreplaceable essence.
Mike Boland
April 6, 2026
Local Marketplaces Apps Flock to ChatGPT
In the past few months, we’ve tracked a handful of local marketplaces apps that have established their presence on ChatGPT, including transactional functionality. That list so far includes Angi, booking.com, doordash, Expedia, Uber and Zillow.
Mike Boland
April 2, 2026