This edition of Local Radar highlights three startups betting that AI can reinvent some of the most established categories in local commerce. From Cascade rethinking construction job acquisition, to Bidbus reshaping the way used cars are sold, to Naive streamlining the process of starting a business, the common thread is software designed for an AI-native world rather than retrofitted for one.
The big news from Snap this week is yesterday’s formal Specs launch. But more relevant for the Localogyverse is an overshadowed move the company made with a new social-local feature. Known as Snapchat Plans, it’s a suite of features for creating, managing, and sharing local outings with friends.
Tiger Pistol has announced that it’s now an official badged TikTok Channel Sales partner. This formally brings TikTok advertising into Tiger Pistol’s Creative Automation Studio, making it easier for its customers to build TikTok content and marketing campaigns – an otherwise challenging endeavor.
Thryv Holdings this week entered into a definitive agreement to sell its print business to PE firm Carolwood, LP for $142 million. Consisting of directory holdings in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, the all-cash deal marks a milestone in Thryv’s ongoing transition to a streamlined SaaS-based business.
Yelp has announced that it’s teaming up with its recent acquiree, Hatch, to integrate OpenAI’s new GPT-Live-1 into Yelp Host. This should bring advanced voice AI capabilities to restaurants and service SMBs, letting them automate functions like fielding calls from inbound queries and new customers.
TikTok has always demonstrated big potential as a marketing vehicle for SMBs. And for those who have adopted it, it’s been powerful. The issue is that so few SMBs – less than 5 percent, we’ve estimated – have done so. Leadzai wants to change that, and has lowered several TikTok adoption barriers.
In a new lawsuit, the United States FTC and 22 states have alleged that Amazon engaged in misleading and fraudulent business practices that impacted about a million SMBs. Amazon denies the allegations, framing its moves as routine and congruent with standard practices in search-ad bid marketplaces.
Do sporting events, concerts, and other big events in a given city boost that city’s adjacent business revenue? Event-affiliated vendors and apparel shops certainly benefit, but what about the broader scope of bars, restaurants, and retailers in a given city? Placer.ai is out with new data to answer this question.
“Using AI is table stakes. Profiting from it? That’s where most agencies get stuck,” vcita CMO Rachel Nulman Shapiro tells Localogy Insider. We caught up with Shapiro this week to find out more about a webinar that vcita will be hosting on September 15. The goal, she says, is to close this common gap.
Yext this week has announced a set of products that are designed to automate and streamline online visibility in the escalating AI era. This includes adding brand-level AI visibility and agentic workflows to its Scout platform, and a new AIO tool that’s purpose-built for the needs and resource constraints of SMBs.
One of the effects of an evolving digital landscape is to spark new user behaviors. That includes how consumers find and evaluate local businesses. And with one of the biggest transformations in decades now underway – yes, we’re talking about AI – local search and discovery habits are being upended.
After launching at the beginning of the year, OpenAI’s advertising program has seen its share of ups and downs. eMarketer reported that it’s pacing well below revenue targets, as our sources tell us the ads themselves underperform. But yesterday, OpenAI silenced critics by announcing a $1 billion run rate.
The day has arrived. After being announced in May – followed by much speculation and analysis from us and others – ads start rolling out this week in Apple Maps. Some ads have been spotted prior to this week as Apple stress-tested the program. But the company is now officially stating that ads are live.
One of the most prevalent hot takes in the backlash to AI search is the medium’s tendency to reduce traffic for publishers and website owners. And it stands to reason: answering questions with greater granularity – as opposed to search’s traditional intermediary role – will naturally pre-empt clicks.
How much does online visibility impact offline foot traffic? SOCi has calculated a .72 correlation between the two. In other words, the strength of local presence for brick-and-mortar retailers correlates to their volume of foot traffic at an average rate of 72 percent. This meaningfully links the two factors.
ChatGPT’s new ad program is one of the most exciting things to happen to the digital marketing world in recent history. But though it has ample potential and piggybacks on a momentous product category, ChatGPT ads continue to feel growing pains. New evidence suggests they have a ways to go.
One of the biggest longstanding holy grails of local commerce is better visibility into the increasingly convoluted and fragmented path to purchase. It weaves in and out of digital and physical channels, making it hard to figure out where influence and intent lie. SOCi and Placer have lifted some of that fog.
Scorpion is out this week with the latest addition to its sprawling suite of marketing tools for SMBs. It now offers Demand Gen ads from Google. This extends SMBs’ reach in promoting themselves from consumers who are explicitly “in-market” for their products to those who aren’t yet.
A few years after the metaverse bubble deflated, we still see some vestiges of its principles. A subset of that movement involved a real-world metaverse that promised a layer of data that annotates the world, unlocked through local discovery apps. That vision stands behind a new startup called Wrinkles.
Google Gemini has surpassed a billion monthly actives – making it one of Google’s fastest-growing products of all time
