Okay.

And you're seeing my screen okay? Yeah.

One of the things about search and finding consumers is most people use search for local understanding and local retrieval.

53% say most or almost all of their searching is local.

So when you think about the internet, and particularly in younger cohorts, most of what they're using online search for is finding local businesses.

And in that, you know, there's this thought that AI is becoming a dominant form.

It isn't.

Um, well, how can people reach you and, um, what else would you like to share?

company with thus the name Near Media.

We tried that.

We weren't able to find a great go-to-market product that scaled.

And so we switched into consumer behavior research primarily, initially.

in whatever category.

So we would, with hotels or restaurants or storage or healthcare or legal, we would put together panels of consumers.

We would put some software on their phone with their permission or on their laptop.

So If you wouldn't mind, walk me through, like, what does that session look like when you're recording them, you're engaging with them, understanding their behavior? What kind of questions do you ask them? What are you looking for? What are you watching for?

Yep.

And, and out of that grew an internet design business where we created a open source, wiki-based content management system.

And so I was selling websites, large-scale websites to local users, and it became obvious to me that SEO was critical to that.

And local SEO, organic local SEO, was critical, was a critical sub-study of that.

And when the Yellow Pages...

You know, in two thousand and five, when Google Maps became sort of consolidated, where they moved the listings in with the maps, it became clear to me that it was the most brilliant product in the world.

It was so innovative, and it l- literally allowed me to throw away the nine Yellow Page books I had to use in my rural community for prospecting.

It knows you just love Barbara Oliver, [chuckles] so.

... on where their focus should be when it comes to using Google as a way to attract more new patients coming to their practice.

Well, their first focus should be on running a great business that gets people appointments quickly, that answers every call quickly, that has a good brand, that has reputation in the local market, where when people th- want to tell their friend about a dentist, they tell you.

That hasn't changed since 2008 and isn't gonna change under AI.

In fact, it may become more so under AI because of the way AI works.

Um, in terms of what we're seeing Google doing, we are seeing them rolling out many more ad units much more pervasively and, you know, when you read articles about how, how AI is stealing search, we don't see that happening in our consumer behavior research.

What we see is Google Ads stealing organic or local.

Now, it doesn't make local organic any less important because those things still feed Google Ads.

So does bounce rate have as much of an effect as it has in ranking as it had before? Or is it not as big of a key factor or key ranking factor for a website? I'm curious because people keep talking about that.