Bots Book Meetings, Check Your References

Reviews as Your Process

Google added review transparency guidance in July, addressing fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews. For Google Business Profiles, the rules remain straightforward: ask for honest reviews, offer no incentives, and do not limit requests to customers you expect to leave five stars.

We’re asking clients to make reviews a repeatable part of the customer experience. A QR code makes the review page easier to reach. Someone still has to ask. An actual customer explaining what you did for them adds something another paragraph of self promotion cannot.

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AI Impressions in reports.

Your new LookStudio AI impression data page goes back to June 2026. We’re storing this at the page level each month and building something bigger around it.

Now We’re Building an AI Search Intelligence Layer.

The plan is to cross AI-positive pages with search impressions, ChatGPT referral traffic, Microsoft Clarity behavior, and potentially Bing data. That gives us a dataset we can mine for patterns at the individual client level and with insights across the iNET portfolio.

The total is interesting and should rise over time. The page list is where we can do something. Which pages is Google showing people? Are those the pages historically producing worthwhile inquiries? More appearances for a DIY blog or a page with zero history of conversion activity could be a vanity metric.

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Google Called. It Was a Robot.

We received our first legitimate Google agent call at iNET this quarter. It was a quick information gathering call about availability, essentially asking whether we wanted to be included on a list. That makes the change less theoretical. Google’s assistants can gather business information on someone’s behalf before that person ever visits a website.

Hotel bookings show where this is going. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, is expanding into lodging, with adoption for hotel booking in AI Mode planned over the coming months. It supports checking availability and completing reservations within Google’s experience, while the hotel remains the merchant of record.

Google wants to middleman more of commerce, including the research, comparison, and booking.

Google may be explaining your business before anyone visits your website. What are we giving it to work with? “Quality service from trusted professionals” could describe a roofer, a dentist, or a tax preparer. We’re replacing interchangeable claims with specific capabilities, service boundaries, and evidence in accordance with Google’s own AI guidance.

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Another Spam Update

Google began its September spam update on September 24, with a rollout expected to take up to two weeks. Building websites right avoids spam penalties. Not worried.

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The Robots Are Investigating the Bot Slop

Google’s SAFE system uses AI agents to investigate coordinated synthetic media abuse. The research looks at content, publishing behavior, and relationships between channels. It goes beyond looking for identical copies of the same material.

We’re looking for details that require knowing the business: what it can do, what it has done, and what backs that up. If you can replace the company name with a competitor’s and the page still works, we probably have more work to do.

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This Quarter’s Broad Strokes Initiatives

1. Building an AI Search Intelligence Dataset

We’re beginning to store AI visibility and page-level search data monthly instead of treating each report as a snapshot. The goal is to build a usable history of which pages appear in AI search, what those pages rank for, and how those visitors behave.

Next we’re layering in identifiable ChatGPT referral traffic and Microsoft Clarity engagement data at the page level, with other search-platform data where it proves useful. That lets us look for patterns within an individual website and across the broader iNET client portfolio.

The end goal is not another AI score. It is a dataset we can mine for questions like: Which topics consistently earn AI visibility? Which page types produce worthwhile engagement? Where are competitors showing up that we are not? What should we expand, rewrite, split, delete, or leave alone?

2. Credibility Sculpting for Answer Engines

We’re continuing to replace interchangeable marketing language with information that requires actually knowing the business: specific capabilities, service boundaries, documented experience, useful comparisons, customer proof, and quantifiable facts.

If an answer engine is going to summarize the business before someone visits the website, we want to give it better material to work with. If you can swap in a competitor’s name and the paragraph still works, we probably have more work to do.

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More than a Numbers Chase

The qualified lead is still the unit of analysis. We know how people search, find, and interact with your website. You know which leads are worth having. If lead quality, sales priorities, or business goals have changed, tell us. A quarterly call helps keep strategy pointed at the right opportunities. CALL US: 262-574-9400.