Planning around AI answers and consent

December handed local businesses two items worth carrying into next year’s plan, and they point in opposite directions.

On 6 December Google announced Gemini, its new model family, and put a version of it into Bard the following week. On 13 December the FCC adopted a rule closing what it calls the lead generator loophole. Consent to be called or texted now has to be given to one identified business at a time, rather than to a page of unnamed “marketing partners”.

One is about how people will find you. The other is about what you are allowed to do with the lead once it arrives. Both push the same direction: toward being the answer rather than one of ten links, and toward owning your own list instead of renting somebody else’s.

This is the week to plan, because nothing is happening in the schedule anyway. Here is how we are approaching it, for the businesses we run directly and for the agency partners we fulfil for.

What actually changed this month

• Gemini, announced 6 December. Google’s new model, with Gemini Pro now inside Bard. It is a better chat product. It is not yet the search results page your customers use.
• SGE is still in Labs. The generative answer Google showed at I/O in May has been open to anyone who opts in since the summer, and it has been changing shape the whole time. Most people searching for a dentist this month are still seeing a map and ten links.
• The FCC one-to-one consent rule, adopted 13 December. It affects automated calls and texts. A single form cannot collect consent on behalf of a list of companies, and the consent has to relate to what the person was actually doing on the page. It does not take effect immediately, so there is a runway, but the rewrite is not optional.
• Consent Mode v2, announced in late November for the EU. Not a requirement for a business serving one town, but it shows where the platforms are heading with consent signals and measurement.
• Chrome is still planning to start turning off third-party cookies for a slice of users early next year. Every year of delay has made agencies complacent. This one looks real.
• Google Business Profile websites are being shut down. Notices are going out. If a business you know is running on that free auto-generated site as its only web presence, that is a dated job, not a someday job.

Plan for AI answers without betting the year on them

The temptation, in an agency pitch deck or an owner’s new year resolution, is a big rewrite aimed at whatever the generative answer wants. We are not doing that, for one simple reason: the thing is still changing weekly and nobody outside Google can measure it.

What we are doing instead is the work that makes a business the one worth citing, which is the same work that makes it rank:

1. Facts that are correct everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services, insurance, in the same form on the site, the profile and the major directories. A model assembling an answer about you will pull from all of it.
2. One real page per service you actually sell, written by somebody who has done the work, with prices or price ranges where you can give them and a clear next step.
3. Questions answered in plain language on the page where the answer belongs, not stuffed into a blog post. “Do you see children on Saturdays” is a page, not a keyword.
4. Reviews with words in them. Recent, plentiful, replied to. Every system that summarises a business reads the reviews.
5. Real photography. Of the building, the team and the work. It is the thing a model cannot generate for you and the thing a customer decides on.
6. A profile someone maintains. Categories, services, hours including holidays, and posts that are not three months old.

For agencies asking what to sell around this next year: do not sell an “AI ranking” package you cannot report on. Sell the audit, the profile management, the review engine and the content, and tell clients plainly that the generative results are not yet measurable. The ones who oversell this in the next six months are going to spend the six after that explaining themselves.

Plan for first-party data, because the borrowed kind is running out

The consent rule is the visible edge of something larger. Third-party cookies are going, link tracking protection is stripping parameters off the links people share, and platforms keep tightening what they will match against. What survives is data a customer gave you directly, with a record of them giving it.

What we are rebuilding in the accounts we manage:

• One business per form. The consent line names the practice, not a network. If you buy shared leads, ask your supplier this month how they intend to comply, and get the answer in writing.
• Consent language that matches the action. Somebody booking a cleaning did not agree to a monthly promotional text. Separate the appointment confirmations from the marketing.
• A stored record of consent. Timestamp, page, and the exact wording shown. Your CRM should hold this without anybody thinking about it.
• An easy opt-out that actually works, honoured across texts, calls and email, immediately.
• Your own list as the asset. Patients and customers you can reach without paying for the privilege. Every campaign next year should be adding to it.
• Measurement that does not depend on a cookie. Call tracking, offline conversion imports, and asking new customers how they found you at the desk.

What to do this month

• Put 13 December in a note and book an hour in January to read every form on your site with the one-to-one consent rule in hand.
• Check whether the business is still running on a Google-generated free site, and get a real one scheduled before the shutdown date.
• Export your customer list, deduplicate it, and confirm you can reach it without a platform in the middle.
• Pick the three service pages that bring in the most work and rewrite them as pages a person would actually want to read, with real photos.
• Book the January listings pass now: categories, hours, holiday hours, services, and the profile posts nobody touched since the summer.
• Agree one number you will judge next year by, and make it booked work rather than rankings or impressions.

None of this is a bet on what the search results look like in twelve months. It is the same local SEO foundation we have been building since 2015, made a little more durable against a year where the answers may not be links. If you want our read on where the generative results sit today, we keep it current on our AI search visibility page, and agencies planning fulfilment for next year can see how we handle this work for their clients on the partners page.