Director of SearchOps
Mani Bharij is the Director of SearchOps. He has spent 17+ years in SEO, building and leading search campaigns across local, organic and technical disciplines.
His work spans independent businesses through to multi-location and national brands, with a focus on the surfaces that actually move local search: Google Business Profile, geo-grid rankings, reviews and, increasingly, visibility inside AI answer engines.
He founded SearchOps to pull those surfaces into a single workspace, so teams can measure what local search really looks like for every client, street by street. He writes here on the practical playbooks behind that work.
The sharpest objection to AI visibility tracking: if the model personalises every answer, isn't measuring it through a tool measuring a fiction? Here is the honest answer. Personalisation re-ranks the shortlist, it does not write it, and the signal you can actually influence is the shared, un-personalized one a good tracker measures.
Read postOn 20 July 2026 Google confirmed it is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and folding pay-per-lead campaigns into Google Ads as a specialized Performance Max type. What survives, what changes, the phased 2026-2027 rollout, and the one irreversible step, backing up your historical reports, to take before your account migrates.
Read postSince April 2026 Google moderates every owner reply and rejects some silently, so a reply can look posted and never go live. That, the July 2026 dashboard outage, and the documented reasons reviews disappear, plus the two-minute check that tells you which one you have.
Read postThe single-location audit shatters at scale. Here is the method we use to audit a multi-location estate in an afternoon: match every location, score the estate on shared axes, target the neglected tail, and report it in a way a board can fund.
Read postAnswer engines do not rank local businesses, they assemble a shortlist of names. Here is how that decision gets made, the three levers that move it, and what we found testing 600 prompts across ChatGPT and the other leading AI answer engines.
Read postPosts are not a Map Pack ranking lever, and never were. What they are, what the data says they do, and the five misconceptions that still dominate the conversation.
Read postGoogle now pulls your latest Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube posts directly into your Business Profile. The practical brief for owners and marketing teams: what you control, what Google decides, and the 30-minute audit.
Read postFour years of verified third-party data on how AI has reshaped local search.
Read postHow a London clinic added a personal, team-led ask on top of their existing SMS and email funnel — and 3.2x'd their monthly Google reviews.
Read postWhat we'll cover here: practical local SEO, GBP optimization, AI search visibility, and the playbooks we use to rank multi-location brands.
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