With Teeth #2: The stuff you cannot fake

Hey again,

Before the usual, one note. This newsletter has a name now: With Teeth.

You will see it on the subject line, starting with this one. If you get it, you get it. 🙂

There is an entire industry selling ways to trick the rankings, and most of it works just long enough to take your money.

Take the one going around now. Get people to look up your business, tap Get Directions, and drive over. It can move you up, until Google spots the pattern and stops counting it.

The reason it works is a number most owners never look at. Google tracks direction requests and shows them to you in your own business profile dashboard. Enough real people asking for directions tells Google you are the business people want, so it nudges you up.

Or the outfits that flood the internet with pages pretending to be independent, all quietly recommending their clients. That one is now against the rules at Anthropic, and it has been spam at Google for a while.

Here is the part the people selling this leave out. You have to keep buying it forever. The month you stop, the traffic falls off, and all Google sees is a business that suddenly started doing worse.

None of it is trust. It is a terrible lie with a car.

And do not assume they lack the data to spot it. Google’s own help page says Popular Times comes from your phone’s location history, and its testimony in the 2023 antitrust case described a system that re-ranks results based on what people click.

So where does that data come from? Google’s own products. Maps and Android see where people go, Chrome measures how fast your pages load for real visitors, and Search sees what gets clicked.

And what is normal looks different for a dentist in Baton Rouge than for a plumber in a town of two thousand. Google has watched both long enough to know the difference, so a spike that does not fit the pattern stands out.

Here is what actually decides whether Google and AI put your name forward. Two things you cannot fake.

The first is what other people say about you. My honest take, and it is not the popular one: what other sites say about you matters more than what your own site says.

You can write anything you like on your own site, and nobody grades you on it. When a directory, a neighbor, or a customer writes about you somewhere you do not control, that reads as real.

Google is not trying to reward the best optimized website. It is trying to find the actual best business, and from a distance the only way it can judge that is through things that did not come from you.

The second is whether your own pages answer what your customers ask. That part is slow, and it compounds, which is exactly why nobody sells it as a hack.

It works like the sign at the front of a ride at Disney World. You must be at least this tall to ride, and you do not need to be a foot taller than that. But if you are under the line, you do not get on, no matter how good your ticket is.

Where that line sits depends on your market. A few local ties can be plenty in a small town, and nowhere near enough in a big city.

So stop counting tricks and go get the local ties. The chamber, the sponsor page, the charity event, the neighbor who will vouch for you. Then write the thing your customer is already searching for.

Before you spend another dollar, find out what AI and search already say about you. We built a free prompt for exactly that:

Norzer independent digital footprint prompt