Issue 013 / August 2026 - Is your Yelp page still claimed?

Hi ,

There's nothing like a great summer vacation to recharge your battery and put you in a good place to dig into your business once you're back. And believe it or not, a lot has happened in the world of AI while I've been away enjoying island life, amazing seafood, family time and the ocean breeze.

If you know me well, you know that I geek out to all things technology, so I am always inspired to share some good finds that are affecting business owners and their teams. I hope that you can take away at least one thing from each newsletter to implement into your business protocols. They add up over time. By the end of the year, I hope to have you in better shape than when you first subscribed to Found.

Which leads me to cybersecurity. I'll be attending a conference on it in early September, focused on small businesses, AI, and scams. And if you haven't connected the dots, every issue of Found has a section that ties right into it. It's the Digital Lockbox... knowing what you own and who can get to it, which is where security actually starts.

As a subscriber you get the free download of the Digital Lockbox plus a complete walk-through of a new category in every issue of Found. Past issues are in the archives if you want to catch up. And a printed workbook version comes out in late September, on Amazon and directly from my website. It's the more comprehensive version, built so someone who hasn't been working along in the newsletter can still use it start to finish. More on that soon.

Let's dig in.

~ Debbie

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NON-NEGOTIABLES

Are Your Emails Actually Landing in the Inbox?

Every email you send from your business address gets checked before it's delivered. Three checks, called SPF, DKIM and DMARC, all answering the same question: did this message really come from who it claims to come from?

Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook have all tightened this over the last two years. Gmail stopped delaying messages that fail and started rejecting them outright at the end of last year. Fail the checks and your email goes to spam, or it never arrives at all.

The part that catches businesses out is that this isn't only about the email you type yourself. It's every system that sends on your behalf using your domain name. Your invoicing software. Your appointment reminders. Your CRM. Your newsletter platform. Each one has to be authorized separately, and adding a new tool without setting it up is the most common way this breaks.

Nothing warns you when it happens. There's no bounce, no error, no notification. The invoice just never gets read and you assume the customer is slow to pay.

The check takes two minutes:

☐ Send an email from your business address to a Gmail account. If you have a Google Business Profile, you already have one. You don't have to use Gmail for business... it's just the easiest place to see the results in plain language.

☐ Open the message in Gmail on a computer. Click the three dots next to Reply, then choose Show original.

☐ Look at the top of that screen. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are each listed with a PASS or FAIL next to them. That's your answer.

☐ Repeat from each system that emails on your behalf. Your regular email, your invoicing tool, your booking system, your newsletter platform. One can pass while another fails, and finding that is the whole point.

If anything says FAIL, this is a call to make, not a fix to attempt.

The repair lives in your domain's DNS records, and DNS is not a place to experiment. Break it and your email stops entirely.

Call whoever has access to your DNS. Usually that's your web developer, or whoever registered your domain. If the failure is coming from one particular tool, start with that tool's support instead... Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and most CRMs publish the exact record they need added, and they'll walk you through it.

What matters is that you now know to ask, and you can tell them exactly which system failed and which check it failed on. That's a five-minute conversation instead of a mystery.

💡 PRO TIP

About to start sending campaigns from an address that has never sent much before? Don't email your whole list on day one, and don't send it from Gmail or Outlook directly... those aren't built for bulk and will limit you. Campaigns belong in your CRM or an email platform, and either one needs to be authorized to send as your domain first. The practice is called warming up: start with small batches to the people most likely to open, then build volume over a few weeks. Skip it and even a perfectly authenticated domain can land in spam.

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INDUSTRY WATCH

Yelp + OpenAI • July 23 and August 10, 2026

Your Yelp Page Just Became a ChatGPT Answer

Yelp signed a licensing deal with OpenAI. ChatGPT can now pull Yelp's reviews, ratings, photos and business details into its answers when someone asks about local businesses. Yelp branding and links appear alongside it, though OpenAI controls how the whole thing looks.

The scale is the part worth sitting with: roughly 330 million reviews and more than 8 million business listings.

Then, three weeks later, it stopped being about information. On August 10, Yelp turned on restaurant reservations and waitlists inside ChatGPT. Someone can now ask for a place to eat and book the table without leaving the conversation. OpenAI added OpenTable and Resy the same day.

Yelp's "Request a Quote" is next, which will let someone contact a local service provider from inside a chat. No launch date has been announced. But the restaurant version arriving this fast tells you where this is going... ChatGPT is turning from a place where people find you into a place where people contact you.

What this means for you:

Your Yelp page is now a data source feeding AI answers about your business, whether or not you've thought about Yelp in the last five years. What's on it... your hours, your services, your photos, what customers wrote... is material ChatGPT can reach for.

Two things worth knowing.

1. Yelp already licenses its data to Apple Maps, Yahoo, and Alexa, so this isn't new behavior for them, it's an expansion.

2. And the agreement doesn't stop Yelp from making similar deals with other AI companies. So this is a pattern to expect, not a one-time event.

You don't control how any of it gets displayed. You only control what's underneath it. Which is the whole argument for going and looking at your page.

READ: Yelp Reviews Are Now Inside ChatGPT. Here's What That Means for Your Business. →

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Got a question about AI visibility?

Submit it and you might see it answered in the next issue.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION >>>

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TWO-MINUTE WIN

Reply to Your Three Most Recent Review

Not all of them. The last three.

Open your Google Business Profile, look at your three newest reviews, and write a reply to each one. Two sentences is plenty. Thank the person, mention something specific from what they said, done.

Do the same on Yelp while you're in there, given everything above. If you can't get in because the page went unclaimed on you, that's your answer about where to spend the next two minutes.

Why this is worth the two minutes:

Your reply is public text attached to your business. It gets read by the next customer, and it gets read by AI systems building a picture of you. A business owner who answers is a different signal than a business owner who doesn't.

Specifics travel further than politeness. "Thanks for the kind words" says nothing. "Glad the new water heater is working out, and thanks for being flexible about the reschedule" tells a reader, and a machine, what you actually do and how you do it.

The negative ones count double. A calm, specific reply to a rough review does more for you than the review does against you. Answer it the way you'd want someone reading it six months from now to see you answer it.

Three replies. Done.

READ: How to Get More Google Reviews for Your NH Small Business →

(This article is relevant in every state, not just NH.)

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TRENDING AI TERMS

Grounding

What it means: An AI can answer you two ways. It can tell you what it already thinks it knows (knowledge through its training), or it can go read something first and answer from that. The second one is called grounding, and the answer traces back to a real source it actually read.

Why you'd want it: When it answers from what it already thinks it knows, that's where made-up details come from. When it reads first, you can check the answer against the source.

You can do this with your own material: Gemini Notebook, which Google renamed from NotebookLM in July, is free and grounds entirely on sources you provide. Upload your documents and it answers only from those, with a citation on every claim pointing at the exact sentence it used. Ask something your sources don't cover and it tells you so instead of filling the gap.

Try it with your own service pages and see. Ask the two or three questions customers actually ask. If your own page can't answer them with nothing else competing, that's worth fixing... and the fix is usually one sentence added to the page.

That's useful for more than content. Your service agreements, your insurance policy, your employee handbook, your supplier terms. Upload them and ask questions in plain language. You get an answer with a citation you can check, instead of one that sounds right.

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DIGITAL LOCKBOX

Category 9: Reviews and Reputation

The One Asset You Can't Rebuild

You could rebuild your website in a week. Redo the logo, rewrite the copy, reshoot the photos. You cannot rebuild 150 five-star reviews.

That's what separates this category from the rest of your Lockbox. Everything else can be recreated with enough time and money. Reviews exist only because customers took the time, and they sit on accounts you may not control.

Who might have access: Your reviews live inside a business account on each platform. A Google Business Profile. A Facebook business page. A Yelp business page. Whoever holds the login to that account is the only one who can reply to the reviews inside it. If a marketing agency set up your Google Business Profile under their own account years ago, they hold it, not you. If a reputation management company answers reviews for you, they may be doing it through their login rather than yours.

Open your Digital Lockbox and complete Category 9:

☐ Google reviews... can you respond from your account? If no, the fix isn't here. It's in Category 4, Google Ecosystem, where you sort out who owns the Business Profile.

☐ Facebook recommendations... can you respond from your page? Facebook replaced star reviews with Recommendations, and they can be switched off entirely at the page level. If you have none, check whether they're even turned on before assuming nobody has left one.

☐ Yelp reviews... do you have login access? Log in and confirm, don't assume. Yelp flips a claimed business page back to unclaimed after 90 days of nobody signing in. If you're locked out entirely, that belongs in Category 6, Business Directories and Listings.

☐ Industry-specific review sites. Angi, Houzz, Avvo, Healthgrades, TripAdvisor, whatever is standard in your trade.

☐ Are you actively responding to reviews? Write down the real answer.

☐ Does a third party manage review responses? Write down who, and confirm you also have direct access. Someone answering on your behalf is fine. Not being able to answer yourself is not.

One rule runs through every category in the workbook, and it applies here too. If you can't log in without calling someone, write that down. That's your answer.

💡 PRO TIP

When you ask a customer for a review, send them a direct link to your review page rather than telling them where to find you, plus a sentence about what's useful to mention... the specific service, the town, what the problem was. Most people want to help and just don't know what to write.

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MYTH VS. REALITY

MYTH: "I claimed my Yelp page years ago, so I'm all set."

REALITY: Yelp can automatically flip a claimed page back to unclaimed if nobody has logged into the Yelp for Business account in 90 days. So the page you claimed in 2022 may not be claimed today, and nothing would have told you.

That mattered less when it was just a directory listing. Now that ChatGPT is licensing Yelp's data, an unmanaged page is a source feeding answers about your business, built from information nobody has checked in years.

And if you never claimed one at all, you may still have a page. Yelp creates them on its own, from data it collects, and anyone can leave a review on one.

Search your business at biz.yelp.com/claim. The page tells you whether it's claimed without you logging in anywhere. Claiming, and re-claiming, is free.

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THE WORKSHOP

🔒 Exclusive for Content Strategy Tool® Subscribers

What Competitive Gap Analysis Is Actually Telling You

Part 1 of 2

The Query Intelligence tab has two halves, and they do different jobs.

Competitive Gap Analysis, at the top, looks at every page currently ranking for your query and reports what they all cover, what none of them handle well, and what format they're all using. It's the reasoning behind how your article got structured.

Competitive Intelligence Insights, at the bottom, is the live data from that same search... who's ranking, when they published, what's turning up in AI citations. Each finding comes with a "Your move" callout telling you what to do about it.

The second half tends to get the attention, because the callouts are the part you can act on. The first half is the one worth reading first. It tells you why your article is built the way it is.

This issue covers the top half. Next issue takes on the Your Moves callouts... which ones change your draft, which ones happen after you publish, and why the order matters.

Below is the Competitive Gap Analysis from an actual report, run on the query "what should New Hampshire home buyers know about septic systems."

What every top-ranking page covers: inspection cost ranges, the September 2024 waterfront septic law change, signs of failure, pumping schedules.

What none of them address well: the actual buyer decision. How to read inspection results, what to ask before making an offer, how to negotiate on an aging system, what the financial exposure looks like if it fails after closing.

Format gap: everything competing is a listicle or an FAQ. Nobody has written a step-by-step guide through the process.

Read those three together and you know what the article is doing. It isn't trying to cover septic systems better than everyone else. It's answering a question the ranking pages leave open.

That's the whole advantage. Competing head-on with pages that have been ranking for years is slow and you may never win it. Answering something none of them answered is a different contest, and it's one you can enter today. It's also what makes a page worth citing... an AI system reaching for a source has no reason to pick the fifth article saying the same thing, and every reason to pick the one that covers what the others skipped.

Why this changes how you edit

When you add your 15% (your authentic expertise, tone, voice), you're deciding what to keep, what to expand, and where your own experience goes. Without the gap analysis you make those calls by feel, and feel is backwards. The unfamiliar material looks like a tangent. The familiar material looks safe. So the thing that made the article different gets thinned out, the table stakes get polished, and you publish something that reads like everything already ranking.

The gap analysis tells you which parts are load-bearing.

The septic basics are table stakes... you need them, but they're not why anyone would cite this article. The buyer decision material is the whole reason it exists. Keep the basics brief. Put your time into the gap.

And that's the natural home for your experience. The gap is the part no competitor covered, which usually means it's the part that requires having actually done the work. If the report says nobody explains how to negotiate on a marginal system, and you've sat at that table twenty times, that section should be the strongest thing on the page.

Reading the gap analysis takes about two minutes before you start editing. It's the difference between an article that covers the topic and one that answers what nobody else did.

Next issue: the Your Moves callouts in the bottom half of the panel. Some of them change your draft and some belong on a publish-day checklist, and knowing which is which before you write saves you from finding out after.

Curious about the Content Strategy Tool®?

It does about 85% of the work... the research, the structure, the competitive analysis... and leaves you the 15% only you can add - the authentic part of your business.

Try it free... 3 reports, no credit card required→

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LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW YOUR BUSINESS SHOWS UP ONLINE

Everything in this newsletter is one piece of a bigger picture. Your website structure, your Yelp listings, your content, your email, your reviews... they all feed the same thing: whether AI systems and Google can find you, understand you, and recommend you.

Most business owners have never seen that whole picture at once.

That's what I do. I look at a company's entire online presence through an SEO and AEO lens... the site, the footprint, the signals, the gaps... and figure out what's actually holding you back and what would move the needle fastest.

Every business is different, so I don't sell a package. I start with a conversation. What are your goals, where are you now, and what's the shortest path between the two?

If you've been reading these issues and wondering what your own "picture" would look like, let's find out.

Let's Have a Conversation >>>