Masters of Search

Welcome to what might be our most unusual episode yet. My guest today is Lars Lofgren, a Fractional VP of Marketing who's worked with companies like Perplexity and Automattic and has generated over $20 million in affiliate revenue across his career. Lars has seen every era of SEO from the inside: the link building gold rush, the Helpful Content Update bloodbath, and now what he calls a new Wild We...

I usually talk to the people building and executing search strategies. Today we're flipping the lens. My guest is Dr. Christoph Klink, General Partner at Antler, where he leads investments across Continental Europe. Antler is the world's leading inception-stage investor. They've made over 100 investments out of Berlin since 2021, among others Peec AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI...

Every month I meet with Malte to take all the news, new research and interesting developments in SEO & AI Search to get his perspective on them. Malte Landwehr is CPO & CMO at Peec AI, one of the leading AI search analytics platforms, and one of the brightest minds in the field. ### My 8 biggest takeaways from this episode: 1) Being mentioned anywhere in the top 10 of a third-party listicle gives...

The website used to be the shop window. Now buyers do half their research inside an LLM before they ever land on it, and the role of the site itself is starting to shift. My guest today is James Ward, Head of Digital Experience at Personio, one of Europe's fastest-growing HR tech companies, where he leads web strategy, SEO, content and CRO across multiple international markets. Before Personio he...

AI search is already driving nearly 10% of Webflow's signups. A key person behind that number is Vivian Hoang, AEO & SEO Lead at Webflow. In this episode, we'll dig into how Webflow's SEO function has evolved over the years, how Vivian started thinking about answer engine optimization before most people even had a name for it, what's actually working for them in AI search, and how she's using tool...

HubSpot literally buried traffic as a metric last year. Not because they stopped caring about reach, but because in a world where AI systems deliver answers directly, the old playbook stopped working. My guest today is Jennifer Lapp, Head of Growth Marketing for LATAM and DACH at HubSpot, where she's been rebuilding the growth engine from the ground up. We'll dig into the real experiments she's be...

Lily Ray is one of the most respected voices in SEO. She even launched her own Substack recently to create a "safe space for ranting about all things SEO and AI Search". ### What we covered in this episode - Lily's launch of Algorythmic, her new consultancy, while staying on as VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive - The flood of AI slop in the SEO/AEO space and why original content is the only way to...

Every month I meet with Malte to take all the news, new research and interesting developments in SEO & AI Search to get his perspective on them. Malte Landwehr is CPO & CMO at Peec AI, one of the leading AI search analytics platforms, and one of the brightest minds in the field. ### What we covered in this episode - Ethan Smith's "AI is much bigger than you think" study: his 20% market share figur...

My guest in this episode is Saskia Sarışın, Head of Global SEO at Meltwater, one of the leading media intelligence platforms out there. We'll talk about how Saskia and her team have built up SEO at Meltwater, how she thinks about pillar and cluster strategies at serious scale, how she's navigating the shift toward AI search, and why she still believes in investing in top-of-funnel content, even wh...

My guest in this episode is Tom Wells, AI Search Researcher at Peec AI. Tom has spent over a decade decoding ranking signals at companies like Semrush and Searchmetrics, and he recently published some fascinating research that got a lot of attention in the ecommerce SEO and AI Search world. Check out Tom's research: - https://searchengineland.com/new-finding-chatgpt-sources-83-of-its-carousel-prod...

My guest in this episode is Steve Toth, CEO of Notebook Agency and the voice behind AI Notebook and SEO Notebook, two newsletters with 27,000+ subscribers where he cuts through the noise in one of the fastest-moving spaces in marketing right now. In this episode we'll dig into the current state of the industry, how big GEO is already for his agency and his clients and why he thinks ChatGPT is lazy...

Claude Cowork is replacing agencies. A Mac Mini is the new must-have for AI enthusiasts. And Bing just gave marketers something Google still hasn't. A lot has happened in the last weeks, so it’s time for a new episode of #MonthlyLandwehr. Malte is CPO & CMO at Peec AI, one of the leading AI search analytics platforms, and one of the brightest minds in the field. So I want to take all the news, new...

My guest today is Felix Welckenbach, Director of Product for Search and Discovery at HomeToGo, a marketplace where millions of travelers book their next dream vacation rental. In this episode we’ll talk about how SEO is not a marketing function anymore at HomeToGo but a product capability, what this actually means like in the day to day, which companies should also think about making a similar cha...

This episode will be about AI. But not the ChatGPT kind of AI, but the building agents kind of AI. We’ll talk about what Alfred has been cooking over the last months, what FAFO really means (not just what the acronym stands for), and about this new kid on the AI block: OpenClaw. If you want to understand where AI-powered marketing is actually heading, not the LinkedIn hype, but the messy, exciting...

Seven years ago, Nick LeRoy got fired. Today, he runs one of SEO's most trusted newsletters with over 12.5k subscribers, operates SEOjobs.com with over 200k annual sessions, and consults with enterprise brands on SEO strategy that actually moves the needle. Nick is an independent SEO consultant who helps enterprise brands turn SEO into a revenue-generating channel, not just a traffic report. He's...

After 10+ years building The Blogsmith into a content agency serving B2B giants like HubSpot and Klaviyo, Maddy Osman French made an unexpected move: she went in-house. Now at DigitalOcean, she represents a "content engineer". A marketer who blend process thinking, technical depth, and AI workflow automation to scale content operations efficiently. What makes Maddy's perspective particularly valua...

We’re kicking off a new format in the Masters of Search podcast and we’re calling it #MonthlyLandwehr. Malte is CPO & CMO at Peec AI, one of the leading AI search analytics platforms, and one of the brightest minds in the field. So I want to take all the news, new research and interesting developments and get his perspective on them. In this episode we covered (among other things): - His perspecti...

M&A in SEO is a topic that you won’t find a lot of content about. But it’s a high-stakes topic that can make our brake organic visibility. My guest today is Daphne Monro, who is Head of Website & Content at hosting.com, where she oversees web strategy, content operations, and SEO for a global hosting network powering over 3 million sites. She lived through multiple high-stakes domain migrations an...

My guest today is Björn Darko. He leads an Enterprise SEO org by day, and hosts one of the largest German SEO podcasts by night. At Aviv Group, Björn oversees a 30-person team building SEO infrastructure for some of the biggest real estate platforms across France, Germany, Belgium. I’m very much looking forward to diving deep into Product-Led SEO at enterprise scale, managing teams across multiple...

Graphite is nothing like your typical agency. While most agencies sell slides and strategic decks, Graphite builds things. While others work on hundred-item SEO audits, they obsess over the 5% of work that actually drives results. They've proven this approach in SEO with companies like Rippling, Webflow, Notion, and Upwork, and now they're applying the same ruthless focus to AI search. That's why...

Lodgify is a €30M+ ARR vacation rental management platform that empowers thousands of independent hosts to compete against Airbnb through direct bookings. And over the years they have built a significant SEO and organic footprint contributing that growth. Joining me on the latest episode of the #MastersOfSearch is Volodymyr Korol, VP of Marketing at Lodgify. He joined in 2024 to restructure the en...

SEO has already been a proven growth engine for Carta, and in 2025, they've gained strong AI Search visibility driving real pipeline results. Lucy Hoyle is Senior Content Engineer at Carta, and played a crucial role in that. She oversees editorial processes, content strategy, and AI workflow optimization for international markets, building scalable systems that turn content strategy into pipeline...

Wise is moving £145 billion across the globe, serving 15 million customers across 160 countries and 40 currencies. They’ve been profitable for years, with their latest financial accounts posting a £560 million profit before tax while saving customers £2 billion annually on hidden banking fees. And although the absolute number is pretty high, in relation to their scale, they’re just spending about...

Chatbase bootstrapped to $8M ARR* and turned AI search into their No. 2 user acquisition channel. So I invited Sandra to the Masters of Search podcast to reveal how they did it. *it was still $7M when we recorded Her answer? There's no glamorous secret. No magic trick. No growth hack. Just proper execution of fundamentals that most teams skip. Here's what drove their AI search success: 1) Crystal...

24 BILLION pages. That's the sheer scale at which Roberto Grasiano led SEO and organic growth at Shutterstock. I'm so excited that I could convince him to come on the Masters of Search to bring you 73 minutes of Enterprise SEO masterclass. Here are my key takeaways, both for Enterprise SEO and for smaller sites: 1. At enterprise scale, you can't crawl the site Roberto couldn't audit individual pag...