No Hacks: Web Strategy for the AI Age

I talked to Amanda Natividad, the person who named zero-click marketing, the week her book with Rand Fishkin came out, and wanted to ask one question: if nobody clicks any more, what is my website for? Her answer is that it matters more than ever, and in a different way(s). It is your source of truth, the record everything else points to. Along the way she buys clothes from a brand ChatGPT picked,...

OpenAI's new agents, dots, are fuzzy balls with eyes that you name and dress. They also sign into websites with your saved passwords and read the email you connect. I went through OpenAI's pages to see what the face is covering. What a dot reads can train the model unless you find the switch, and websites are told nothing. I would not give one my logins or my card. Chapters 00:00 - Sam A...

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI agent, Muse, needs to be discreet. The same month, some of the calls it made to businesses were placed by people in a call center. I went through what he told Joanna Stern and Alex Heath about Muse's privacy and security and sorted every claim by tense. What exists today, only Meta has checked. The protection from Meta itself is promised for later this year...

A hundred and seventy-two companies have put their name to A2A, the standard for AI agents at different companies to find each other and talk. I took the web address the project lists next to each name and asked 135 of them the question the standard is built around. Four answered. The reason is not technical: MCP needs one person to say yes, A2A needs two organisations. Chapters 00:00 - AWS, Micro...

A magazine put a paywall in front of its journalism to stop AI reading it. I tested what that paywall actually checks. It reads one line of your request, the name you type in yourself, and compares it against a list. Say who you are and you get a bill. Make something up and you walk straight in. Then I asked two assistants to read the article anyway. Both got charged, both answered, and neither ha...

On August 5 Shopify switched on a second way into every store on its platform, built for AI agents instead of people. Nothing to install, no merchant asked. I opened three unrelated stores, Allbirds, Brooklinen and Partake Foods, and asked each what it could do for a machine. All three answered with the same roughly 800 words, identical character for character, and no merchant wrote a syllable of...

Most of what's sold as AI search optimization has never been tested by the people selling it, and this episode is me checking the biggest one against server logs. Ahrefs looked at 137,000 domains in June: 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in May, and the biggest readers of the rest were SEO audit tools. I also lay out the line I use to sort every pitch: a hack tries to influence what th...

I came back from a month off the grid to find OpenAI had killed Atlas, its most glamorously launched product, nine months after the keynote. It barely matters, though. The automated, non-human visitor Atlas was sending to your website is still coming, through whatever shell comes next. Build for the visitor, not the browser. Timestamps 00:00 - Back from break, and the bad news 01:17 - Atlas: the m...

I sat down with Malte Landwehr, who left VP of SEO at Idealo to become CPO and CMO at Peec AI, the platform that tracks what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews actually cite. We open on the strangest finding of the year. GummySearch, a Reddit analytics tool that shut down last November, now sits behind about 0.1% of all ChatGPT citations. From there we get into why clicks are the wro...

This week I welcome Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive, to the podcast, to ask the question she fires back at every client who walks in wanting to "win at AI visibility." Her answer flips the whole project: fix what the models get wrong about you before you chase the category terms. We got into her research on why lower-authority websites earn more citations, why LLMs rec...

The user-agent string in the HTTP header has been there since the 1990s. The web was built with software navigating it on someone's behalf. For thirty years that someone was a human. That changes now. Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, was one of the first to take seriously what it means when the "user" navigating the web is an AI agent.  He published the foundational ess...

We are significantly closer to movie Her than we were just 6 months ago. Most coverage reads Google's last six months as a string of independent product updates. They aren't. Read together, they're the whole agentic-web stack closing one component at a time. Tuesday's Gemini Intelligence on Android announcement named the keystone - the first OS-level web-agent integration any c...

I ran the Cloudflare Agent Readiness scanner on nohacks.co, got 33 out of 100, and felt insulted. One toggle later the score was 67. That gap is where this episode starts. My case: the web is splitting into two economies. A retailer-friendly agentic web where AI-referred traffic now converts 42 percent better than human traffic. And a page-view-driven publisher web losing 20 to 90 percent of its G...

Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, shares how losing 80% of organic traffic actually revealed that his team had been tracking the wrong metrics for years. We get into why AI visibility is a vanity metric, how 44% of LLM users include brand names in their prompts, the real security risks of wrong phone numbers in AI answers, and why trust (not visibility) is the only moat that matters. Chap...

In 2009, Luke Wroblewski's "mobile first" changed how every website gets built. Start with the harder constraint, and the rest gets better. Now the harder constraint is not a small screen. It's no screen at all. Sani introduces Machine First Architecture, a four-pillar framework covering everything from how you define your business to how machines interact with your website. Id...

Google was granted patent US 12536233B1 in January 2026, describing a system that scores your landing page and, if it falls below a quality threshold, replaces it with an AI-generated version personalized to each searcher. This episode breaks down how the patent works, how the industry reacted, and what website owners should do to prepare. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:24 - How the Patent Works...

Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro and one of the most influential voices in digital marketing history, shares research proving that AI brand recommendations are wildly inconsistent. You'd need to ask ChatGPT 1,500 times to get the same brand list in the same order twice. We discuss why AI ranking tools are selling metrics that don't exist, why Google is still 210x bigger than ChatGPT...

Five years. 218 episodes. 110 hours of content. To celebrate, five returning guests flip the script and interview Sani about the agentic web, the future of web optimization, and what makes this podcast tick. Kelly Wortham, Iqbal Ali, Talia Wolf, Jon MacDonald, and Shiva Manjunath each bring their own questions, their own perspectives, and a few personal ones too. Chapters 00:00 - Five years of No...

In the 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape fought for control of the browser, the gateway between humans and the internet. Netscape went from 90% market share to zero in five years. Now, with over 30 agentic browsers launching in under 18 months, the same war is playing out again, only this time the stakes are higher. This episode breaks down the 90s browser wars, compares the tactics to what's hap...

Duane Forrester, 30-year search veteran who co-launched Schema.org and built Bing Webmaster Tools, explains why AI systems prioritize trust above all else. We discuss machine comfort bias, chunk-level content optimization, why SEO is now a multidisciplinary role, and how to prepare for a world where LLMs decide who gets cited. About the Guest Duane Forrester is the author of "The Machine Laye...

Your website might rank #1 on Google but be completely invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. In this episode, let's break down why a huge chunk of the web is fundamentally broken for AI systems - not because of bad content, but because of technical decisions that made sense for humans but make sites invisible to the AI systems rapidly becoming the front door to the internet. Chapter T...

Google just made two massive moves in 48 hours, and together, they could reshape how AI interacts with commerce forever. First: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that lets AI agents shop on your behalf. Discovery, checkout, payments, post-purchase, the whole journey, with one common language. Backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, Visa, Mastercard, and 20+ others. Second: a mult...

For the last 20 years, digital marketing had one goal: drag a human across a "threshold", onto your website, so you could control the message and sell the product. In 2026, the threshold is gone. In this episode, Jono Alderson argues that we have entered the era of "Marketing to Machines." We are no longer optimizing for clicks; we are optimizing for the AI agents that intermed...

If 2025 felt like a constant, high-pitched ringing in your ears, you aren't alone.  We call it "Digital Tinnitus", the exhausting result of two years of AI hype, "pivot or die" mandates, and confident mediocrity. In this 2025 finale, let's shut off the noise. We look back at why "Fatigue" was the word of the year, and why the crash of the hype cycle is actua...

The ground beneath the digital marketing industry is shifting. For decades, the mantra was simple: optimize for traffic, measure clicks, and track conversions. But with the rise of Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Answer Engines, that rulebook is obsolete. In this powerful episode, I sit down with Joe Doveton to discuss the urgent reality facing every brand that relies on web traff...