218: Five Years of No Hacks - The Guest Host Takeover

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 Hacks
• 01:33 - Kelly Wortham: Why the shift to the agentic web?
• 05:17 - Kelly Wortham: The secret to being a great podcast host
• 08:57 - Iqbal Ali: Why Web MCP is a big deal
• 12:23 - Iqbal Ali: What excites you about 2026?
• 13:58 - Talia Wolf: What everyone misses about optimizing for AI agents
• 15:33 - Talia Wolf: The misleading advice in the industry
• 18:19 - Jon MacDonald: Why brands need agentic web data now
• 25:38 - Jon MacDonald: NBA All-Star Weekend hot takes
• 29:22 - Shiva Manjunath: The skeptic's case against agentic web hype
• 37:56 - Shiva Manjunath: If you were a meme
• 38:37 - What's next for No Hacks

Key Takeaways

1. AI middleware is coming to every interaction - Chrome has 3 billion browsers, Apple is putting AI into Siri across every device. There will be an AI layer between every user and every website. This is not five years away. It is happening now.
2. Web MCP could make the agentic web actually work - Current AI agents take 3-5 minutes to fill a basic form on well-coded pages. Web MCP provides a standard interface between your front end and AI agents, making interactions reliable regardless of your HTML quality.
3. Optimizing for AI agents is not a separate discipline - A fully functional website built for humans gets you 80-90% there. Accessibility, semantic HTML, schema markup, fast load times. All the basics you felt bad about skipping? They matter now more than ever.
4. Citation tracking in LLMs is misleading - Prompting an LLM 100 times and averaging your position to 4.7 is not useful data. The rankings model does not translate to AI. Bing Webmaster Tools just launched AI tracking in beta, and Google will have to follow. That is when real measurement begins.
5. Getting ready for AI agents means making your website better for humans- There is not a single reason not to do it. Better technical health, better standards compliance, better user experience. The work is the same.
6. This is not about websites going away - Stores did not go away when e-commerce arrived. Websites will not go away when AI agents arrive. But there is a new channel, and if your site is not ready for it, you can disappear from discovery entirely.

Guest Hosts

Kelly Wortham

Founder of the Test and Learn Community (TLC). Asked about the shift to the agentic web and what makes a great podcast interviewer.

Iqbal Ali

Experimentation and AI consultant, founder of Ressada. Asked about Web MCP and what excites Sani about 2026.

Talia Wolf

CRO expert, founder of GetUplift, author of "Emotional Targeting." Asked about what people miss when optimizing for AI agents and what common industry advice is wrong.

Jon MacDonald

Founder of The Good, author of three books on website optimization. Asked about why agentic web data matters for brands and shared NBA All-Star Weekend hot takes.

Shiva Manjunath

Host of the From A to B podcast. Brought the skeptic's perspective on agentic web hype and asked what meme Sani would be.

No Hacks is a podcast about web performance, technical SEO, and the agentic web. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.

Transcript

NO HACK5
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[00:00:00] Sani: Welcome back to No Hacks for a special episode, 218, uh, five years ago, episode one came out. Uh, it feels weird to say, but that was, it feels like a lifetime ago for sure. And, uh. I just wanna thank everyone who was ever involved with this podcast, who was on the podcast, uh, who listened to the podcast because, uh, yeah, my life has definitely changed professionally, especially my life has completely changed.

[00:00:26] Sani: Thanks to the podcast and, uh, yeah, for all of you sticking out and listening to me ramble about now about the Agenda web, I, I wanna thank you and, uh, I hope you stick with this podcast for a long time in the future. For this episode, I didn't feel like doing a regular, uh, typical episode. But, uh, what I wanted to do instead was invite five people who have made this podcast, who have helped shape this podcast into what it is today.

[00:00:55] Sani: Five of my previous guests and have them do sort of a mini interview with me, ask me about Egen web, ask me about whatever they want. So those people are Kelly Worthham. Talia Wolf, Al Ali, John McDonald, and Shava Manjot. All previous guests of the podcast, John was on three times. Al was on three times, I think.

[00:01:17] Sani: Uh, Shava was on, uh, I believe twice. So let's start with Kelly. Kelly is the heart and soul of test and Learn community. If you're not in that community, I think you should join. They have a very vibrant slack. So let's see what Kelly had to say.

[00:01:33] Kelly Wortham: Happy birthday. Welcome to no hacks. I am honored that number one, that I was invited to do this. And number two, this is the opening question, which makes total sense. I want to know what you were seeing in the marketplace that made you decide. To do the shift in the first place? What was going on that made you decide we need to change the conversation and start asking different questions to different people about the agentic web?

[00:02:07] Sani: To my dear listeners, I did not know this would be the question, but if I could have picked a question, this is what it, it would've been so totally random. perfect. Great question. Important question. A few things that happened last year. First, I had this slide at Conversion Hotel about the, the timeline towards the bubble, where every month there's three new AI browsers and companies pushing AI into the browser because that's where the attention is.

[00:02:35] Sani: And there's gonna be kind of an AI middleware between every interaction that that's between a human, the user, and the website.

[00:02:44] Kelly Wortham: Right.

[00:02:45] Sani: And the optimization is never going to be the same again once that fully develops and fully happens. And I think it's happening this year and not in five years or three years, because once Chrome says, yeah, now there's AI in every Chrome browser in the world, that's 3 billion browsers.

[00:02:58] Sani: And once Apple puts Siri into everything powered by Gini. That's every phone in the world, Android and Apple. So I I, I just realized sometime last year where there's, there's a lot of talk about models and frontier models and, you know, productivity workflows. Yay. Not a lot of people really need most of that, but there's also this, where they're putting AI in front of our eyes.

[00:03:26] Sani: Like the stuff you read is not going to be the same that the person who wrote it wanted it to be. There's going to be an interpretation that's going to be done by, by an LLM, by an assistant, by, by a search, AI search, whatever it is. So I realized, let's not argue about how we use AI to do our jobs. Let's talk about, and let's think about how people use AI to consume our work.

[00:03:51] Sani: Because there's more of those people than there's of us sitting in the room and and playing the optimization game. That's a joke.

[00:04:01] Kelly Wortham: Makes, makes total sense.

[00:04:03] Sani: think this is as, as my friend put it on the podcast about a month or two months ago, Brent Su Tores. This is not year 21 of the internet. This is year one of something new.

[00:04:15] Sani: It will lead to something else. I'm not saying everyone will use AI assistance for everything. People will not shop because I've had this argument with conversation, not arguments with a few people. Yeah. But I want to go to the website. I love shopping. You can do that. But when someone pulls up their phone, there's gonna be AI between the phone and the, the world beyond that phone.

[00:04:40] Sani: That's what you need to be optimizing for, that AI needs to discover you, is need, it needs to want to cite you, and then it needs to be able to use your website. If you're not doing that, if you're arguing about how can I use a workflow to make my process 20% better? To quote myself, I don't love to do that, but it's like you're sitting in a car and you're arguing whether you wanna listen to Serina Carpenter or Taylor Swift and the car is falling off of a cliff and it doesn't matter.

[00:05:14] Sani: So this is why, this is my answer.

[00:05:17] Kelly Wortham: Yep. That's, you're dead on. Dead on. All right. I get to ask you a more question. Right? The world, the world has already changed, and if we're not staying abreast of it, we are we're too late. All right, so my personal question. And, and this is, this is total honesty. You are my favorite person to be interviewed by.

[00:05:40] Sani: Thank you. Thank you

[00:05:41] Kelly Wortham: It is part of the reason that I love having you as a co-moderator on the TLC. I think you are one of the best podcast hosts, moderators, panelists, panel leaders, whatever. Out there. I wanna know what is the secret from a personal level that you use to make people feel comfortable? Like how do you unlock when you're talking to somebody to make them feel comfortable?

[00:06:18] Sani: Thank you so much, first of all, and, and another great question. So it's not easy, but unless you have a a, you're running a podcast with, with a huge staff and you have researchers and all that, if it's just you and it's just me, you have to be

[00:06:34] Kelly Wortham: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:35] Sani: If you're not curious about your guests and about what, what they're going to say and about their background and about all that, it's just not gonna happen.

[00:06:44] Sani: That's number one, that that's the hygiene factor, as Craig Sullivan

[00:06:48] Kelly Wortham: So be curious, like genuinely do your

[00:06:51] Sani: you need to genuinely be curious when you're, when you're researching someone and you have someone as a guest, you need to be curious about the thing they did 15 years ago. If you're not, don't bring it up.

[00:07:03] Sani: If it's just a footnote or just, I've seen this person on five podcasts and everybody asks them this, the same thing, I need to have this question again. Maybe not, maybe do better, maybe be more curious. Second, and this is something that I try to do with every guest. Yes, we do have a conversation, prerecording, all that, so I want to make sure they're in the right mind frame and it like they're in a good mood for the, for the interview icebreaker question.

[00:07:29] Sani: Something stupid, something totally unexpected. You need to make them laugh before they start talking. If you can do that, it's smooth sailing along the way until the end. So those two are, I think, would be the best ways to, to, to get a guest, to just feel good about being interview. If you're not interested, if you don't care about the person you invite on your podcast, maybe a blog post, maybe a tweet.

[00:07:57] Kelly Wortham: Right. I agree. I agree. Get somebody on there that you like. Be curious and then ask 'em stuff you actually care

[00:08:06] Sani: that. That is the most important thing, but it's not going to work without that. It's just not going to work. Does that, does that answer the question?

[00:08:14] Kelly Wortham: It does and it also explains why you've been so successful. Happy birthday my

[00:08:19] Sani: Thank you so much. Thank you, Kelly. 

[00:08:21] Sani: Okay, next. A very, very close friend of mine who I met thanks to this podcast, someone I talked to, and a lot of people don't notice I talk to every Friday at 10:30 AM we have a 30 minute call that ends up being a 90 minute call, two hour call. Al Ali, one of the most humble people you will ever, ever meet in your life.

[00:08:41] Sani: And, uh, just he knows everything. He's so skilled. He's, uh, an experimentation consultant, AI consultant. Uh. He built his dual reside, also an extremely, extremely talented comic book artist. So let's hear what Egal had to say today.

[00:08:57] Iqbal Ali: Hello, welcome to No Hack's podcast where this week we've got a very special guest he's called Sloan. I don't think I've seen you before.

[00:09:09] Sani: You were on the podcast three times. You were on the podcast three times, which is why you're here. So yes, let's chat.

[00:09:15] Iqbal Ali: Let's chat. So I've got a question for you. Web MCP, you posted something very recently about Web MCP. Why is this web MCP such a good deal? Such a big

[00:09:26] Sani: I think it, I saw it first last summer when they had the GitHub repo. It was a small thing and, and it's somewhere my to dos that I forgot about to reach out to people who are behind it, people from Google and Microsoft and tried to have them on the podcast. I had forgotten about that until. Chrome added web MCP as a standard, but that, that, that's just me

[00:09:45] Sani: I think agen for the Agen web to work for AI agents to be able to not, not, not crawl and consume web, to navigate and use websites. It can work if the website is nearly perfect, if, if anything is not standard. If you have shadow do, if you don't have all of your labels, if you don't have the schemas. It's very brittle and it's probably going to fail. Web MCP is the way to make it work. No matter how crappy your HTML is, fix your HTML. Absolutely do that. But Web MCP is that interface. It's like from HTML to schema for consuming content Web MCP is kind of that, but for action and, and taking action with, with the webpage and the website.

[00:10:30] Sani: It, it's incredible. I love it. I'm so excited about it. It's not even a a, an approved, fully, fully adopted standard yet. It's going to be in, in next Chrome version as a flag feature, so it's, it's nowhere near, but if this happens, everyone can have an agentic website, a website that works for agents.

[00:10:48] Iqbal Ali: Cool. So how, how does does it work in practice like Sam Developer? I want to implement,

[00:10:53] Sani: there, there are two ways. There are two, two, it's still an early proposal. It's, it's not I, I don't think it's a, it's a fully adopted standard. I think it's still developing. There are two ways You can either mark up your HTML by adding some additional information into the HTML, or you can just, it's called navigator model context, API, and you can just add your functions to that. And then it's a JavaScript function that runs in your webpage, basically, where the agent can just say search flights, or fill the form, or whatever you call your functions. They're declared. The agent knows what they are, what's available, what kind of information is required, and then.

[00:11:30] Sani: This API web, MCP does, does the interaction between your website, the front end of your website, which is a big difference than MCP, which is sort of backend. And then web MCP is the bridge between the front end and the AI agent, and, and it works. It's so simple. This is the most, the, the simplest standard I've seen in a long time.

[00:11:51] Iqbal Ali: it's so simple and it's so needed as well. It's, it's, it seems to be coming right at the right

[00:11:56] Sani: So I've been testing. AI agents filling forms a lot lately. It usually takes three to five minutes for it to fill a form for any agent to fill a form that has three to four basic fields.

[00:12:09] Iqbal Ali: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:10] Sani: why

[00:12:11] Iqbal Ali: Yeah.

[00:12:12] Sani: stupid and that's well coded pages. This is not pages that don't work or have errors or anything. It's just brittle and not a patient. This is the standard that can make it work.

[00:12:23] Iqbal Ali: Nice. And okay, so last question. Personal question. What excites you about like 2026 and the way things are going

[00:12:34] Sani: All the people like me screaming. I told you so.

[00:12:37] Iqbal Ali: Nice.

[00:12:37] Sani: have the right to say. I told, I freaking told you so we've been telling you so for decades. Just do it by the standards. Do it by the books. No freaking hacks. Just do it. Well do everything right. Of course. You need to have something to say. You need to have a product that people want. Hacks are. the past, they don't exist anymore. AI is too smart for any stupid hack that SEO people and CRO people and content people have been trying to pull for the last two decades. It's gone and I'm so happy about it. And I told you so.

[00:13:10] Iqbal Ali: Nice. I like the way you wrapped it Background to no hacks. That's

[00:13:14] Sani: That's why it's named No hacks. That's, this is exactly why the podcast is named No hacks because long term you cannot. Default to hacks. You cannot use any hacks because they'll come back to bite you and you will be sorry whoever did it. So yes. What a great question. I love this.

[00:13:30] Iqbal Ali: No hacks in bracket. I told you so.

[00:13:33] Sani: Yes, I love that. Thank you so much.

[00:13:36] Iqbal Ali: Thank you. See you next time.

[00:13:38] Sani: Next up we have Talia Wolf. Someone I'm really happy I can call a friend and someone I've started learning about CRO from years and years and years ago. So she's so good at her job. She literally wrote a book about it. A book called Emotional Targeting. You should check it out. You should also follow Talia.

[00:13:55] Sani: I learned from her. So right now, let's hear what she had to say.

[00:13:58] Talia: Welcome back to No Hacks, one of my favorite podcasts in the whole world, which is hosted by one of the kindest, most authentic and lovely people in this industry. Sunny. Sunny, thank you for being here today.

[00:14:11] Sani: Thank you very much for doing this.

[00:14:13] Talia: I am excited. I'm excited. Okay. I have two questions for you. The first one is, what is one thing that you think everyone is missing or doesn't really understand about optimizing for AI agents?

[00:14:31] Sani: That it's not a separate thing. You just need to. Fully functional website made for humans. That works well for humans, and you are 80 to 90% there. All of the checklists, all of the compliance checklists when optimizing webs, you know, the accessibility semantics, does it pass validation errors? Is it fast?

[00:14:49] Sani: All of those things that. You kind of felt bad about not doing it for humans, but eh, it doesn't really matter. Oh boy does it matter now? So that is the, the one thing that most people who hear about this for the first time, they think, oh, this is a new industry. It's going to either push me away or I don't care about it.

[00:15:05] Sani: You know, this is the same thing. You just need to be more extreme about getting the basics done really, really well, and that's the

[00:15:12] Talia: I love that. I love that. Okay. My second question is, what is one common tip advice that people in the industry give about agent to KI? Optimizing your website for AI that is wrong or misleading?

[00:15:33] Sani: that, that's a great question. That's a really, really good question. So, and a tough one. The, the. I think the, the, how do you call it? Citation tracking. LLM track, like I don't see the value in that. I know there are a lot of tools and it's, it's really early. This is a wild West Days for those, this is the pre, pre SEMrush basically is what we're seeing for, for LLM tracking, I don't know, ranking inside lms.

[00:16:02] Sani: I really, I really don't see how that helps anyone and, and. It's kind of getting, there's a little bit of pushback against it, but early on, like six months, which is crazy that we were talking about six months, like it was a decade ago. There was a lot of, this is how you track, so what you prompted it a hundred times and then your number 4.7 on average, or like, it's different every time.

[00:16:24] Sani: It's based on the locality, it's based on the user. Now we're getting into hyper personalization. Your assistants are learning about you, giving you the answer based on that. There's, I think that kind of, I see why it exists, because we have nothing else and we need to do something. But now, I mean, Bing webmaster tools just.

[00:16:44] Sani: They launched their AI tracking yesterday, like literally it came out, it's still in beta. It came out yesterday. That's the the first official tool we have. Google has to follow, I think Chachi pt, open Air OpenAI doesn't have enough of a runway to build something like this. In my opinion. I, I don't think they ever will, but Google will absolutely be pressured to do something in Google Search Console, and that's the era where AI and LLM tracking becomes real.

[00:17:08] Sani: And we know from them what's happening.

[00:17:11] Talia: Yeah, I guess. I think we're all kind of obsessed with. The, let's say, where are we, right? Like, are we ranking number 1, 2, 3, whatever, 10, because it's the old way we used to. Measure things and now we're in this transition period where we need to start measuring different things. And one of the things that I loved about Ram Fishkins recent research at Spark Toro was, no, it's not about ranking, it's about percentage of visibility.

[00:17:43] Talia: So yeah, I completely agree with you. I think that's, that is something that is misleading, not on purpose, just because as you said, it's the wild, wild west right now and no one really knows what's gonna matter.

[00:17:56] Sani: But also the rankings model is something we're familiar with. Generations of marketers of SEO people are familiar clients, even business owners are familiar with. Am I number one on Google? Am I number five on Google? Like am I page two on Google? That model. Doesn't translate to this. And I think that that's the most important thing that people need to realize.

[00:18:16] Talia: Love it.

[00:18:17] Sani: Excellent. Thank you so much for doing this.

[00:18:19] Sani: This next person is the first ever three time no hacks podcast guest. Also author of three books about website optimization. Someone when I talk to daily about work, about Agent web, about MBA, the one, the only. John McDonald, founder of the Good Agency.

[00:18:40] Jon MacDonald: All right. Welcome to No Hacks. This is a five year anniversary show. I am so honored to be here. Sandy, you mentioned who else was also doing these guest hosting and that is a list that is a hall of fame. So I am stoked to be able to be here with you today and to chat with you a little bit in a quick episode.

[00:19:02] Sani: have you back and, and yeah, thank you. It is no hacks Hall of fame for sure. Absolutely, a hundred percent.

[00:19:09] Jon MacDonald: Well I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Angen Entech Web, and what I mean by that is what is happening around AgTech experience, right? We have CRO that's kind of moving into the world of AgTech experience and making sure. Companies can have their website be accessible to these modern browsers and gentech experiences that are out there.

[00:19:35] Jon MacDonald: Without getting too technical on that though, I, I know another guest host has asked you why you chose that as a area to, to explore. And by the way, thank you for bringing me along with that journey. It's been fun to work with you on some of these things, but I wanna know why you think it's important to.

[00:19:54] Jon MacDonald: The, the end users, the brands. Right now, if you have an e-commerce site or a B2B site, why is it important to have the data that is, is hard to come by right now, but the data around Gentech experience what that looks like. Mm-hmm.

[00:20:10] Sani: Well, number one, when this is fully implemented, adopted by the end user, the shoppers. It means more convenience. More convenience is what always pushes the adoption. It's happening, the technology and, and the, the frameworks that will make this happen are being built. Now, most of it is already there.

[00:20:28] Sani: We have the protocols.

[00:20:29] Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:20:30] Sani: Even brands like MasterCard, visa, Stripe, they're all building these protocols, agent payment protocols, all that stuff with Google, with OpenAI, Shopify, Etsy, like. Everyone's there. Even the, the open source platforms like WooCommerce has an integration. BigCommerce Wix has an integration.

[00:20:50] Sani: It's not a matter of will this happen? It's a matter of when will I make the first purchase using an agent and, and why brands should care about this, because this allows. The decision making to go upstream, so I don't need to go to the product page to look at it and decide based on the copy, based on image.

[00:21:09] Sani: I don't need to go to the cart page to see what the offer is. I don't need to go to the checkout page. It can happen before I even visit the website. It's a lot more convenient if the trust can be there, and this is the reason why I'm almost certain it'll happen and, 

[00:21:23] Jon MacDonald: yeah.

[00:21:24] Sani: Well, the best part of all is that getting ready for AI agents means making up the website better for human users, and there's not a single reason not to do it.

[00:21:34] Jon MacDonald: Right. I love that. As you know, my mission is to remove all the bad online experiences until only the good remains. So it definitely fits into that for me, and I love hearing that from you of, of. It's coming. And honestly, if you're a brand and you're not paying attention to this, you're gonna start losing sales 

[00:21:55] Sani: a hundred percent. One thing that I wrote yesterday in the the article about agent commerce is it's not, you're not too late to the party. If you start implementing this now and thinking a bit about this now, but you're no longer early to the party like this is here. It. It has arrived. It's not going away.

[00:22:13] Sani: This is what's going to be, I think, the dominant, predominant way for people to use websites and shop online.

[00:22:19] Jon MacDonald: Yeah. You know what I've been thinking about it as where to try not to get too technical, but if you are have been a developer like myself, I have a computer science background, been a developer my whole life. I learned how to program in college, all those things. Now. I talked to Claude Code and I haven't written, I, you know, I've done several apps that I have not written a particular line of code at all.

[00:22:45] Jon MacDonald: I have just told Claude Code what I need done. Now, that experience and the reps that I've had actually building stuff and knowing how to code has helped, but. It's the exact same way we're all going to move into the internet and using the internet on a day-to-day basis, where it's no longer gonna be, I'm gonna go to Amazon and search for my product and scroll through five, you know, thousand response, you know, all this grid of products to try to figure, find the one that I want.

[00:23:14] Jon MacDonald: Instead, I'm gonna tell Claude, Hey, Claude and Chrome. You know, go find me this product that I want that has five stars and you know, these particular features in this price range. And then it's gonna come back with one or two suggestions. And if your site is not able to be interacted with in these, by these agents going out and doing this work, yeah.

[00:23:39] Jon MacDonald: You're gonna lose sales.

[00:23:40] Sani: Absolutely. You're not

[00:23:41] Jon MacDonald: that abstraction

[00:23:42] Sani: mentioned. This is not about going from, I don't know, 3% rate to 2.5. This is about going to zero and. If they don't even know you exist, which is a horrific, of course, you still have your paid channels, you have your social, you have all that. But in terms of, let's say this kind of is an equivalent to search as a discovery,

[00:24:04] Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:24:05] Sani: disappear.

[00:24:05] Sani: You can literally disappear if your website takes three seconds to load because.

[00:24:10] Jon MacDonald: I mean, we're in the exact same thing with at the Good where. The vast majority of our leads used to come from from search engines, right? Because we've been around for 16 plus years. Written content forever, shared everything we know it's out there, right? So search engines loved us and they, people would search for a provider doing what we do and they would find us.

[00:24:31] Jon MacDonald: Now, our traffic to our website is down exponentially year over year. But the inbound leads have stayed the same because people are finding us through ai. Ai, you know, we've put in all those reps, and AI has recognized that and looks at us as an authority and is sending leads our way. But it's that abstraction layer.

[00:24:51] Jon MacDonald: That's exactly where we're

[00:24:53] Sani: and you've been doing incredible work for 15 plus years with the good, like it, it's clear that the AI should recommend you. One thing I love is it's not, it's no longer about what you say on your website because you can pay for an ad, you can, you can get that traffic and then your website can.

[00:25:09] Sani: Tell whatever story you want to tell and maybe you convince, maybe you sell them the pen, basically. Now with, with asking AI assistance and LMS about a brand, about a certain service, it's all the knowledge it has on you, and if there's something negative about your brand, that's going to get mentioned as well.

[00:25:27] Sani: You cannot pay for ads to hide bad PR anymore, which ultimately is great for the end customer.

[00:25:34] Jon MacDonald: yeah. I, well, a hundred percent. I'm excited

[00:25:37] Sani: I say.

[00:25:38] Jon MacDonald: I wanna change the topic briefly. Okay. So this past weekend, just a couple days ago from when we're recording was All Star Weekend, and I need a hot take from you because we talk basketball all the time.

[00:25:51] Sani: Yes we do. Yes,

[00:25:53] Jon MacDonald: in common there.

[00:25:53] Jon MacDonald: We love it. I, I need a hot take from you on the new All Star format. I want to know what was your point of view, because the All Star game format. Changed. For those who don't follow the NBA and like ourselves, it was they had three teams, two teams of USA players and a team from the world as they called it.

[00:26:14] Jon MacDonald: Debatable if it should have been the opposite, where it should been two teams from the world and one from the US at this point. But regardless I'm really interested in your take on how that went

[00:26:24] Sani: So a lot of people. Hardcore basketball fans that I know and have been in touch for decades stopped caring about the All Star a while ago. I haven't. It's still, it's a holiday in this house. It'll always be something like a holiday. I care about it even when it's bad. I, I stay up to watch, like it was early this year, so it was easy to watch.

[00:26:44] Sani: It was like 10:00 PM here. I don't know why, but it was very, maybe because global game and whatever, usually it's 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM and I stay up. I wake up and watch it. Team, MUS versus team world absolutely works. I think there's so much potential in that there that can be, you can have a competitive game every single time.

[00:27:04] Sani: The short game, absolutely work. 12 minute game. Killed. You lose a lot between one game to another, like you change teams and then it's a different team playing, and the old guys played three games in a row and just had no gas at all for the last game. You can tweak that and you can make it better, but team world versus team, I mean, you saw Wimpy.

[00:27:25] Sani: Wimpy wants to dominate every single one of these and wants to dominate every single one of these. This is going to be good for the next 10 years, just because two of them will be there. I think it's amazing. Amazing.

[00:27:37] Jon MacDonald: I did like also how they did the, the two USA teams, one being the younger guys and one being the older guys. Because it did kinda show a little bit. I mean, the older guys cleaned up the first game and then got totally wiped by the young guys on the third game. But regardless, I agree, competitive was back.

[00:27:54] Jon MacDonald: It was meaningful. And the icing on the cake was Dam Lillard winning the three point tournament. You know, that

[00:28:00] Sani: I, I know also there were free throws in, in the Allstar game, like two minutes in, you have free throws. That hasn't happened in decades. It, it, it, I think they're onto something great. They need to tweak it a little bit, obviously, but this is better than anything since Michael Jordan was still playing these games.

[00:28:20] Jon MacDonald: I love that. Well, I'm excited to see the rest of the basketball season. I know we have a couple of shared favorites that play for the Portland Trailblazers. Not the, not the best team, I'll admit

[00:28:32] Sani: On, on the rise. On the

[00:28:33] Jon MacDonald: It is my hometown team,

[00:28:34] Sani: On the rise. They're, they're awesome.

[00:28:36] Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. Well I'm looking forward to next season, probably more than this one, but that's all

[00:28:41] Sani: you so much, John.

[00:28:42] Jon MacDonald: well thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it.

[00:28:45] Sani: you.

[00:28:45] Sani: Everyone says it should leave the best for last, but who cares about the rules, which is why Shiva is my fifth guest slash host for today. Shiva is host of the from A to B podcast, a podcast about CRO and experimentation, and someone who really pushes me to make this podcast better as much as I hopefully push him to make his podcast better.

[00:29:04] Sani: We talk about content and podcasting a lot. Uh, we had a fun conversation about Agen Web. Shiva is a skeptic and trying to convince Shiva about. Anything he doesn't believe in is always a journey. So I hope you enjoyed this mini interview we did, and I hope you enjoyed this format. 

[00:29:22] Shiva Manjunath: Welcome to another episode of From No To Hacks. You got your host Shiva here, and I'm joined by my amazing, lovely host, Soni Monage. Welcome to the show. How are you

[00:29:34] Sani: Thank you. Doing great. Thank you for doing this, Shiva. Five years.

[00:29:36] Shiva Manjunath: So five years. How does that feel?

[00:29:39] Sani: it feels unreal. The crazy thing is, you know, my, my favorite podcast to listen to other from A two B is bad friends and they're having their anniversary the day before six years. So kind of almost birthdays makes it even cooler, but this feels unreal.

[00:29:54] Sani: It's 218 episodes now. 110 hours of content, five years, and going strong.

[00:30:01] Shiva Manjunath: And still you lost to from A to B. How does that feel?

[00:30:03] Sani: lost. What? There's no

[00:30:05] Shiva Manjunath: It's you, you

[00:30:06] Sani: There's no losers. The, the only loser is everybody else. We're the winners here, Sheba?

[00:30:12] Shiva Manjunath: You know what, I'll take that. Okay, so I have a question for you. It's related to a agentic web optimization. This is something I actually wanted to talk to you about more in depth, and let me paint a very quick scenario.

[00:30:28] Shiva Manjunath: What I've been thinking about is. With the rise of AgTech ai, one would think, oh, well, there's no need for websites in the way that they were before. You could use some type of AI model or language or, or tool, whatever, AI in whatever capability you'd like. You could just use it to buy stuff. My question with this is, I think this is incredibly over-hyped because look at how Amazon.

[00:30:57] Shiva Manjunath: Is Alexa, you could be like, Hey Alexa, order me 10 rolls of toilet paper. Like how many people are using that? I don't remember the exact number, so I'm totally fudging this up.

[00:31:06] Sani: It was very

[00:31:06] Shiva Manjunath: it was a very, it was a very low number.

[00:31:08] Sani: shared that number with me. Yep.

[00:31:10] Shiva Manjunath: It was like 5%. It was like very, very, very low. So my question with all of this is like.

[00:31:16] Shiva Manjunath: If I understand the potential for the hype to be there, that like, oh, you don't have to go to websites anymore because you could just have AI in whatever, whatever ais you want. You know, agentic AI or you know, chatt, whatever. You could use a conglomerate tool to basically just never go to a site. But I challenge that by saying just like Talia, another guest of yours who interviewed you is saying there's a lot of emotion that goes into purchasing things.

[00:31:45] Shiva Manjunath: People said that about websites, websites are gonna go away, or I'm sorry stores are gonna go away 'cause you could just buy everything online. It's like, no, you, there are plenty of sites last time or stores last time I checked. So just trying to understand, I know you're bullish on agen ai, orent web optimization and like websites kind of going away. don't,

[00:32:07] Sani: wrong. That's wrong. That's it. That's not that. I never said websites going away is something that I never said. I never will say I don't think that's gonna happen. The what you said, the stores didn't go away, but now we have website. Same shift. The website are not going away, but now there's another way.

[00:32:21] Sani: Did you ever use any LLM to compare two different products or something? Like did you ask for opinions about two different things, for example?

[00:32:29] Shiva Manjunath: No, 'cause the way I buy is

[00:32:31] Sani: No, I'm not talking about buying. I'm talking about I'm, I'm talking about what's the best camera, what's the best this, what's the best this. Did you ever ask chat, GPT for that?

[00:32:39] Shiva Manjunath: No, 'cause, again, the way I, well, I guess the way I research is

[00:32:42] Sani: No, I'm not. I'm talking about research. I'm not talking about buying, I'm talking about research. Did you ever do anything like that?

[00:32:47] Shiva Manjunath: Yes. Say Yes bro.

[00:32:50] Sani: Everyone

[00:32:50] Shiva Manjunath: I have not used ai. I look it on my own. To be fair, I might go to like blog sources that I

[00:32:58] Sani: a gen, that's a gentech web browsing. That, that, that, that's an AI agent doing that for you. That's what I'm saying. It's doing the research for you. It's doing the comparison. It's giving you the output. You're not buying all, I'm not

[00:33:08] Shiva Manjunath: I don't, well, what if I don't trust AI to do that research? What if I want to go to the primary source? So, so in the same way, like I might ask Chacha, BT a question. And be like, tell me I have eye pain. What are possible reasons? It could be also go to a doctor if you have eye pain. But

[00:33:25] Sani: But that, that,

[00:33:25] Shiva Manjunath: if I'm going to do that with Chad GBT, I'm gonna go to the primary sources.

[00:33:29] Shiva Manjunath: I'm not just gonna read the snip and be like, I'm a doctor.

[00:33:31] Sani: but who, who's giving you the sources? Who's researching and comparing the sources? Who's reading those websites for you before you decide?

[00:33:38] Shiva Manjunath: so it's just a, it's just an upgraded

[00:33:41] Sani: That's one component. That's one piece of it.

[00:33:42] Shiva Manjunath: It's just the vision of Ask Geeves, just re just

[00:33:46] Sani: That, that's one tiny piece of it. But yes, that, that, that, that is a piece of

[00:33:49] Shiva Manjunath: What, what are the bigger pieces?

[00:33:51] Sani: It can actually do a lot more. It can research it, it can compare, it, it, it can literally do everything you do online and a agent. In a browser, in an lm whatever, whatever it is, can do those things for you faster. I would never trust it blindly. I will never trust it blindly, but it'll save you a lot of time. And that's the whole thing.

[00:34:09] Sani: This is about convenience and, and nothing, nothing but

[00:34:12] Shiva Manjunath: Can you walk me through a scenario where you've seen it, like,

[00:34:15] Sani: I mean, I

[00:34:16] Shiva Manjunath: I know we talked about running shoes, right? So walk, let's walk through maybe that

[00:34:20] Sani: running shoes. I want to watch YouTube. Let's, let's talk about a camera, for example. 'cause I'm looking at a camera lens. You can just ask any LLM what's the difference between this lens and this lens? And it will summarize 50 positive reviews for this one and negative reviews and 50 positive and negative reviews for this one.

[00:34:37] Sani: And tell you according to the reviewers, this, this, these are the strengths and these are the weaknesses. So rather than having someone write a blog post about this specific lens and give me the pros and cons, I can, I can summarize 50 different blog posts or reviews or whatever and, and then make my decision and go further and read what I want to read like.

[00:34:56] Sani: An AI agent doing anything for you.

[00:35:00] Shiva Manjunath: So the Optimiz, so what is the optimization part

[00:35:03] Sani: Technical, it's, it's, it's more technical than anything else. Your websites need to be technically a hundred percent healthy. This is not about,

[00:35:10] Shiva Manjunath: In order for the

[00:35:12] Sani: this is not a CRO magic bullet. It's simply with Google and with humans, you were able to get away with a lot of shitty. Technical, technically shitty websites. You know, the, the schema is not right.

[00:35:25] Sani: It's slow. It, it's not logical. The, the URL structure is not correct, or, or, or it's dumb. Your robots dxt is weird and blocking some shit. This will kill you. This is not the silver bully, but this is you entrance. Like you, you're not able to play if, if you don't, if you don't get this done. That's the whole thing.

[00:35:45] Shiva Manjunath: Okay. I, I'm interested in to see where it goes. I'm skeptical, but I understand in the same way that like, there are review aggregator sites, right? So instead of going to 50 different like sites with all the same reviews, sometimes it's nice when Amazon just has like

[00:36:02] Sani: This is, but the, that's the thing. This is not only about review as an as as a data point. This is about a blog post that somebody wrote. This is about a YouTube video where someone talked about this. This will take all that into account and not just Amazon reviews to get a

[00:36:15] Shiva Manjunath: Okay. Let me add one more question to this. The all of this is, you're assuming the research is generally unbiased, right?

[00:36:23] Shiva Manjunath: So the question is, with ads being introduced into the AI space more and more, there already is a skepticism around trust. Do you think that this will, do you think that ad introduction will, you're bullish on.

[00:36:37] Shiva Manjunath: Web optimization and these things. I think these are housekeeping, foundational things that should be done. Are you not concerned that like the introduction of ads might actually take away from the trust

[00:36:48] Sani: would like to see what that I, I would like to see what that looks like before we make a decision. Ads in.

[00:36:54] Shiva Manjunath: non-answer.

[00:36:56] Sani: Yeah, because I, we don't know what the question is just yet. The thing is Google, Google search. Google search result pages that have ads on top. There's a lot of people who don't know that's an ad.

[00:37:07] Sani: Even if it says sponsored.

[00:37:09] Shiva Manjunath: And it's getting worse,

[00:37:11] Sani: Sure, sure. I'm not saying this is gonna be better with ai, but also there's, there's really no ads in ai, like proper ads in AI just yet. Chachi open AI announced they would do that. Like, and they'll like, you have to pay 200,000 per year or like something insane to get started and let's see it work.

[00:37:30] Sani: Let's see what this is. I'm not, say if you have organic ads inside a, a, a response from an LLM and it doesn't say it's an ad, we're screwed. It's over. I hope that doesn't happen. That's, that's what I'm saying.

[00:37:44] Shiva Manjunath: They could already be doing it now, and we have no idea.

[00:37:47] Sani: they might already be doing that. Yep. Yep.

[00:37:50] Shiva Manjunath: Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right, well that was the bulk of the first question I

[00:37:53] Sani: I love a good skeptic. Yeah.

[00:37:56] Shiva Manjunath: the second dumb question is, if you were a meme, what

[00:37:59] Sani: If I were a meme. Oh, wow. The Spider-Man meme pointing at you.

[00:38:09] Shiva Manjunath: We wait. That means we're both the same podcast

[00:38:12] Sani: Yeah. Used to be. Yeah,

[00:38:13] Shiva Manjunath: or we're both the same humans?

[00:38:15] Sani: whatever.

[00:38:16] Shiva Manjunath: We're both literally wearing black.

[00:38:19] Sani: There you go. There you go.

[00:38:20] Shiva Manjunath: Therefore we have to be the

[00:38:22] Sani: There you go.

[00:38:22] Shiva Manjunath: 'cause no humans were the same level of clothing colors ever.

[00:38:27] Sani: exactly. Exactly. Especially black. But

[00:38:30] Shiva Manjunath: Spider-Man

[00:38:30] Sani: Thank you, Shiva. Thank you so much for doing this. 

[00:38:33] Shiva Manjunath: congrats to you. Five years, man. Five, no more. Let's, let's drink for five more.

[00:38:37] Sani: you, sir.

[00:38:37] Sani: That is it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did talking to these wonderful people. Next week, I might take a break, check out the blog, check out the website 'cause there still will be something there. But on the podcast I might take a week off. But two weeks from now, you will not believe the episode I have.

[00:38:57] Sani: Talk to you soon.