227: ChatGPT Shopping Is Scraped Google Shopping with Malte Landwehr, CMO/CPO at Peec AI

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 wrong way to measure AI search, why your local brand keeps losing to US ones, why scaled AI content rockets then crashes, and why Malte says SEO is dead as a default growth channel.

Guest Profile

Malte Landwehr is CPO and CMO at Peec AI, an AI search visibility platform that runs daily prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Grok. He spent more than twenty years in search and product, including five years as VP of SEO at Idealo and five years as VP of Product at Searchmetrics. In his first six months at Peec AI, the company grew from roughly $500K to $5M in ARR.

Chapters

• [0:00] Intro
• [1:15] Leaving one of Europe's best SEO jobs for AI search
• [5:07] Why clicks are the wrong way to measure ChatGPT
• [8:22] Which answer engines actually matter
• [12:34] GummySearch: a dead product winning ChatGPT citations
• [18:33] Listicles and the English-language fan-out bias
• [23:48] Advertorials, local results, and Mount AI content
• [33:50] Digital PR over technical SEO
• [36:27] ChatGPT Shopping is scraped Google Shopping, and the MCP contest
• [42:16] SEO is dead as a default channel, and the chunking move

Key Takeaways

1. Stop measuring AI search by clicks. In an LLM, clicking is optional, so ChatGPT can look like 1% of your traffic while shaping most of your buying journeys. Measure the influence on the decision, not the visit.
2. What gets written about you offsite now matters more than your own technical SEO. Grounding pulls from Reddit, G2, Wikipedia, YouTube, and news, so digital PR is the bigger lever for how AI describes and recommends you.
3. One citable paragraph beats a chunked article. Put your main claim near the top in two or three declarative, self-contained sentences that name the entities. Do not shred a whole article into one-line bullets.

Notable Quotes

"In a web search, clicking is part of the intended user journey. In an LLM, clicking is completely optional." Malte Landwehr

"They didn't gain visibility as a brand. They now have power over what brands are recommended by LLMs." Malte Landwehr, on GummySearch

Resources

• Peec AI: https://peec.ai
• Peec AI research blog: https://peec.ai/blog
• Malte Landwehr's website: https://www.maltelandwehr.de
• Future of AI Shopping webinar with Malte Landwehr (Peec AI): https://peec.ai/webinars/future-of-ai-shopping

Connect

• Malte Landwehr on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/landwehr/
• Peec AI: https://peec.ai

No Hacks is a publication about the agentic web. Articles, a weekly podcast, and a newsletter for SEO, CRO, and web professionals who want to stay visible, trusted, and findable as agents take over. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.

Subscribe at https://nohacks.co/subscribe

Transcript

[00:00:00] There was this Reddit analytics tool called GummySearch. It shut down last November. Today, it sits behind roughly one in every 1,000 citations ChatGPT makes. So the product is dead, and it still helps decide which brands the AI recommends. It makes no sense. My guest today figured out why. Malte Landwehr had a top SEO job in Europe, VP of SEO at idealo, that he left to bet everything on AI search. He's now CPO and CMO of Peak AI, where his team tracks what ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini cite every day. We get into the dead product. We talk about why ChatGPT shopping is just Google Shopping in disguise, why your local brand keeps losing to American ones, and why he says SEO is dead as a default growth channel.

[00:00:49] So by the end of the episode, you'll know what moves the needle in AI search and what is just noise. This is NoHacks, episode 227. Subscribe at nohacks.co/subscribe. Here's the episode

[00:01:05] 

[00:01:15] Slobodan: Thank you for joining me and a pleasure to have you on

[00:01:17] Malte: Thanks for having me

[00:01:19] Slobodan: Last year quit a very comfortable job, VP of SEO at Idealo, probably one of the best SEO jobs in Europe, if not one of the best in the world. What did you see that made you think something else happening right now and I, I wanna do Peec?

[00:01:37] Malte: Yeah. So Idealo has a business model that is very SEO dependent, and so I had always the time and the resources to also explore potential risks, right? And one of these risks was ChatGPT. Like suddenly there was a system that could answer questions and even before ChatGPT even had web search, I was convinced this is gonna be a threat.

[00:02:00] Malte: So I spent a lot of time investigating it, thinking about it trying to run my first experiments to understand how is it working and yeah, over time, I convinced myself this is gonna be huge. And then I was thinking, do I want to steer an existing company through this change or do I wanna be part of that change?

[00:02:23] Malte: And at Idealo, I spent a lot of time fighting Google Shopping and trying to help steer the company through this threat where suddenly Google puts something on top of the search results that is similar to a price comparison. And I decided I don't wanna do that again. I wanna be part of it and shape it.

[00:02:41] Malte: And so I started... Or actually I started actively looking. It was more I was approached by a couple of people who were working on tools. One of these teams was the Peec AI team, and I originally joined as an advisor because they were the team where I was the most convinced, okay, if somebody can do it, it's gonna be these guys.

[00:03:01] Malte: And then I went on vacation with my wife and more like as a joke, I said, "I will not use Google," because we went to South Korea and there Google and Google Maps is less common. And for two weeks I didn't use Google. I used it, I don't know, 10 times maybe for spell checking and stuff, and I had a great vacation.

[00:03:22] Malte: I never went to any tourist attraction that didn't exist. Everything where I went was open. So if there were hallucinations, ~they didn't, ~they didn't impact me. And I realized the shift is gonna be bigger and faster than I anticipated. And I also realized that this shift to AI search is the only thing that I enjoyed working on and not the typical SEO stuff.

[00:03:44] Malte: And that's when I decided to ditch my job ~at, ~at Idealo and join Peec. And at that time, Peec had, I think, five full-time employees. ~At, ~at Idealo, I had a team ~of, ~of 30 close to 40 people or actually a couple of teams in my department. And yeah, it was a big shift, but ~I, ~I was very convinced at that time it's the right step and I think now I'm even more convinced that it was the right decision for me.

[00:04:12] Slobodan: As you showed me, it was a gamble for sure at the time. My story kind of mirrors that. I was in conversion rate optimization before I realized that agentic browsing and agentic web usage behalf of people is changing. I've had clients a few times tell me-- I, I come-- I give them some information, they say, "Well, ChatGPT says this." And this was before web search. This was-- not, not contradicting what I say, but realized are using ChatGPT to their opinions on something. Conversion rate optimization is really about influencing how people make decisions on a page, and if there's AI whispering in their ear, "Do this," not what they're telling you, like, do something else.

[00:04:50] Slobodan: Like, you should focus on something else. So this is kind of similar, not as big of a bet. I wasn't VPO of anything at the time I realized that, to be very honest. But I think the behavioral shift in how people use the internet is, is undeniable at this point, and you have data to back that up.

[00:05:07] Slobodan: SPeecing of data there are many different studies that say ~LLMs ~LLM referred traffic is, or LLM search volume is ten percent of what Google is, five percent, twenty percent, depends on who you're asking. Basically, it's lower. There's no denying that it's lower. Google still is the king of search.

[00:05:24] Slobodan: Also, Google now has LLM search, so where do you put them? Like, is, is that traditional search? Is that... That, that's, that's a different can of worms. But too many companies operate like this is still zero and focus on the rules that applied five years ago. Why is that the case, and what is the cost of, of them ignoring this?

[00:05:44] Malte: Yeah. I mean, many companies, I think they are used to we treat Google by the amount of clicks it sends to us. So they judge ChatGPT by the amount of clicks it sends them. And in many cases, that will be a tiny number, like maybe 1% of total website traffic, maybe 2%. So in comparison to Google, it's irrelevant.

[00:06:06] Malte: It's, it's smaller than Bing, smaller than DuckDuckGo, smaller than Ecosia. But the big difference is, of course, in a web search, clicking is part of the intended user journey. In an LLM, clicking is completely optional, and especially for non-transactional queries, it's not expected. So I cannot judge the system based on the outgoing traffic.

[00:06:31] Malte: And then when I try to look at how many searches are there, how many search-like prompts are happening, which is a bit of a fuzzy thing, because one prompt can replace fifteen searches. Or if I look at how many user journeys are being influenced, then I will very likely come to the conclusion that LLMs are huge already.

[00:06:53] Malte: There are numbers from, from Google from this year for B2B software buying journeys, and depending on the stage, the, the, the funnel stage and different personas, et cetera, et cetera, they have some numbers. If you add it all together, very close to 100% of software buying decisions are in some way now influenced by AI.

[00:07:16] Malte: And it can be that the senior SEO manager whose task was buying a new AI search software asked ChatGPT for a short list of tools, or it can be that the head of procurement that has to sign off of the purchase uploads the offer to Claude and says "Are there alternatives to this?" Or, "Is there anything where I should negotiate a lower price?"

[00:07:40] Malte: Or, "Are they charging for something that is actually worthless?" And this, I think, just means-- ~Like, ~like, for me, it's a fact ~that, that, ~that AI ~is, ~is influencing so many buying decisions, and that's why people should just care, even if it doesn't send a lot of clicks

[00:07:57] Slobodan: I agree, and I'm not going to push back and ask for data because close to a hundred percent, getting too close to a hundred percent, whatever it is, ~it, ~it either is there already. every journey is at least partially influenced by AI or is getting there very, very soon. So it like every customer journey has some AI sprinkled into it and some AI AI-helped decision-making.

[00:08:22] Slobodan: Not doing that is risky. That, that's my opinion. You-- sPeecing of LLMs of course, there's ChatGPT, there's Gemini or whatever. I don't even know what Google is what versus, versus Gemini. Like, I don't think they know. Like, it's all mixed now. there's Claude, there's Perplexity. Which ones should people focus on?

[00:08:38] Slobodan: You had a post about a month ago that said Claude is overtaking Perplexity. Perplexity is declining. Is it good strategy to focus on all of them? Pick the ones you care about? Like, what should people do?

[00:08:53] Malte: Depends a little bit.

[00:08:54] Slobodan: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:55] Malte: I will give an answer that applies to most countries in the Western world. The biggest LLM or the biggest answer engine based on an LLM is actually still AI Overviews in Google. Of course, some people don't seek them out. They just-- they are just in your face when you use Google.

[00:09:14] Malte: But if we look at the amount of people that are exposed to them, it's AI Overviews. But they are still pretty close to SEO, nothing that big. I would guess ChatGPT is roughly half the size of AI Overviews maybe slightly less for search intents. And then th-these two are usually the biggest apart from France, where AI Overviews don't exist.

[00:09:38] Malte: And then often Gemini and AI mode are actually user and traffic-wise the biggest. But again, AI mode has a lot of usage where people just say on like expand or more in AI Overviews, and then they are suddenly in there. And then Claude is still in absolute terms smaller, but Claude has a lot of power users in for-- especially professional contexts.

[00:10:08] Malte: Like Claude is very largely used by businesses and by prosumers, so consumers that, that act like small business. So potentially a lot of money, a lot of buying decisions. And I already see for many B2B SaaS companies, for example, that they get more leads out of Claude than Gemini. Claude is even rivaling ChatGPT or overtaking it.

[00:10:32] Malte: If you have a product that a heavy LLM user would buy. And then of course, there's also Groq, Perplexity. If you care about e-commerce, Rufus from Amazon could be relevant for you. I have seen first data this week that in some-- at least in some countries, Rufus has already overtaken Perplexity,

[00:10:55] Slobodan: Oh

[00:10:55] Malte: in terms of usage.

[00:10:57] Malte: And of course, Copilot from Microsoft, which many people laugh about, and in total numbers, it's really small. But there are companies that allow their employees to use Copilot or nothing. And if you sell,

[00:11:13] Slobodan: heard stories.

[00:11:14] Malte: if you sell to that kind of company very large enterprises that are not very forward-thinking in terms of technology some, some governmental agencies.

[00:11:26] Malte: And if you sell to them, you should probably also have a look at Copilot

[00:11:32] Slobodan: Great point, because for decades, a rule of digital marketing and selling online has been go where your users are, and this is exactly that. I mean, it's a different location for the users to be. It's a different interaction they're having, but you're still... You need to influence where your users are. I cannot help but laugh at Copilot.

[00:11:50] Slobodan: I just read a stat last week that out of the, all of the Office 365 users, like 3% use Copilot, o-of the ones that have it available there. It doesn't seem to be going well for them. But you're right. If, if that's the only option and your client, your, your, y-your, your prospects are using that as the only option, you have to do it.

[00:12:12] Slobodan: You absolutely need to take-- You need to be careful about what you do with Copilot. Let's talk about all of the, the case studies and all the incredible research work Peec is doing. You're trying to figure out how these-- how the black box works, and, and you're one of the few companies that's really months, if not years ahead of, of, of most of the market including the market you're competing in, and not just internet in general.

[00:12:34] Slobodan: So let's talk about that. You published something, I think yesterday, the GummySearch case study. And this is about grounding queries and, and Reddit and, like, the hot topic. Of course, Reddit has been LLM darling, and then it, it's not loved, and it's loved again. So ~that, ~that case study, it's a, this is a dead product.

[00:12:51] Slobodan: GummySearch is a Reddit analytics product, I think, something like that. ~It, ~it shut down, and now it's it's powering 0.1% of all ChatGPT citations. Is that? Can you explain what ~the, ~the grounding issue is

[00:13:05] Malte: Yeah. So, I mean, what's happening is when LLMs answer a question, they often perform this grounding or web search process, right? Where they generate fan-out queries, they search, they pull in documents. And earlier this month, ChatGPT changed for one of the models they are using. I think it's 5.5 Nano, but I would have to look it up how they pull in the fan-out queries.

[00:13:31] Malte: And they-- Basically, these fan-out queries, they now contain a lot the term Reddit. So you write a prompt like, "What's the best skiing mask?" Or, "Which podcast microphone should I buy?" You don't mention Reddit at all in the prompt. You click Enter, ChatGPT generates fan-out queries. There's a high chance the word Reddit is included in at least one of these.

[00:13:56] Malte: And of course, they do this with the intention to get Reddit content. But what happens is, more or less, this fan-out query is put into a search engine like Google. What does Google do if you put Reddit in the search of-- in the keyword? Of course, reddit.com ranks a lot. But if there are websites that mention both Reddit and the other part of the keyword, they also have a chance to rank.

[00:14:21] Malte: And especially if you want some domain diversity, you might even give them a boost. So instead of giving hundreds of URLs from Reddit, you give maybe five URLs from Reddit and then an external website. And that's where GummySearch is profiting now, because they literally have landing pages like best fashion brands according to Reddit.

[00:14:41] Malte: And then, so the, the keyword is already perfect for the fan-out query, like the title is matching perfectly. And then the content is a listicle with the top 20 brands. And for every brand, there are reviews, sta- like, so star ratings. And these star ratings are connected to individual reviews, and these individual reviews are just sentences that users have written on Reddit.

[00:15:06] Malte: So for every brand, you have something like 20 statements, and these are sentences that mention the brand and then mention some kind of judgment or some kind of review or rating

[00:15:18] Slobodan: perfect, perfectly citable, right?

[00:15:20] Malte: Yes, it's the perfect content. Also, if a-- as a human, if you go on it, you're like: Yeah, this is like based on what people write on Reddit.

[00:15:28] Malte: It must be true. This must be the best brands. And of course, they mention all of these terms that are related to Reddit. Like they say, "We aggregated 15 subreddits like r/AskUK and r/AskCasual and r/BuyOnceForever," or whatever it's called. So all of these terms that are related to Reddit. They list, they mention the Reddit usernames, the date, the subreddit where they wrote it.

[00:15:52] Malte: So it's just like a perfect storm, basically. It's, it's for this kind of fanout query, it's the perfect result, and that's why for these kind of prompts, they right now show up as a source a lot. The funny thing is that the service actually shut down in November last year because they couldn't get an API deal with Reddit.

[00:16:14] Malte: And these public landing pages, they were just some form of advertising for them, some form of growth marketing, similar to Similarweb that give you for free some information on any domain. And yeah, right now the citations went through the roof, and this is only happening in ChatGPT. In none of the other LLMs are they a relevant source, and up until a few weeks ago, they were also not relevant for ChatGPT.

[00:16:39] Malte: Now, this is of course a temporary thing, very, very likely, but it is very interesting because it shows that if there's a slight shift in the fanout queries, and you have the perfect content for this you can actually profit a lot as a source. Very important. They didn't gain visibility as a brand, right?

[00:16:58] Malte: They are not making any money from this. In theory, they could now say, "Hey, dear brands, you can buy the number one spot in my listicle," and they could monetize that. It's maybe not-- It's definitely not ethical. It's maybe also illegal, depending on what country they are in. But they now have power over what brands are recommended by LLMs

[00:17:17] Slobodan: That's such an inter-- really interest-- I mean, I was preparing the interview last night, and I saw the post, and I, I need to ask him this because this shows we're in the very early stage of LLMs as a search engine or as a search tool, whatever you wanna call it. see more of these. We'll see some examples than this that do harm, do actual harm which just means be prepared.

[00:17:39] Slobodan: Anything can happen because it's still chaos. Also, the fact that they're adding Reddit to fan-out queries, do you think that's an AI feature, LLM deciding to do that, or a deterministic thing that they just program into the tool that the model is using?

[00:17:54] Malte: For that one, I'm not sure,

[00:17:56] Slobodan: Hmm

[00:17:56] Malte: Because it's so often Reddit. If we look at other LLMs like Groq, for example, they use a lot of different domains.

[00:18:05] Slobodan: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:05] Malte: So if you do software reviews, they would mention G2 and Capterra. So there's a little bit more balance. ~I, ~I couldn't tell you if it's hard-coded or if a reasoning process of an LLM led to it

[00:18:17] Slobodan: It could be either one. That, that, ~that's, ~that's the crazy thing. The fact that it was just added, maybe it was a different model that they pushed, but I, I'm leaning more towards the deterministic because all of the this works features that we see like Claude Code, Claude... They're all tools built around LLMs.

[00:18:33] Slobodan: They're all deterministic software built around LLMs, and that's why sometimes it works really well. Your team Jan Ellingspil and Tomek Rusky ~did a, ~did a study about listicles.

[00:18:43] Malte: Yes

[00:18:44] Slobodan: Now, listicles are used to be the hot thing. People used to recommend listicles for SEO, for all kinds of reasons, and now Google is not crazy about them anymore.

[00:18:53] Slobodan: The interesting thing about listicles that they found is it's a five million data points, which is just and crazy. If you have a listicle on your website, it doesn't really matter if you're promoting your brand, but if it's an earned mention, then, then it matters more. Is, is that how it was?

[00:19:08] Malte: If it's an, like, earned mention-- Like, if it's a third-party mention, I would say, then we can see some very concrete benefits of that. If it's a, your own listicle, very, very likely there's also a benefit, like from observation. But when we looked at it and tried to quantify it, we could not find clear values, clear impacts.

[00:19:31] Malte: That can just mean that there are other effects just because it's your own domain. It can mean they are treated differently. It can mean that it's pr-primarily done by players who are already being recommended. Like, we cannot say they don't work. I don't wanna say that. What I can say is for third-party listicles, we saw these very, very, very, very clear impacts that were measurable across different industries.

[00:19:57] Malte: ~For, ~for your own listicles, we could not come to such numbers. It was very often statistically not significant what we observed

[00:20:05] Slobodan: And this is where AI and LLMs and Google agree, which is very interesting. Google Search is also not a fan of self-promoting ~resti-resti-- ~And did-- they had a, was it March update this year? Recently had an update that just slaughtered websites that rely on that as a content strategy. Very interesting. More about the fan-out queries the language. Now, Peec is-- it, it's a German company. ~You're, ~you're in Germany. I'm in Portugal. Why are all, almost all or most of the fan-out queries in English regardless of the website language? And what does that mean for German websites, French websites, Portuguese websites, Spanish websites?

[00:20:38] Malte: Yeah. So what we analyzed there was if I write a prompt in a language of a country using an IP address in that country, what fan-out queries am I seeing? And we saw very, very consistently in ChatGPT that at least one of the fan-out queries was English in, depending on the country, 70, 80, 90% of cases. Of course, there were also fan-out queries in the language of the country.

[00:21:02] Slobodan: Right

[00:21:02] Malte: ~What, ~what does this lead to? This leads to English-sPeecing sources, which usually means US-based sources and US-centric sources influencing the grounding process. This is a disadvantage if I'm a German brand and all my content is in Germany and every interview I ever gave was in German and every press release I ever released was in German, because that means that for one of my fan-out queries, my content has no chance to show up, and that can even lead to ChatGPT recommending US or UK brands that are not active in a certain country.

[00:21:40] Malte: What can I do about it? Don't go and translate your whole website into English. Like, people always ask me, "Is this what I should do?" And I'm like, "No, no, no."

[00:21:49] Slobodan: clear about that. Thank you for

[00:21:50] Malte: Yeah.

[00:21:50] Slobodan: Yep

[00:21:51] Malte: SEO still exists. You still want a clean index, and in order to actually show up for the fan-out queries and for the grounding process, you first need to rank in Google and other search engines, so don't translate everything.

[00:22:05] Malte: But it can make sense to have maybe an About page in English, even if your target audience doesn't need it. Just have it to have some facts about your company in English. It can make sense to maybe run a content marketing campaign once per year in English. Maybe your CEO should be on one or two English-sPeecing podcasts.

[00:22:24] Malte: You could be a guest in a few English-sPeecing social media like YouTube videos. You could run your own English-sPeecing social media accounts. Like, you should have some footprint in the English-sPeecing web, but this is not like the new foundation of your strategy. You should dedicate a small percentage of your time to that if you have the time and resources, because this could also change tomorrow, right?

[00:22:47] Malte: It ~could, ~could just go away

[00:22:49] Slobodan: Hopefully it does because this is just wrong. This is unfair to, to local brands, in my opinion. What about llms.txt, llmsfull.txt? Like, should those be in English because that's the language of LLMs or should they be in your local language?

[00:23:04] Malte: If you use an llms.txt, I would always do it in English. And important, llms.txt will not give you more visibility in search,

[00:23:12] Slobodan: Of course

[00:23:13] Malte: but it can help agents to understand your website, understand where to find your MCP server, how to obtain an API key, or how to interact with your website if you wish for agents to directly interact with your website

[00:23:24] Slobodan: That makes sense. And yes, this is not e- I mean, again, even Google said two weeks ago, they said LLM ChatGPT is stupid. The search people said it, and then the agent people said LLM ChatGPT is something you should have. And there was like a mini nuclear war happening on LinkedIn over those two things. are correct. That's the crazy thing.

[00:23:42] Malte: Yeah, both are correct and both have been known for a couple of months. Like it's...

[00:23:47] Slobodan: Yes.

[00:23:48] Malte: But yeah

[00:23:48] Slobodan: yes. You also had a study about advertorials.

[00:23:52] Malte: Yes

[00:23:53] Slobodan: ~I, ~I'm not a fan. I'm ~not, ~not of the study of advertorials. ~If, if it's, ~if it's unethical, hidden, masked, that it's an ad, like, I think it's just plain wrong.

[00:24:00] Slobodan: And they were ~a visi- ~an L and visibility trick in the early days, and they were declared dead. Now they're kind of back to life. Can you explain what's happening in that space?

[00:24:07] Malte: Yes. So I did, I, I don't, I, I heard they had declared dead at some point, and I was like, "No." I, I,

[00:24:15] Slobodan: was declared dead at some point, so

[00:24:18] Malte: Yeah. And I was thinking, I, I don't think that happened. And then I remembered that in October, I set up a project with a couple of prompts from a specific niche in the insurance space in Germany, because I knew while doing research for a client of ours that there were a lot of advertorials as sources used.

[00:24:40] Malte: And every single week, I have a re-recurring task in my Claude to go through the PIK MCP server, pull all the data, analyze it, and give me the report. And every single week I get the same number, roughly. Something between 2% and 2.7% of citations for this prompt set are advertorials, meaning advertorials where the word advertorial is already like literally in the title of the page or very visible on the page.

[00:25:12] Malte: And this is very, very constant. There are new advertorials all the time and old ones drop out, but it's very, very constant since October last year. Maybe advertorials used to work even better at some point, but they definitely still do work. And 2% of citations doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have

[00:25:36] Slobodan: content is advertorials? ~Is, ~is it 2% of all the content in the world or less?

[00:25:40] Malte: Oop, I would guess significantly less.

[00:25:43] Slobodan: Yeah, same. So, ~so they, they did, ~they do work. They absolutely work ~if that, ~if you look at it that way. That's very interesting. Let's go back to the country~ local ~local searches, different languages. ~You, ~you ran the same prompts for markets, UK, US, and checking my notes, Sweden,

[00:25:57] Malte: Yes

[00:25:57] Slobodan: and you get different answers.

[00:25:59] Slobodan: This is for different-- from different IP addresses. Like how did you run this?

[00:26:03] Malte: Yes. So with the normal PKI infrastructure, meaning if I select a certain country,

[00:26:08] Slobodan: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:08] Malte: then whenever we run the prompt, we use a random IP address in that country

[00:26:14] Slobodan: And~ what was the, ~what were the differences? Like, w- give me some examples that you had there

[00:26:18] Malte: Yeah. And I mean, I ran different prompts. I just ran the prompt, I'm looking for a project management software, and then like in English, and then of course I also ran it in Swedish, and then I just added the country. So I'm looking for project management software in the US, in the UK, in Sweden, and I also did that for the Swedish-sPeecing prompt.

[00:26:38] Malte: So then it's like in Sweden or something. And if I just run English-sPeecing prompts, I get super US heavy results no matter my IP address. If I say in country, it is more country specific. Also, if I run it in the language of the country, it's more country specific. And if I run it in the language of the country plus mention the country in the prompt, then it gets even more country specific.

[00:27:05] Malte: But there's always some amount of US sources in there. And yeah, that was basically the, the finding.

[00:27:14] Slobodan: back to the fan-out queries

[00:27:16] Malte: Exactly

[00:27:16] Slobodan: talked about one being in English versus not. So the model that they all ask is still the same. ChatGPT five point whatever, the base model is the same. It's the fan-out queries and what they return based on where you're from, what the language is. This is interesting, and this is really what, what strategy should be. It's easier to rank for something in Sweden in Swedish than, than globally in English. So if you're a local competitor in any market, try to conquer that market. Maybe, maybe that's easier than just trying to go global and winning everything.

[00:27:46] Slobodan: There's a controversial thing in, in the world of AI and AI content called Mount AI. people call it Mount AI. Explaining it to the audience, essentially, you go crazy on the AI-generated content, and it looks amazing. You're winning all the bets for a month, two months, and then you go crashing down. Looks like a mountain, the chart. Do you see any of that in, in-- when you're tracking? Like, d-does Peec register any of this data? And, and what's your take on, on AI-generated content at scale, at crazy scale in general?

[00:28:18] Malte: Yeah. So I'm not totally opposed to AI-generated content. Like, I have personally overseen the publication of hundreds of thousands of AI content pieces and million of automatically created landing pages. If you have a good system, it can work. But very important, you should ask yourself two questions. If I'm a human and I want to read an AI summary of this content, would I go to your website or would I just go to ChatGPT?

[00:28:49] Malte: And the second question is, if you were a product manager at Google or OpenAI and your job is to save money, would you spend money to discover, crawl, index, and rank this content or not? And if the answer to either of these questions is no, then you can still do it, but you are doing something against the will of Google and OpenAI.

[00:29:15] Malte: ~This can be worth it. ~This can be worth it, but we are going into black hat spam territory.

[00:29:21] Slobodan: Yep

[00:29:21] Malte: Totally fine if you're a one-person affiliate company just making a living. Kind of problematic if you're responsible for a large brand that has a reputation to lose and has a lot of revenue tied to the website.

[00:29:36] Malte: And to give you an example of what works well, if you are a price comparison website and you have this chart with how much the, the product used to cost, you can write a one-sentence AI summary, and you can update it every single day. Right now the product is cheap.

[00:29:53] Malte: You can do this also for flights. Or if you have a weather website, and for every, every street you want to have the live weather, of course you can write it with AI. Nothing against it. Whenever you have some unique information you bring to the table, you can use AI content. It works well for SEO, works also well for AI search visibility.

[00:30:17] Malte: Users like it. Another example is you have product reviews. Of course, you can summarize them. Users say that this fridge is very cheap but loud, for example. So it's a good fridge to put in your garage, but it's not a good fridge to put in your home office. So this can, this can be AI written. But what you shouldn't do is just prompt ChatGPT, "Write me an article how to tie a tie."

[00:30:45] Malte: It might rank for a while. It might even be good content in the sense that it answers the user question But it's not helpful. The AI could just generate it on the fly itself. So if you want something that's really long-lasting, really sustainable, where you are not fighting against OpenAI and Google, don't do any of that.

[00:31:08] Malte: And the, the trap that many companies went into, they created comparison articles, glossaries these listicles that you mentioned competitor comparisons mass production of FAQ content,

[00:31:22] Slobodan: Hmm

[00:31:23] Malte: or this best X for Y, like best CRM for dentists, best CRM for pharmacists, best CRM for freelance photographers, et cetera, et cetera, landing pages with AI.

[00:31:35] Malte: And of course, at some point, Google realized there's a lot of slop in the sub-directory and just ~stopped ~stopped ranking it. I, I personally looked at the reference and case study customers of a large AI content tool. I'm not gonna name them. The good news is 43% were flat or increasing in visibility.

[00:32:00] Malte: 22% had this perfect Mount AI shape.

[00:32:03] Slobodan: Wow

[00:32:04] Malte: But the worst is 35%, they were flat and then they tanked. So they didn't even have the increase from the Mount AI. They went straight for the decrease. And Lily Ray did a bigger analysis. She looked at over 200 domains, and there was also something like, like 200 domains that lost at least 30% of visibility.

[00:32:28] Malte: And then I think like 40 of them even lost more than 75, 75% of visibility. And there's also big companies in there like HubSpot, ClickUp, AirOps, a couple more. They really lost the majority of their SEO visibility. So it works short term for both SEO and AI search, but long term it has immense risk if it's not done well.

[00:32:53] Slobodan: And it's really difficult to recover from that. when Google pushes you to zero or near zero, that is a tough and dark road of getting back to where you were before. Not, not the Peec, but Mount AI. I don't mean Peec Peec the brand. I find it fascinating that people would even do this, number one. mean, the, the name of the podcast is No Hacks. This is much of a hack as it gets. Like, if you have the weather data, if you have the price comparison, all that, you're not do-- that's not AI content. That's content that has an AI component in it. And of course, if it took you longer to less-- if it took you less time to create it than it would take me to read it, it's bad content.

[00:33:32] Slobodan: Like, that's my-- Like, when I see something and the author has no idea what's in this page. Like, they, they, no human eyes have seen this before I did, I'm not reading that. Google is probably not reading that, and then even the LLMs don't care about that. Yeah, and then you have to do digital PR, which is my next question.

[00:33:50] Slobodan: You, you, you used to believe in technical SEO. This is from one of your posts as well. You, you, you no longer believe technical SEO is the future. You believe that digital PR matters more LLM visibility. I mean, they're not mutually exclusive, obviously. We're going to agree on that. But what made you think that digital PR is more important for the future?

[00:34:09] Malte: Yeah. I mean, you phrased it quite well, right? I wrote it a little bit dramatic in my introduction for that post, but of course

[00:34:14] Slobodan: how you write the post on LinkedIn. ~That, ~that, that, that's the

[00:34:16] Malte: it's the hook. Yeah.

[00:34:17] Slobodan: That's okay

[00:34:19] Malte: so I, I still believe technical SEO is important, but I do believe digital PR is more important now for AI search visibility. Because if you look at how grounding an LLM works, yes, your own website is a source, but your own website will never be the only source that LLMs are using, and unless it's a branded prompt, it's also unlikely to be the biggest source.

[00:34:44] Malte: It does matter a lot what is written about you on Reddit, on G2, on Wikipedia, on YouTube, in some LLMs, Facebook, Yelp all of these editorial news and media websites. They have huge impact on how LLMs rank your brand and recommend your brand and, and also how they perceive you. Like, what are strengths, what are weaknesses?

[00:35:07] Malte: So at, at least you don't influence them with technical p- SEO, right? I mean, of course, at these companies, there are technical SEO people working, and they have an influence on it, yada, yada, yada. But we look at the levers that you can pull as a business, and there the offsite aspect is just much, much bigger for AI search

[00:35:28] Slobodan: Agreed. ~I, I agree. I'm, ~I'm a primarily a technical SEO person. When it comes to S- I see it as technical SEO as an extension of web development. I was a web developer. Like, proper web development is technical SEO. There's no need to optimize it if you build it well. ~That, ~that's my take ~on, ~on technical SEO. but I agree with that 100%. I also think that SEO or CRO, all those interested never should have been about the website only. ~That, ~that was a mistake that people just lived it for 20 years. I think now AI is kind of making brands rethink this and obviously, like you say if, ~if the, ~the sources are pulled from third-party websites and not your website, you kind of need to have influence what's there as well.

[00:36:07] Slobodan: And then you need to make sure it's consistent information, it's positive information, it's correct information to begin with. It-- I like this direction. ~I, ~I hate that we needed AI to come to senses, but hey, anything at this point. ~You, ~you had a- another post... no, you have a webinar actually~ in, ~in June, on June 16th.

[00:36:27] Slobodan: I'll put a link in the description because this episode will probably come out before that Google Shopping and ChatGPT Shopping, and I'll let you tell the story because it's a crazy story,

[00:36:38] Malte: Yeah.

[00:36:38] Slobodan: opinion

[00:36:39] Malte: Yeah. So PKI conducted research on this together with Tom Wells, an independent researcher in the space, and we discovered that ChatGPT Shopping, meaning this, back then it was a shopping slider, now it's usually a table, that this data is pulled from Google Shopping. To be a little bit technical, in the data that is streamed from the ChatGPT server to your browser, there is a blob of text that is Base64 encrypted, encoded.

[00:37:10] Malte: You can easily decode it. And then you see a set of parameters and a keyword. And some of these parameters are hl uule, like these parameters ~that you would use, ~that you would use in the URL of Google to change the country and location and language. And some of these parameters are the things that you typically find in a Google Merchant Center feed, so like a headline offer ID, a headline offer image ID, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:37:41] Malte: We stitched all of these together, and we landed on a Google Shopping page, and the products were the same as in ChatGPT Shopping. ~The re- ~the ratings of the products were the same, and the number of ratings were the same, and the prices and the ability were the same, apart from some caching issues.

[00:38:00] Slobodan: Of course

[00:38:01] Malte: so we investigate a little bit and, yeah, turns out the top 40 organic results of ChatGPT of Google Shopping can explain all of the products and ratings and reviews and prices in ChatGPT Shopping.

[00:38:19] Malte: And this is not true, for example, if you use Bing Shopping. With Bing, you cannot explain what is happening in ChatGPT. And what is very important, the order of products is heavily influenced, but not exactly the same.

[00:38:36] Slobodan: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:36] Malte: So there is some form of re-ranking happening. We believe this is because there are, in addition to the...

[00:38:43] Malte: Ah, I forgot to mention this. In this file, we also found shopping fan-out queries, like a different set of fan-out queries that are apparently used for Google Shopping. And we also found an ID where I believe based on this ID, we know which scraping provider OpenAI is using to get the Google Shopping data because they add their own unique product ID to it, but different, different part of the story.

[00:39:09] Malte: So we believe the shopping fan-out queries are used to pull in the products, and the regular fan-out queries are used to pull in context to then re-rank these products a little bit

[00:39:20] Slobodan: ~This is, ~this is a crazy story. ~This is ~this just shows you that the ethics between these companies is just an unknown thing. They don't care about what they're doing. You also had an MCP contest recently, and I've seen so many posts in my feed on LinkedIn by people who participated and were excited about it. I'm not going to-- You had 67 submitted projects, something like that. I'm not going to ask you about the details of the projects, but what did you learn about your own product from how people were using the

[00:39:45] Malte: So the most interesting thing was about half the things that people built, we either currently have it in internal beta

[00:39:54] Slobodan: Nice.

[00:39:54] Malte: we have like a rough design idea and we have it on the roadmap. So that was amazing. Like,

[00:40:01] Slobodan: Yep

[00:40:02] Malte: at that time, for example, ~of the, ~of the challenge, we didn't have our log file analysis live yet for everyone.

[00:40:08] Malte: Many people connected the PKI data with log file analysis. We were like, "Okay, this is nice validation. It's good that we built a log file ~anal- ~analysis tool." And ~a, ~a lot of other things were like also things that we obvious have on our roadmap, like connecting Google Search Console, connecting to your web analytics, these kinds of things.

[00:40:26] Malte: My personal favorite was someone who did merchant center feed optimization, because based on this research into ChatGPT shopping, I'm now very convinced that I know a couple of things you can do to optimize your content. For example, you could look at the shopping fan-out queries that ChatGPT is using, and you could look for terms that ChatGPT is introducing in these fan-out queries that are not part of the original prompt.

[00:40:55] Malte: These are probably words you wanna include in your merchant center feed and on your product pages. Or you have in the table from ChatGPT for the product, you have these categories like comfortness, versatility, and then you have some rating stars. If you see the same attributes again and again, you probably want to write favorably about your product for ~comforta- ~comfortness, versatility, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:41:23] Malte: So you can get a lot of inspiration, and somebody just did that. Of course, with some, "Hey Claude, please write this content."

[00:41:31] Slobodan: Yeah, ~that, ~that, that's fine. That's completely... I

[00:41:33] Malte: Not judging.

[00:41:34] Slobodan: ~Clement, ~Clement Prayal, ~if, ~if my notes are correct, who did this project. But the, yeah, Merchant Center optimization. but yeah, fan-out queries are... People know about them. I don't think they're used enough. literally the roadmap.

[00:41:49] Slobodan: ~That, ~that gives you the direction and tells you, you should be doing this. Like, this is, if you do this, you win short-term, mid-term, maybe even long-term, but more people should be playing with that. ~This is, ~this is excellent. I was, when I was researching you and your previous experience, you had a podcast, a few podcasts where you say SEO is dead. And this is my final question for today. I wanna let you explain. ~I'll, ~I'll try to push back as hard as I can.

[00:42:13] Malte: I usually follow that by something. 

[00:42:15] Slobodan: Yeah

[00:42:16] Malte: my stance is SEO is dead as a default growth channel for every company. Because in the past, almost every company would just assume, "Hey, our SEO traffic will grow 10, 20% per year." And it was kind of a given for SEO teams. So there are very, very few SEO teams in the world who got away with saying, "Yeah, there's gonna be the same traffic as last year."

[00:42:41] Malte: Like, you would be laughed out of the room by the executives.

[00:42:43] Slobodan: Yep

[00:42:44] Malte: And this is no longer the case. Of course, there are still companies that are growing with SEO. There are also some that are growing massively. But I don't see the, the total cake increasing in size or the total pie. So in the past, if you had 5% market share, if the total pie increased, also your slice of it increased, right?

[00:43:06] Malte: And that I see happening less and less. Of course, there will always be winners, and there will always be more companies now that give up on SEO too early, so it's easier to take a larger percentage of the pie if for companies that still believe in it. But I do not believe that companies or the majority of companies will grow with SEO.

[00:43:29] Malte: And

[00:43:30] Slobodan: ~disagree. ~I don't disagree. I'm sorry. I have to say that

[00:43:35] Malte: ~s- s- s- ~and for new companies, I would in- only very rarely I would nowadays recommend them go all in on SEO. There are still some ma- cases where it makes sense, like if you go outside of the United States, in most countries, you are not allowed to advertise for prescription medicine or like facial surgery that is not medically needed or you can't use pre, post pictures, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:44:00] Malte: Then SEO can make sense, right? If you are severely limited in your marketing. Also, if you are selling things targeted towards adults weapons, cigarettes, some of these things where many forms of advertising are not accessible to you, of course, SEO is great. Also, if you have a lot of unique data, th-this is like your, your secret advantage over your competition.

[00:44:26] Malte: For some reason, you have this data that nobody else has, then also SEO can make a lot of sense. But otherwise, today, for the first 12 to 24 month, I would tell most companies, "Don't focus on SEO too much. Don't do anything bad for SEO, like don't publish off AI content." But I mean, honestly, just get your name out there.

[00:44:48] Malte: Try to find a paid marketing channel you can scale or another organic channel, but don't go all in on SEO. It's, it's unlikely to be the channel by which you win

[00:44:59] Slobodan: Correct. ~I, ~I mean, ~I, ~I cannot disagree. SEO is a primary growth channel. ~Died in '24 probably, or ~started dying in '24. ~Now, ~now, I mean, it can work, sure. It will work. ~What I, ~what I wanted to push back on, but I won't because you explained it, is the practice of SEO, things you need to do for good SEO, ~that, ~that's nowhere near dead.

[00:45:17] Slobodan: ~That's, ~that's thriving, expanding to off-site things, expanding to all kinds of things. But if you think that your organic traffic is going to keep growing, oh my God. I have some NFTs to sell to you.

[00:45:31] Malte: I also still have some to sell, but they are not worth the transaction fee.

[00:45:35] Slobodan: Exactly. The audience mix of this podcast is website optimizers, ~people, ~CRO ~people, ~people, copywriters. the one thing that you think most people to look back at ~M- ~May, June 26, a year from now and ~s- ~realize, "Oh, ~we, ~we used to get it all wrong"? Like, what is the one thing that the opinion of the broader digital marketing population when it comes to AI search specifically?

[00:46:00] Malte: I think chunking is the topic where the most wrong takes are existing. So maybe for those who never heard of it, there's this assumption among some practitioners in the AEO, GEO, AI search, whatever space, that you need to chunk your content, and they are both right and wrong. And then there are also people who say, "No, you don't need to do this," and these people are also both right and wrong.

[00:46:24] Malte: And what I mean by this is the following. You do not need to chunk up your whole content, right? There are people who literally translate their articles into just a list of one-sentence bullet points. You do not need to do this. Actually, you shouldn't do this. Because they have the logic that then every sentence is one chunk, and then the LLMs will cite it.

[00:46:46] Malte: It's ridiculous. But people advise it, don't listen to them. However, if you have one paragraph or one chunk, if you wish to call it so, near the top of your document that has the main statement that you want LLMs to understand in there, and if this is written with a length of maybe 50 words, two to three sentences it is written in an authoritative, declarative manner, so there is no guessing, no maybe, no somewhat, but like a strict statement.

[00:47:24] Malte: And if it is self-contained, so it's not referencing anything before and after, it can be taken out of context and still make sense, and if it names the entities that it is about, this is much more likely to be cited by LLMs than any random part of your text. Let me give an example. That is why this podcast is somewhat good for ~those con-- ~those topics, and, and I believe the host is kind of good.

[00:47:57] Malte: This is

[00:47:58] Slobodan: all that on the fly. ~I love, ~I love how you just generated that on the fly faster than ChatGPT would. 

[00:48:02] Malte: Yeah.

[00:48:03] Slobodan: yeah, continue

[00:48:04] Malte: ~this, this is the opposite, right? ~I can't take this out of context. It's not declarative, it doesn't make the entities. But when I say based on reviews on Reddit and G2, the No Hacks podcast is the bet- best podcast for website optimizers to learn about the agentic web and the host won an award from da, da, dum institute.

[00:48:28] Malte: This is not self-contained.

[00:48:30] Slobodan: ~By the way, ~by the way, I have to show it. I actually did, and this is the sound clip I'll use. Thank you for that. But you know what?

[00:48:36] Malte: We didn't plan this

[00:48:38] Slobodan: Absolutely not. You know, ~that, ~that makes all the sense. However, when you're writing for humans, it makes even more sense to do it like that. This is not-- Writing for machines to extract information is not equal to sounding robotic and sounding like a machine. It's just common sense because LLMs really try to replicate human understanding of content as much as possible. Like, ~th-this~ is-- It's painful that we have to keep repeating for two, three decades that this is how you're supposed to talk to people, and now LLM's just trying to mirror what the people need.

[00:49:10] Slobodan: But yeah, this is a, the excellent example. If you're vague, you have marketing claims that say, "We are the best agency at this," based on what? Like, where's-- ~W-who~ says that? What's the percentage of lift that you have? Do you have any case studies? All that stuff. Vague is horrible, especially in that first paragraph ~and, ~and if an LLM sees-- ~I've, ~I've been reading a lot of research by Kevin Indig on his Substack and he has, like, he's been killing it ~with, ~with the studies.

[00:49:35] Slobodan: If you're vague in the first paragraph, the rest of it doesn't really matter because ~it, ~it gives up. LLM's going to give up and think ~this is, ~this is just all nonsense. This is~ it's ~interesting. It's interesting that we keep going back to basics. ~Th-these~ are-- This works for humans. This still works for everyone.

[00:49:49] Slobodan: What is the best place for the audience to connect with you? Obviously, Peec.ai is P-E-E-C.AI and how can people find you?

[00:49:59] Malte: search for Malte Landwehr on LinkedIn. I think that's the best place to follow me. I'm also active on X, but I would say ~on, ~on LinkedIn there are my more thought of content pieces

[00:50:11] Slobodan: That, that's exactly a-an accurate description of LinkedIn and X. Malte, thank you so much for doing this. It was a pleasure to learn about all the great things Peec is doing. Keep going and yeah, y-you're, you're doing amazing. Love talking to you. And

[00:50:26] Malte: Thanks for having me

[00:50:27] Slobodan: to everyone listening, thank you for sticking with us for, like, 50 minutes. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I hope you learned a lot from Malte, and I will talk to you next week

[00:50:37] Malte: Thanks everyone

[00:50:38]