Masters of Search

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

What makes Maddy's perspective particularly valuable is this combination of agency and in-house experience, paired with genuine technical depth. She's a bestselling author of "Writing for Humans and Robots," a certified content engineer from AirOps, and someone who actually builds RAG pipelines with n8n and Pinecone rather than just talking about AI in abstract terms.

We'll explore how content operations are evolving, why she believes most SEO problems are actually process problems, and what it means to be a "content engineer" in 2026 when AI is reshaping how we create, distribute, and measure content success.

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

In this episode we covered (among other things):

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M&A in SEO is a topic that you won’t find a lot of content about. But it’s a high-stakes topic that can make our brake organic visibility.

My guest today is Daphne Monro, who is Head of Website & Content at hosting.com, where she oversees web strategy, content operations, and SEO for a global hosting network powering over 3 million sites.

She lived through multiple high-stakes domain migrations and rebrands, and knows the ins and outs of how to make this a success.

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My guest today is Björn Darko. He leads an Enterprise SEO org by day, and hosts one of the largest German SEO podcasts by night.

At Aviv Group, Björn oversees a 30-person team building SEO infrastructure for some of the biggest real estate platforms across France, Germany, Belgium.

I’m very much looking forward to diving deep into Product-Led SEO at enterprise scale, managing teams across multiple countries and brands, and what it’s like to have a full-time job while hosting or co-hosting the SEOPRESSO Podcast and the SEO Product Unveiled podcast.

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Graphite is nothing like your typical agency. While most agencies sell slides and strategic decks, Graphite builds things. While others work on hundred-item SEO audits, they obsess over the 5% of work that actually drives results.

They've proven this approach in SEO with companies like Rippling, Webflow, Notion, and Upwork, and now they're applying the same ruthless focus to AI search.

That's why I'm excited to have Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, on the show today.

Ethan has led Graphite to the absolute forefront of Answer Engine Optimization, one of the largest new marketing channels we've seen in over a decade.

He already gave the ultimate guide to AEO on Lenny’s podcast a couple of weeks ago, but I felt like a lot of questions remained unanswered. So I asked him to do a follow-up deep dive, and now we’re here.

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Lodgify is a €30M+ ARR vacation rental management platform that empowers thousands of independent hosts to compete against Airbnb through direct bookings. And over the years they have built a significant SEO and organic footprint contributing that growth.

Joining me on the latest episode of the #MastersOfSearch is Volodymyr Korol, VP of Marketing at Lodgify.

He joined in 2024 to restructure the entire 30+ person marketing organization across eight functions to drive sustainable ARR growth.

I was curious to learn more about how he leads such a big marketing org, how we thinks about SEO fitting into the bigger picture, and where he sees organic growth, SEO, and AI Search heading.

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SEO has already been a proven growth engine for Carta, and in 2025, they've gained strong AI Search visibility driving real pipeline results. Lucy Hoyle is Senior Content Engineer at Carta, and played a crucial role in that.

She oversees editorial processes, content strategy, and AI workflow optimization for international markets, building scalable systems that turn content strategy into pipeline results.

We talked about how SEO differs from AI Search, why Lucy has been an early champion of the content engineering movement, and her POV on successful content marketing in the Age of AI.

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Wise is moving £145 billion across the globe, serving 15 million customers across 160 countries and 40 currencies. They’ve been profitable for years, with their latest financial accounts posting a £560 million profit before tax while saving customers £2 billion annually on hidden banking fees.

And although the absolute number is pretty high, in relation to their scale, they’re just spending about £50 million a year on marketing.

One part of this remarkable customer acquisition efficiency is a well-oiled organic growth engine.

To understand how Wise built this growth machine, I'm excited to have Fabrizio Ballarini on the podcast today. As Head of Organic Growth at Wise, Fabrizio oversees a cornerstone of their customer acquisition, and he’s already been onboard for 10 years.

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Chatbase bootstrapped to $8M ARR* and turned AI search into their No. 2 user acquisition channel. So I invited Sandra to the Masters of Search podcast to reveal how they did it.

*it was still $7M when we recorded

Her answer? There's no glamorous secret. No magic trick. No growth hack. Just proper execution of fundamentals that most teams skip.

Here's what drove their AI search success:

1) Crystal clear positioning

"AI agents for customer support" - impossible for LLMs to confuse with generic AI tools. Sandra's team maintains this exact messaging everywhere. When AI searches for customer support solutions, it knows exactly what Chatbase does and who it's for.

2) Proper SEO foundation

Domain authority, backlinks, technical setup. The boring stuff most startups skip because they're chasing AI search hacks. Sandra's insight: AI search doesn't work without the SEO fundamentals already in place. Everything feeds everything.

3) Obsessive documentation and changelog updates

Their docs and changelog get updated religiously. Not just for users - for LLMs. Fresh, accurate documentation becomes the source material AI models cite when users ask highly specific questions about how to build customer support agents.

4) Content that lives everywhere

Distribution through "written content influencers" - bloggers, Reddit contributors, not just social media creators. When the same clear message appears across multiple trustworthy sources, LLMs recognize the pattern and are more likely to mention Chatbase.

5) Free plan as entry point

The free plan helps spread the word and get more eyeballs on the product. Right limitations let users experience value without burning AI costs. Obviously a much debated topic, but for Chatbase it worked out.

Watch the full episode for the complete playbook. Link in comments. 👇

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24 BILLION pages. That's the sheer scale at which Roberto Grasiano led SEO and organic growth at Shutterstock. I'm so excited that I could convince him to come on the Masters of Search to bring you 73 minutes of Enterprise SEO masterclass.

Here are my key takeaways, both for Enterprise SEO and for smaller sites:

Roberto couldn't audit individual pages at Shutterstock (24B pages, 500M indexed). Instead, he built comprehensive taxonomy mapping the entire site structure into clusters: broad categories (animals, cars, people), then subcategories (felines, SUVs), with exact page counts for each. This taxonomy determined which optimizations to test and how to measure impact. Even at 10,000 pages, taxonomy thinking beats keyword thinking. Group pages by intent clusters and user journey stages, not just traffic volume.

Roberto moved SEO content from top of category pages (above products) to below the fold. Theory said top placement ranks better. Result? 15% traffic increase. Users wanting specific products don't read text blocks. They want to see products immediately. When you optimize for bots over humans, you hurt user experience, which ultimately hurts rankings. Plus, bots crawling content cost server resources. His rule: content should be made for humans. If it's good enough, it'll show to the people who need it.

When I pushed back on instant checkout in ChatGPT (pointing to Meta's failed checkout), Roberto made a psychological argument: OpenAI builds something that feels like a friend who knows you. Remember when everyone said people would never buy things online? "No one will trust this, we need to touch products." Now our parents spend hours on Amazon. Shopping behavior changes over decades. People will buy through AI interfaces. It won't be fast, but it'll happen.

Roberto's advice: learn your data, understand attribution, connect organic to revenue. Don't ask your boss to track revenue if you can't answer "how much money did you make last quarter?" Moving from vanity metrics (rankings, traffic) to commercial metrics (pipeline, revenue) gives SEOs negotiating power. We have the tools and data available. We just need to use them.

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