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

About the Guest

Rand Fishkin - Co-founder & CEO of SparkToro, co-founder of Moz and Alertmouse, author of "Lost and Founder"

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:04 - The best thing AI has brought online
• 02:51 - The AI inconsistency research: 1,500 prompts for the same list
• 06:17 - Why AI tracking tools give you a false sense of visibility
• 09:16 - Is AI search actually better than Google?
• 11:34 - Kung Pao Chicken vs Peanut Butter: prompt variability
• 16:26 - What AI tracking should actually measure
• 20:16 - Why the best brands weren't built on digital marketing
• 22:43 - AI as "Spicy Autocomplete": where the hype exceeds reality
• 25:17 - Why AI cannot be creative
• 28:58 - Google is still 200x bigger than ChatGPT
• 31:28 - Two ways to show up in AI: base models and RAG
• 34:34 - Brand mentions as the real lever for AI visibility
• 38:10 - Zero-click marketing and the death of traffic as a metric
• 41:47 - Why SEO careers are more important than ever
• 44:39 - What brands should actually do first in March 2026
• 48:10 - The one thing about AI that should be killed today
• 52:02 - Where to find Rand

Key Takeaways

1. AI rankings don't exist
2. Visibility percentage is the real metric
3. Brand mentions drive AI visibility 
4. The best brands weren't built on digital marketing
5. Your homepage is not your homepage anymore
6. SEO is more important than ever, but the metric changed

RESOURCES:

• Rand's AI Inconsistency Research: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-resear...
• SparkToro (audience research): https://sparktoro.com
• Alertmouse (brand mention monitoring, free): https://alertmouse.com
• Connect with Rand on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/randfishkin

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

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.

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

Key takeaways

1. The playbook hasn't changed - Bundling, free products, proprietary lock-in, and distribution deals decided the 90s browser wars. The same tactics are playing out with agentic browsers today.
2. Google is running Microsoft's 1995 playbook - Microsoft embedded IE into Windows to protect its OS monopoly. Google is embedding Gemini into Chrome to protect its search monopoly. The browser is the defensive weapon, not the product.
3. The Chromium trap is deeper than IE bundling ever was - Most agentic browsers (Comet, Atlas, Neon) run on Google's Chromium engine. Even competitors are built on Google's foundation.
4. The prize shifted from attention to transactions - The 90s fight was about what people see. The agentic browser fight is about what AI agents buy, book, and do on your behalf.
5. Your website is the new Netscape - If AI agents mediate every user interaction, your site risks becoming invisible infrastructure rather than a destination.
6. Regulation will be too late - The DOJ took 6 years to settle with Microsoft. Netscape was already dead. The same timeline is playing out with Google's antitrust case.

What to do today

• Don't optimize for one agentic browser. Build for web standards: semantic HTML, ARIA labels, structured data, server-side rendering.
• Build direct audience relationships (email, communities, subscriptions) so you're not dependent on browser intermediaries.
• Make your site worth visiting, not just worth scraping. Offer value an AI agent can't replicate.
• Treat accessibility as an agent strategy. Screen reader compatibility = AI agent compatibility.
• Test your site with an agentic browser to see what works and what breaks.

Read the full agentic browser landscape breakdown: nohackspod.com/blog/agentic-browser-landscape-2026

Chapters

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:34 - The First Browser War
• 09:15 - The Agentic Browser Explosion
• 12:48 - Why Is This Happening Now?
• 16:15 - Where the 2026 Version Gets Worse
• 21:27 - What This Means for Your Website
• 23:14 - What to Do About It
• 26:49 - Closing

Connect

Website: https://nohackspod.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slobodanmanic/

Newsletter: https://nohackspod.com/subscribe

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

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

About the Guest

Duane Forrester is the author of "The Machine Layer" and search industry pioneer

• 30 years in search and digital strategy
• Senior Product Manager at Microsoft - built Bing Webmaster Tools
• Co-launched Schema.org structured data standard
• Leadership roles at Bruce Clay Inc. and Yext
• Founder of Unbound Answers, creator of CitationIQ

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:01 - The biggest shift SEO has ever seen
• 03:30 - Machine Comfort Bias: the 5 layers of trust
• 09:19 - Chunking: writing for AI and humans
• 16:01 - Making content citation-ready
• 18:35 - Schema.org: the trust infrastructure
• 25:46 - Ironman vs Superman: AI as amplifier, not savior
• 32:28 - EEAT, Universal Verifiers, and why trust is everything
• 42:59 - Latent Choice Signals: the invisible metrics
• 52:35 - The Machine Layer book
• 57:53 - Emerging roles in AI discoverability
• 01:01:16 - Where to find Duane

Key Takeaways

1. Trust is the new algorithm - LLMs need multiple dimensions of verification before citing you. If you can provide everything they need without them having to guess, they'll lean into that "machine comfort bias"
2. Chunking matters, but not how you think - Don't reformat your entire page into 300-word blocks. Instead, put key facts, figures, and bullet points at the top. LLMs get "lost in the middle" of long-form content
3. Be the canonical source - Your goal isn't rankings, it's being seen as THE source of knowledge on your topic. If you haven't expanded the LLM's training data with net new information, you won't be cited
4. SEO is now multidisciplinary - Technical SEOs must understand branding, conversion, engagement, PR, and UX. Silos are killing companies in the AI discovery layer
5. AI is Ironman, not Superman - These systems amplify your skills but require you to drive them. Hope is not a strategy. Always ask self-referencing questions to verify outputs
6. LLMs want to save money - They won't waste tokens looking elsewhere if you provide everything they need. Consistency and trust reduce their computational costs

Resources Mentioned

Duane's Work

• Book: The Machine Layer - Available on Amazon (Kindle & Paperback)
• Website: duaneforrester.com - Free frameworks from the book available
• Substack: duaneforresterdecodes.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dforrester

Connect with No Hacks

• Website: https://nohackspod.com
• Newsletter: Subscribe for weekly episodes

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

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

Chapter Timestamps

• 00:00:00 - Introduction: The new game your website is losing
• 00:01:43 - The Scale of the Problem: AI crawler traffic explosion
• 00:05:19 - The JavaScript Problem: Why AI crawlers can't see your content
• 00:10:28 - The Bot Protection Paradox: Accidentally blocking AI
• 00:14:40 - The Speed Requirement: Why 200ms matters
• 00:17:46 - AI Agents Are Struggling Too: Browser agents and their limitations
• 00:20:46 - How to Fix It: 6 things you need to do
• 00:25:33 - Closing: The web is adapting again

Key Statistics

• 569 million GPTBot requests on Vercel's network in a single month
• 370 million ClaudeBot requests in the same period
• 305% growth in GPTBot traffic (May 2024 to May 2025)
• 157,000% increase in PerplexityBot requests year-over-year
• 33% of organic search activity now comes from AI agents
• ~40% failure rate for the best AI browser agents on complex tasks

The 6 Things to Fix

1. Implement Server-Side Rendering (SSR) - If your site uses a JavaScript framework (React, Vue, Angular) with client-side rendering, switch to SSR or static site generation immediately. Use Next.js, Nuxt, or a pre-rendering service.
2. Add Structured Data with JSON-LD - Expose key information in machine-readable format using schema.org markup. Microsoft confirmed Bing uses this to help Copilot understand content.
3. Optimize for Speed - Target server response time under 200ms. First Contentful Paint under 1 second. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds.
4. Check Your Bot Protection Settings - Review Cloudflare, AWS WAF, or your CDN's bot management. Make a deliberate decision about GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot access.
5. Kill Infinite Scroll and Lazy Loading for Content - Use paginated URLs with standard HTML links. Ensure high-value content is in the initial HTML response.
6. Keep Sitemaps Current - Maintain proper redirects, consistent URL patterns, and fix broken links.

Tools Mentioned

• Glimpse - Free tool to test how AI sees your website: glimpse.webperformancetools.com

Show Links

Sources Referenced in This Episode

AI Crawler Statistics:

• Vercel Blog - The Rise of the AI Crawler
• Cloudflare 2025 Year in Review
• Cloudflare - From Googlebot to GPTBot
• Search Engine Land - AI Optimization Guide

JavaScript Rendering:

• Prerender.io - Understanding Web Crawlers
• Search Engine Journal - Enterprise SEO Trends 2026

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

Google just made two massive moves in 48 hours, and together, they could reshape how AI interacts with commerce forever.

First: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that lets AI agents shop on your behalf. Discovery, checkout, payments, post-purchase, the whole journey, with one common language. Backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, Visa, Mastercard, and 20+ others.

Second: a multi-year deal with Apple. Gemini will power the next generation of Apple Intelligence, including Siri. That's Google's AI running on 2 billion Apple devices.

In this episode, I break down what UCP actually is, how it works, why the Apple deal matters, and what this means for merchants, developers, and anyone building for the agentic web.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 – The Anthony Joshua smile meme (and what it has to do with Google) 
• 02:59 – The landscape: AI agents, fragmentation, and the assistant wars 
• 06:36 – What is UCP? Universal Commerce Protocol explained 
• 11:04 – Who's backing UCP and what it enables today 
• 14:21 – The Apple-Gemini deal: what it means 
• 17:55 – Why Apple chose Google (and what happens to OpenAI) 
• 21:00 – Connecting the dots: Google's full strategy 
• 24:00 – What this means for merchants and developers 
• 26:30 – The bigger picture: who controls the agentic web? 
• 29:07 – Closing thoughts

LINKS

• UCP Documentation: https://ucp.dev
• UCP GitHub: https://github.com/Universal-Commerce-Protocol/ucp
• Google's UCP Announcement: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/
• Google-Apple Joint Statement: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/
• Shopify's UCP Deep-Dive: https://shopify.engineering/UCP

KEYWORDS/TAGS

Google, UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, AI agents, agentic commerce, e-commerce, Apple Intelligence, Gemini, Siri, AI shopping, MCP, Shopify, OpenAI, retail technology

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

For the last 20 years, digital marketing had one goal: drag a human across a "threshold", onto your website, so you could control the message and sell the product.

In 2026, the threshold is gone.

In this episode, Jono Alderson argues that we have entered the era of "Marketing to Machines." We are no longer optimizing for clicks; we are optimizing for the AI agents that intermediate the web.

We discuss why 90% of websites are now "Zombies" (technically online but functionally dead), why AI models treat marketing fluff like an allergen, and why the future of SEO isn't about meta tags, it's about "Upstream Engineering."

In this episode, we cover:

• [00:00] The Death of the Threshold: Why the era of "interrupting humans to get them to your site" is over.
• [02:24] The Surface-less Web: Why your brand is no longer just your domain, but an aggregation of everything said about you on the web (Reddit, YouTube, 2013 microsites).
• [06:52] The "Zombie Web" Theory: Why "commodity content" (like generic dentist blogs) is worthless to an LLM that has already memorized the facts.
• [11:05] The Machine Immune System: Why AI models view persuasive copywriting and sales fluff as "noise" or hallucinations to be filtered out.
• [16:40] The Incoherence Penalty: How machines spot the gap between your marketing claims ("We love customers") and your reality (bad Reddit reviews).
• [20:30] The llms.txt Trap: Why creating a separate "agent-friendly" version of your site won't work (and why machines won't trust it).
• [22:50] MCP (Model Context Protocol): Is this the future of how websites communicate?
• [28:14] Upstream Engineering: The new SEO. Why you need to optimize your return policy, logistics, and customer service instead of your title tags.
• [33:05] The Timeline: The best and worst-case scenarios for the web in the next 5 years.
• [38:39] How to Survive 2026: One final piece of advice for optimizers.

Resources:

• Connect with Jono: jonoalderson.com
• Follow Jono on LinkedIn

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

If 2025 felt like a constant, high-pitched ringing in your ears, you aren't alone. 

We call it "Digital Tinnitus", the exhausting result of two years of AI hype, "pivot or die" mandates, and confident mediocrity.

In this 2025 finale, let's shut off the noise.

We look back at why "Fatigue" was the word of the year, and why the crash of the hype cycle is actually the best news for serious professionals. Sani breaks down why Deep Work is the only antidote to the chaos and reveals the massive strategic shift coming to No Hacks in 2026.

The internet is changing. We are moving from an Attention Economy to a Utility Economy. And next year, we focus on one thing only: The Non-Human User.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Hangover: Why 2025 broke us, and why the silence of 2026 is a gift.
• Deep Work vs. Shallow Hacks: Why "Vibe Coding" is a trap and true craftsmanship is the only moat left.
• The 82:1 Prediction: Palo Alto Networks predicts 82 AI agents for every 1 human online. What does that mean for your website?
• The 2026 Mission: Announcing the sole focus for next year: Optimizing the Human Web for Non-Human Users.

Links:

• Connect with Sani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slobodanmanic/
• Subscribe to the Newsletter: https://nohacks.substack.com/

See you in 2026.

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

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

We dive into the phenomenon Joe calls the "Crocodile Mouth", the unsettling visual trend where brands maintain high search impressions but see clicks vanish, a direct result of zero-click searches. With the proliferation of platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and various generative engines, we discuss why the Google monopoly on the customer journey is over, and how users can now move from the awareness stage to purchasing a product without ever visiting a Google property. This episode is a wake-up call for marketers still clinging to outdated KPIs.

Joe introduces the new alphabet soup of optimization, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization). Crucially, we explore what this means for your analytics. If traffic and conversion rate are "lousy metrics", what should you measure? Joe reveals emerging metrics like Visibility within LLMs and competitive positioning. Most importantly, we agree that this "Wild West" era is finally killing all the outdated SEO hacks, forcing brands back to the core long-term strategy: writing useful content and focusing on the customer experience.

About the Guest

Joe Doveton is an experienced digital strategist, consultant, and speaker focused on the intersection of AI, search, and customer experience. With a background that includes working in advertising and a deep understanding of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Joe is now pioneering tools and strategies for the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) space. He is the founder of GEO Jet Pack, a platform designed to extract and visualize entities from content to help brands gain visibility in LLM responses - a critical new metric for the AI era.

What You'll Learn

• The difference between traditional SEO and the new acronyms: GEO, AEO, and LLMO.
• What the "Crocodile Mouth" is and why it confirms the end of the reliance on clicks.
• Why the old marketing KPIs, specifically web traffic and conversion rate—are now "lousy metrics" for measuring success.
• The new metrics emerging for the middle of the funnel, such as Visibility within LLMs and competitive position within prompt responses.
• Why the entire AI shift proves that long-term SEO success is still about being useful, interesting, and trustworthy (EEAT).
• Why the current AI era is killing all the old SEO hacks and discouraging tactics like content farming.
• How and why brands like Google are undermining their own profitable ad business by integrating AI Overviews.
• The vision of the Semantic Web and why the current structure of websites is inherently ill-suited for machine consumption.

Guest Contact:

• Joe Doveton's website
• Joe Doveton on LinkedIn

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

There is a new user on the internet. It doesn't have eyes, it reads code, and it has zero tolerance for bad UX.

In this episode, I sit down with Jes Scholz (SEO Futurist & Marketing Consultant) to discuss the "Great Correction" coming to our industry. We talk about why a decade of obsessing over short-term metrics has "corrupted" brand marketing, and why AI is finally forcing us to fix the fundamentals we’ve ignored for too long.

Jes explains why AI agents are abandoning websites with messy HTML, why "entity optimization" is the real key to future visibility, and why the popular tactic of spamming Reddit to influence LLMs is a ticking time bomb for your brand.

Topics Covered:

• Why short-term metrics broke modern marketing (and how to fix it).
• The "New User": How to optimize for AI agents that read code, not screens.
• Why "trash" code and interstitial popups are fatal for AI discovery.
• The "Reddit Spam" Rant: Why trying to hack AI will destroy your brand reputation. Shocker, right?
• The #1 skill AI cannot replace in 2026. Can you guess what it is?

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Intro 

00:02:07 - How Short-Term Metrics "Corrupted" Brand Marketing 

00:03:59 - Why Marketers Must Relearn to Work Without Perfect Metrics 

00:08:00 - AI Agents: Why They Fail on Bad UX & Messy HTML 

00:17:52 - Beyond the Website: Why Entity Optimization is Key for AI 

00:21:14 - Why Spamming Reddit to Influence AI Will Destroy Your Brand 

00:27:23 - Final Advice: The #1 Skill to Keep & The #1 Habit to Drop

About the Guest: Jes Scholz is a global digital strategist and SEO futurist. Formerly the International Digital Director for Ringier, she has led digital transformation across 140+ media and e-commerce brands in Europe, Africa, and Asia. She is now an independent consultant helping enterprises adapt to the AI era. 

Connect with Jes:

• Website: jesscholz.com
• Newsletter: SEO Brief on Substack
• LinkedIn: Jes Scholz

Connect with Sani:

• LinkedIn: Slobodan (Sani) Manić
• Website: nohackspod.com
• Newsletter: No Hacks on Substack

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