No Hacks with Slobodan Manic
AI is changing the internet, and nobody asked us if we wanted it changed. So every week I go and look at one thing it did: a website that started charging robots to read it, an assistant that got turned away at the door and answered anyway, a company that promised something a year ago and can't show a receipt. Then I tell you whether it's good, bad, or pointless, and what to do about it, whether you use the web or build it. Around fifteen minutes per episode, usually me on my own, with occasional guests. Hosted by Slobodan M...
235: Your Website Is Your Source Of Truth, Not Your Traffic Source with Amanda Natividad, Co-Author of Zero Click Marketing
I talked to Amanda Natividad, the person who named zero-click marketing, the week her book with Rand Fishkin came out, and wanted to ask one question: if nobody clicks any more, what is my website for? Her answer is that it matters more than ever, and in a different way(s). It is your source of truth, the record everything else points to. Along the way she buys clothes from a brand ChatGPT picked, signs up for a tool whose homepage she never saw, and explains why a how-did-you-hear-about-us survey credited TV chefs who never mentioned the brand.
<...234: OpenAI's Dots Are Cute. What They Do With Your Data Is Not.
OpenAI's new agents, dots, are fuzzy balls with eyes that you name and dress. They also sign into websites with your saved passwords and read the email you connect. I went through OpenAI's pages to see what the face is covering. What a dot reads can train the model unless you find the switch, and websites are told nothing. I would not give one my logins or my card.
Chapters
00:00 Sam Altman's pitch, and what a dot is01:42 Do you need one?02:36 Where the face came from04:33 Launch day, and why now07:05 Under the costume: your...233: Muse Is Why Meta Has No Business Building The Agentic Web
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI agent, Muse, needs to be discreet. The same month, some of the calls it made to businesses were placed by people in a call center. I went through what he told Joanna Stern and Alex Heath about Muse's privacy and security and sorted every claim by tense. What exists today, only Meta has checked. The protection from Meta itself is promised for later this year. My verdict: stay away from this. After the sign-off, the show moves to Saturday mornings.
Chapters
00:00 - Discreet AI, and calls made by people00:59 - What...232: The Agentic Web Is Still A Single-Player Game
A hundred and seventy-two companies have put their name to A2A, the standard for AI agents at different companies to find each other and talk. I took the web address the project lists next to each name and asked 135 of them the question the standard is built around. Four answered. The reason is not technical: MCP needs one person to say yes, A2A needs two organisations.
Chapters
00:00 - AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and four answers00:54 - What I was actually sold, and what I went looking for01:31 - What counts as another party, and...231: A Paywall Stopped ChatGPT From Reading The Article. It Confidently Summarised It For Me Anyway.
A magazine put a paywall in front of its journalism to stop AI reading it. I tested what that paywall actually checks. It reads one line of your request, the name you type in yourself, and compares it against a list. Say who you are and you get a bill. Make something up and you walk straight in. Then I asked two assistants to read the article anyway. Both got charged, both answered, and neither had read a word of it. It keeps going after the sign-off, about where this podcast is headed.
Chapters
230: A Shoe Company And A Cookie Company Now Say The Exact Same Thing To AI Agents
On August 5 Shopify switched on a second way into every store on its platform, built for AI agents instead of people. Nothing to install, no merchant asked. I opened three unrelated stores, Allbirds, Brooklinen and Partake Foods, and asked each what it could do for a machine. All three answered with the same roughly 800 words, identical character for character, and no merchant wrote a syllable of it. What those words say, and what it costs a brand when the visitor has no eyes.
Chapters
00:40 Thirty years of every shop trying to sound different02:13 What Shopify switched...229: Does llms.txt Work? What 137,000 Domains' Server Logs Show
Most of what's sold as AI search optimization has never been tested by the people selling it, and this episode is me checking the biggest one against server logs. Ahrefs looked at 137,000 domains in June: 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests in May, and the biggest readers of the rest were SEO audit tools. I also lay out the line I use to sort every pitch: a hack tries to influence what the machine says about you, architecture changes what a machine can read and do on your website.
Chapters
00:00 The AI...
228: OpenAI Killed Its AI Browser
I came back from a month off the grid to find OpenAI had killed Atlas, its most glamorously launched product, nine months after the keynote. It barely matters, though. The automated, non-human visitor Atlas was sending to your website is still coming, through whatever shell comes next. Build for the visitor, not the browser.
Timestamps
00:00 - Back from break, and the bad news01:17 - Atlas: the most hyped browser ever launched02:27 - Watching it work is a demo, not a workflow03:29 - Killed with no keynote: the browser was never the product04:35 - The visitor isn't...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...
226: Most Brands Are Chasing AI Visibility Backwards with Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive
This week I welcome Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive, to the podcast, to ask the question she fires back at every client who walks in wanting to "win at AI visibility." Her answer flips the whole project: fix what the models get wrong about you before you chase the category terms. We got into her research on why lower-authority websites earn more citations, why LLMs recommend a brand only 2.3% of the time, and the gap nobody is tooling for: getting an agent to actually use your website, not find it.
About the Guest<...
225: Every Website Already Has An Agent Experience And Most Are Bad With Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann
The user-agent string in the HTTP header has been there since the 1990s. The web was built with software navigating it on someone's behalf. For thirty years that someone was a human. That changes now. Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, was one of the first to take seriously what it means when the "user" navigating the web is an AI agent.
He published the foundational essay on Agent Experience in January 2025, pivoted his entire company around it, and recently shipped netlify.ai as a separate entry point built for agents. We cover the four pillars o...
224: Google's OS-Level AI Agent: Building Samantha Into Android
We are significantly closer to movie Her than we were just 6 months ago.
Most coverage reads Google's last six months as a string of independent product updates. They aren't. Read together, they're the whole agentic-web stack closing one component at a time. Tuesday's Gemini Intelligence on Android announcement named the keystone - the first OS-level web-agent integration any company has built. Chrome auto-browse lands on Pixel 10 and Galaxy S26 in late June.
This episode walks through the six-month assembly (Chrome auto-browse, AppFunctions, AI Mode in Chrome, "Ask Google", web.dev agent-friendly guidance, Gemma 4 + Gemini Nano 4...
223: I Scored 33/100 on Cloudflare's New Agent-Readiness Scanner
I ran the Cloudflare Agent Readiness scanner on nohacks.co, got 33 out of 100, and felt insulted. One toggle later the score was 67. That gap is where this episode starts. My case: the web is splitting into two economies. A retailer-friendly agentic web where AI-referred traffic now converts 42 percent better than human traffic. And a page-view-driven publisher web losing 20 to 90 percent of its Google traffic in a year. This split is structural, not a rebalancing.
Chapters:
00:00 Opening00:41 The 33, then 67 score on nohacks.co02:46 The thesis: the web is becoming two webs03:55 Cloudflare Agents Week: 28 shipments in five...222: AI Visibility Is a Vanity Metric with Wil Reynolds
Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, shares how losing 80% of organic traffic actually revealed that his team had been tracking the wrong metrics for years. We get into why AI visibility is a vanity metric, how 44% of LLM users include brand names in their prompts, the real security risks of wrong phone numbers in AI answers, and why trust (not visibility) is the only moat that matters.
Chapters
00:00 - 80% traffic drop, pipeline went up06:43 - The pressure of experimental channels with real budgets08:28 - AI visibility is a vanity metric13:49 - People are tracking...221: Machine-First Architecture: The Framework for Building Websites That Work for AI and Humans
In 2009, Luke Wroblewski's "mobile first" changed how every website gets built. Start with the harder constraint, and the rest gets better. Now the harder constraint is not a small screen. It's no screen at all. Sani introduces Machine First Architecture, a four-pillar framework covering everything from how you define your business to how machines interact with your website. Identity, structure, content, interaction. In that order.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction: The Mobile First Parallel01:24 - Why Machine First Follows the Same Pattern05:09 - Pillar 1: Identity08:05 - Pillar 2: Structure12:34 - Pillar 3: Content15:20 - Pillar 4: Interaction19:29 - Why...220: Google Patented Replacing Your Landing Page With AI
Google was granted patent US 12536233B1 in January 2026, describing a system that scores your landing page and, if it falls below a quality threshold, replaces it with an AI-generated version personalized to each searcher. This episode breaks down how the patent works, how the industry reacted, and what website owners should do to prepare.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction01:24 - How the Patent Works, Step by Step04:26 - How the Industry Reacted06:46 - What This Actually Means07:57 - Ads First, Everything Else Later08:58 - Google's Data Advantage10:13 - Your Website Is Becoming a Warehouse11:10 - The...219: Your Homepage Is Not Your Homepage Anymore with Rand Fishkin
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...
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 Hacks01:33 - Kelly Wortham: Why the shift to the agentic web?05:17 - Kelly Wortham: The secret to being a great podcast host08:57 - Iqbal Ali: Why Web MCP is a big...217: The Browser Wars Are Back. This Time With AI Agents!
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
The playbook hasn't changed - Bundling, free products, proprietary lock-in, and distribution deals decided...216: The Machine Layer - Building Trust in the Age of AI Search with Duane Forrester
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 strategySenior Product Manager at Microsoft - built Bing Webmaster ToolsCo-launched Schema.org structured data standardLeadership roles at Bruce Clay Inc...215: The Agent-Broken Web - Why AI Can't See Your Website
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 losing00:01:43 - The Scale of the Problem: AI crawler traffic explosion00:05:19...214: How Google Just Took Control of AI Commerce (UCP + Apple Deal Explained)
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...
213: Why Google & ChatGPT Are Ignoring Your "Dead" Content with Jono Alderson
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...
212: Goodbye 2025 - Digital Tinnitus and the Non-Human Future
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 i...
211: Why AI is Killing Your Clicks: The New Metrics for a Zero-Click World with Joe Doveton
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...
210: AI Agents Are Here (And They Hate Your Website) with Jes Scholz
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 re...
209: The Zero-Effort Lie - How AI Is Accelerating the Death of the Internet
The promise is irresistible: generate anything you want, instantly, with zero effort. We’ve been told that AI is the great democratizer, but in this episode, we argue it’s actually the most catastrophic lie of the digital age.
The truth is, this endless supply of cheap, fast content is fundamentally destroying value and driving the collapse of the internet as we know it. We're not seeing liberation; we're seeing an intellectual lazy river that's turning the web into a toxic digital swamp.
In this episode, we break down the three deadly flaws of the zero...
208: How AI Is Forcing Brands to Be More Human with Brent Csutoras
As the world rushes to adopt AI, what if the most future-proof skill isn't mastering the machine, but mastering human connection? In this episode, Sani sits down with Brent Csutoras, a true OG of the internet who has been a core member of the Reddit community since 2006.
Brent argues that the unfiltered, honest, and often chaotic conversations happening on Reddit, a platform he calls "the real world online", provide the ultimate blueprint for the future of brand building. So many brands fail on Reddit because they treat it like a traditional advertising channel, only to be torn...
207: The Empathy Advantage - Bryan Eisenberg on Why Stories, Not Tools, Will Win in the Age of AI
What do you do when you feel like you've swallowed an elephant? For Bryan Eisenberg, a pioneer of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), that feeling was both a personal crisis and the inspiration for his new book.
In this deep and insightful conversation, Bryan takes us on a journey through his 30-year career, from the earliest days of the internet to the current age of AI. He reveals the one-word secret that has guided his success with brands like Google and Disney: Empathy.
Bryan explains why messaging will always be more powerful than any tool, why "...
206: The Vibe Coding Trap and What to Do Instead
Welcome to No Hacks, the podcast that cuts through the noise to reveal the truth about the future of work and the impact of AI. In this episode, we're taking a look into the phenomenon of "vibe coding" – the idea that you can simply describe an app to an AI and have it magically built.
Is Vibe Coding the shortcut to tech success, or just another false promise?
Sani argues that the hype around pure vibe coding mirrors the deceptive playbook of dropshipping gurus: selling a dream that ultimately profits the pl...
205: AI, Search, and the Jobs of Tomorrow with Olga Andrienko
The world of work is changing faster than ever, and AI is leading the charge. What does this mean for industries like SEO, marketing, and content? And more importantly, what does it mean for your career?
In this episode of No Hacks, I’m joined by Olga Andrienko, a marketing leader who transitioned from VP of Brand Marketing into AI operations. Her journey is the perfect case study for how professionals can adapt when the ground shifts under their feet.
We start with Olga’s “lightning bolt moment” at an AI course that showed h...
204: #ChatGate - Your ChatGPT Conversation Could Be Indexed and Anyone Could Read Them
In this emergency solo episode I walk you through #ChatGate, the discovery that thousands of “shared” ChatGPT conversations are now fully searchable on Google. We de-mystify the site: operator, trace the unusual timeline that puts OpenAI, Google Cloud and Microsoft on a collision course, and explain why some marketers cheer while privacy advocates panic.
Most importantly, you’ll learn how to check whether your chats are exposed and what to do next.
Key Takeaways
Shared ChatGPT links are public if you tick “Enable search indexing.”A sitemap discovered in late 2024 helps Google crawl those...203: No Juniors, No Google, No Chill: Survival Tips for the AI Shake-Up with Erin Weigel and Lukas Vermeer
What does life look like when search engines, junior tech jobs, and even human therapists start losing ground to generative AI? In this lightning-charged round-table, host Sani sits down with experimentation legends Erin Weigel and Lukas Vermeer to test-drive a future that’s already creeping into the present.
In this episode you’ll hear:
“RIP Google SERPs?”. Lukas explains why he’s stopped opening SERPs and lets ChatGPT do the leg-work instead, and what that means for SEO as a profession. Therapy by chatbot. A frank debate on th...202: Behavioral Design Secrets from YouTube, Google, and Duolingo with Katie Dove
Why don’t users do what they say they’ll do? Why does great UX still fail sometimes? And what do the world’s top companies know about behavior that most of us miss?
In this episode, Sani sits down with Katie Dove, behavioral designer at Irrational Labs, to break down the Three B Framework, a powerful behavioral design tool used by teams at Google, YouTube, and Duolingo. They unpack how context shapes decisions, why psychological friction is often invisible, and what it really takes to drive engagement through design.
If you wo...
201: Know Your Customer, Grow Your Brand: Email Marketing Masterclass with Omar Lovert
What separates email campaigns that convert from those that get ignored? It all comes down to understanding your customers, deeply.
In this episode, Sani welcomes back Omar Lovert for a masterclass on customer-centric email marketing. Together, they unpack why AI can’t replace real customer insight, how to use RFM segmentation to identify your most valuable users, and the frameworks that top-performing brands use to map the customer journey and boost lifetime value.
From tactical tips on optimizing welcome flows to the underrated power of post-purchase emails, this is your blueprint for building hu...
200: Magician vs. Conductor: How to Build (and Fix) Products with AI in 2025
Heads-up: I use some salty language. Nothing hateful, just passionate about this topic. Skip if that’s not your vibe.
It’s 2 AM, your side-project just went viral, and the signup flow is on fire. Do you keep “vibe-coding” blind prompts, or step up as the conductor who actually knows the score? In this first-ever solo episode, I unpack why “anyone can code with AI” is 2025’s biggest myth and show you how to turn large language models into the ultimate co-pilot instead of a ticking time-bomb.
Key Takeaways
Illusions break at scale. Vibe-coding...199: Data Minimalism, Experimentation, and Ethical AI with Matt Gershoff
In this episode, Sani sits down with Matt Gershoff, CEO and Co-founder of Conductrics, to talk about how being intentional, not just fast, leads to better experimentation, better customer relationships, and better outcomes.
Matt shares the wild story of how a machine learning summer school (and donkeys in pajamas!) helped spark Conductrics. They unpack why "just in case" data collection is broken, why data minimalism matters now more than ever, and how companies should rethink experimentation in the AI age.
What You'll Hear
[00:00...
198: Google Doesn’t Need Your Blog Posts Anymore, Here’s What to Do Instead with Jono Alderson
Is content marketing finally dead? In this no-BS conversation, I’m joined by digital strategist Jono Alderson to unpack the new reality of SEO, content, and how Google’s evolution is leaving traditional marketing behind.
Jono explains why so much content is now obsolete, how search is changing with AI, and why the only real path forward is to be more human, more trustworthy, and more brand-driven than ever before.
🔥 What We Talk About:
00:00 – Is content marketing dead? Jono kicks off with a bang.
00:46 – “Solved query...
197: Is the Internet Dead? The Rise of Bot-to-Bot Web & the Decline of Human Content with Anne Berlin
In this episode of No Hacks, host Sani is joined by technical SEO strategist Anne Berlin to explore one of the most disturbing and fascinating topics on the web today: the Dead Internet Theory. Is most of what we see online actually created by bots, for bots? What happens when the web becomes a wasteland of AI-generated slop and abandoned digital ruins? Anne draws on her extensive experience analyzing crawl logs, server stats, and digital infrastructure to reveal how bot traffic is outpacing real users, and what that means for the future of human-centric content.
If you’ve...
196: Growing Smarter, Not Louder: The 1-1-1 Framework for Early-Stage Startups with Ward van Gasteren
Growth doesn’t have to mean being everywhere at once or chasing every shiny new tactic.
In this episode of No Hacks, I talk with Ward van Gasteren — one of Europe’s first growth hackers — about how to grow smarter, not louder. Ward shares his go-to method for helping early-stage startups: the 1-1-1 Framework — one audience, one channel, one message.
We dig into how founders and product teams can stop spreading themselves too thin, avoid early-stage overwhelm, and finally find traction through focus. Ward explains the difference between growth and traditional marketing, how to approach e...
