Uncensored truth about black hat SEO & AEO | Lars Lofgren, Fractional VP of Marketing

Uncensored truth about black hat SEO & AEO | Lars Lofgren, Fractional VP of Marketing

Welcome to what might be our most unusual episode yet. My guest today is Lars Lofgren, a Fractional VP of Marketing who's worked with companies like Perplexity and Automattic and has generated over $20 million in affiliate revenue across his career. Lars has seen every era of SEO from the inside: the link building gold rush, the Helpful Content Update bloodbath, and now what he calls a new Wild West where Google seems to have turned off its spam filters. Today we're doing something different: a true crime-style deep dive into the dark side of search: Black hat SEO, parasite schemes, Reddit manipulation, and how Google's algorithm is being exploited right now in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Lars isn't here to teach you how to break the rules, but as he puts it: it takes a thief to catch a thief. MY 6 BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS 1. Google changed its algorithm at the end of 2022, and most old playbooks no longer work. Lars calls it the biggest shift he has seen in his career. The helpful content update is now a permanent part of the algorithm, ready to hurt your site if you cross the line. 2. Link building is no longer the shortcut. He built huge numbers of high quality links in 2023 to save sites that were dropping, and it did nothing. You can no longer go from zero to number one with links alone. 3. The new way to win, is building your entity across platforms. Build your presence on YouTube, Reddit, or LinkedIn first. Then come back to Google, and in his experience you can break many SEO rules and still rank. Note the word he uses: entity, not brand. 4. He calls Reddit the most powerful tool for manipulation he has ever seen. Five upvotes in a decent subreddit can put you on page one of Google for terms worth six or seven figures. Win on Reddit, and you win on Google, every LLM, and Reddit itself at the same time. 5. There is a hidden way to use Reddit that he says is wide open and widely used. Old anonymous accounts. An agency watching product threads. Soft comments with no links and no clear traces. A few fake upvotes to start the momentum. Sometimes they even post the question and answer it with a second account. His advice: if a product ranks on Google through Reddit, assume someone put it there. 6. Every black hat trick from 2008 is back. Expired domains pointed at money pages. The new version: find domains with few links but a strong Google Business Profile full of reviews. That authority is hidden from normal link tools and feeds your entity. LET'S CONNECT Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/] Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/] Lars on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larslofgren/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/larslofgren/]

Peec AI Investor: They will win against Profound & AirOps | Christoph Klink, General Partner @ Antler

I usually talk to the people building and executing search strategies. Today we're flipping the lens. My guest is Dr. Christoph Klink, General Partner at Antler, where he leads investments across Continental Europe. Antler is the world's leading inception-stage investor. They've made over 100 investments out of Berlin since 2021, among others Peec AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI search optimization space, which went from inception to $29 million raised and 50+ employees in just over a year. MY 8 BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE: 1. The inception stage exists because of a matching problem, not a capital shortage. Lots of great founders have no rich aunt, and lots of rich aunts have no great founder niece or nephew. Most early-stage VC won't touch a company before it has a product, revenue, or at least a complete founding team. Antler bets on people before any of those things exist. 2. At inception stage, the bet is 80%+ on the founders. The product will change, the problem framing will change, and the market will surprise you. The one thing that can't be substituted is the team's quality and drive. Everything else is downstream of that. 3. Peec AI started in summer 2024, when AI search optimization didn't have a name yet. The founding team went through multiple problems before landing on it, threw away fast, and moved. The first product wasn't loved by everyone, but enough people clearly needed an answer to "how am I trending across AI models?" to make the signal real. 4. AI search is fundamentally harder to optimize for than classic SEO, and that's the business opportunity. In traditional search, the rules are known, the keywords are finite, and Google is a single platform you can measure against. In AI search, there are multiple models, each behaving differently, each changing frequently, and no native cross-model visibility layer. Marketers need a meta-level view that doesn't yet exist natively anywhere. 5. Peec AI's growth is almost exclusively inbound. The product creates its own pull because the question it answers, "how visible are we across AI models and why?", is one every marketing team has right now with no good existing answer. 6. The fear that should keep European founders up at night is not being out-raised. It's being out-executed. Anton from Lovable said it directly: he's not afraid of competitors raising more money, only of competitors shipping faster. The European founders building category-defining companies right now have internalized this. They post ARR milestones, not funding announcements. 7. Until 2020, only 27% of European unicorn founders had a technical background. Among European companies founded after 2020 that have already crossed unicorn valuation, over 90% of founders do. The nature of who builds in Europe has changed faster than most people realize. 8. The conventional wisdom is that the most-funded company in a market wins. In AI search, funding is a lagging indicator of execution, not a predictor of it. The market is still fragmenting, consolidation is coming, but the winner won't be whoever raised the largest Series A. It will be whoever keeps figuring it out fastest as the underlying models and user behaviors keep shifting. LET'S CONNECT Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophklink/ Antler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/antlerglobal/

Listicles, Chunking, Google's GEO guide, llms.txt, BrightonSEO & OMR Recap | #MonthlyLandwehr

Every month I meet with Malte to take all the news, new research and interesting developments in SEO & AI Search to get his perspective on them. Malte Landwehr is CPO & CMO at Peec AI, one of the leading AI search analytics platforms, and one of the brightest minds in the field. MY 8 BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE: 1) Being mentioned anywhere in the top 10 of a third-party listicle gives a brand a 6 to 16 percentage point visibility boost in LLM answers. Landing at position one pushes that to 13 to 17 percentage points, and also improves average ranking position inside the answer. The goal is top 10 minimum, position one if you actually want to dominate. 2) The impact of listicles on LLM visibility is much larger in new or niche markets than in mature ones. In a mature market the LLM already has strong model knowledge, so grounding is mostly confirmatory. In a new space the model has little or nothing, and the grounding content is the primary data source. 3) You do not need to chunk your whole article for AI visibility. One citation chunk is enough: a 50-word, self-contained paragraph near the top of the page, written so that if an LLM pulled it out of context it would still carry full meaning. Name the entities, include the trust signals, make it eatable in isolation. 4) When Google warns you not to do something, it is usually because that thing works extremely well. Google warned about link buying when buying links was maximally effective. Google warned about chunking now. That should tell you something. 5) A useful pre-measurement framework: before touching analytics or roadmaps, walk through this sequence. Is there demand? Is the space winnable for you? Do you have indexed content? Do you have any visibility? Are you differentiated? Do you have social proof and positive brand sentiment? Only when every answer is yes do you start optimising. Whatever the first "no" is, that is your highest-leverage task right now. 6) LLMs.txt is not a discoverability tool and it does not improve visibility in AI search. It is an agent-readiness tool: it tells autonomous agents how to use your website, where to find your API, and how to access your MCP server. Google including it in Lighthouse confirms this framing, because Lighthouse is an accessibility tool, not an SEO tool. 7) Pretty Little Things renamed product category pages from generic labels like "jeans" to intent-driven labels like "airport outfits" and sold out every item in those categories. The shift to intent-based content architecture is not just an SEO play; it converts. 8) Thought experiment: if your next 1 million customers never visit your website, what does that force you to change about your content, your brand, and your distribution? Work backwards from that answer and you end up with a strategy that also happens to be exactly right for AI visibility. LET'S CONNECT Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/] Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/] Malte on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/landwehr/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/landwehr/] Peec AI on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/peec-ai/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/peec-ai/]

Why the website is dying | James Ward, Head of Digital Experience @ Personio

The website used to be the shop window. Now buyers do half their research inside an LLM before they ever land on it, and the role of the site itself is starting to shift. My guest today is James Ward, Head of Digital Experience at Personio, one of Europe's fastest-growing HR tech companies, where he leads web strategy, SEO, content and CRO across multiple international markets. Before Personio he spent years at Salesforce and ADP, so he's seen this shift play out from inside both enterprise giants and a fast-moving scale-up. We dug into what happens when your buyers already know everything about you before they hit your site, why your own Wikipedia page might be quietly undermining your positioning, and whether websites are heading toward becoming databases for LLM front ends. WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE * Why Personio's Wikipedia page was quietly miscommunicating their ICP to LLMs, and how a single line of off-site content can undo your entire positioning strategy * The reverse-prompting exercise every marketing leader should block out half a day for before buying any AEO tooling * Why "dark AI traffic" is forcing a rethink of the website itself, from curated navigation paths toward prompt-based, deeply personalized experiences * The shift from technical SEO hacks to brand narrative and reputation management as the real AEO lever * Why Reddit hype has already peaked, and where first-party content and third-party listicles now sit in the AI visibility stack * How AI is turning specialists back into T-shaped marketers, and why James thinks everyone (yes, even content writers) should be building with Claude Code or Lovable * Why traffic is becoming a vanity metric at Personio, and what they measure instead in an era where LLM citations, branded organic and direct all blur together * Whether the future of B2B SaaS buying happens natively inside ChatGPT, and what that means for the role of your website ▶ Let's connect! 🔗 Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswarddigital/ Personio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/personio/

Webflow AI Search Playbook | Vivian Hoang, AEO & SEO Lead @ Webflow

AI search is already driving nearly 10% of Webflow's signups. A key person behind that number is Vivian Hoang, AEO & SEO Lead at Webflow. In this episode, we'll dig into how Webflow's SEO function has evolved over the years, how Vivian started thinking about answer engine optimization before most people even had a name for it, what's actually working for them in AI search, and how she's using tools like AirOps to scale content without sacrificing quality. I'm really excited about this one because Vivian isn't speaking about theory here. She's already built the playbook and has the numbers to back it up. WHAT WE COVERED IN THIS EPISODE * ~10% of Webflow's signups now come from AI search, a real and measurable number that proves AEO is a growth channel worth investing in * AEO builds directly on a strong SEO foundation; don't abandon SEO, optimize both in parallel * If you create genuinely authoritative, useful content, you're already doing the right thing for both Google and LLMs * Webflow shifted from top-of-funnel to mid/bottom-funnel content because conversion rates were higher and ToFU traffic was declining with AI Overviews * Audit what you already have before creating anything new, refresh high-potential pages, and build from there * You can't optimize what you don't measure: identify the prompts your audience uses, track your LLM citations, and find your way into the sources LLMs trust in your category * AEO is a team sport: get leadership bought in with data, educate your marketing team, and run small experiments with visible results before scaling ▶ Let's connect! 🔗 Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ Vivian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivianhoang/ Webflow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/webflow-inc-/