No Hacks with Slobodan Manic

Epizode

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  232: The Agentic Web Is Still A Single-Player Game 16.09.2026 18min

  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 ...
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  231: A Paywall Stopped ChatGPT From Reading The Article. It Confidently Summarised It For Me Anyway. 10.09.2026 23min

  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. Chap...
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  230: A Shoe Company And A Cookie Company Now Say The Exact Same Thing To AI Agents 12.08.2026 17min

  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 ...
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  229: Does llms.txt Work? What 137,000 Domains' Server Logs Show 05.08.2026 19min

  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. Chapter...
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  228: OpenAI Killed Its AI Browser 24.07.2026 17min

  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 wi...
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  227: ChatGPT Shopping Is Scraped Google Shopping with Malte Landwehr, CMO/CPO at Peec AI 17.06.2026 50min

  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 ...
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  226: Most Brands Are Chasing AI Visibility Backwards with Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive 03.06.2026 47min

  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 y...
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  225: Every Website Already Has An Agent Experience And Most Are Bad With Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann 20.05.2026 45min

  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....
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  224: Google's OS-Level AI Agent: Building Samantha Into Android 14.05.2026 21min

  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 si...
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  223: I Scored 33/100 on Cloudflare's New Agent-Readiness Scanner 22.04.2026 21min

  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 Opening00:4...
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  222: AI Visibility Is a Vanity Metric with Wil Reynolds 01.04.2026 52min

  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...
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  221: Machine-First Architecture: The Framework for Building Websites That Work for AI and Humans 25.03.2026 26min

  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...
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  220: Google Patented Replacing Your Landing Page With AI 11.03.2026 17min

  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, E...
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  219: Your Homepage Is Not Your Homepage Anymore with Rand Fishkin 04.03.2026 54min

  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 Gues...
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  218: Five Years of No Hacks - The Guest Host Takeover 18.02.2026 38min

  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...
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  217: The Browser Wars Are Back. This Time With AI Agents! 11.02.2026 29min

  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 c...
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  216: The Machine Layer - Building Trust in the Age of AI Search with Duane Forrester 04.02.2026 1h 3min

  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 Micros...
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  215: The Agent-Broken Web - Why AI Can't See Your Website 28.01.2026 29min

  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 Prob...
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  214: How Google Just Took Control of AI Commerce (UCP + Apple Deal Explained) 14.01.2026 29min

  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 Si...
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  213: Why Google & ChatGPT Are Ignoring Your "Dead" Content with Jono Alderson 07.01.2026 41min

  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 mod...