Masters of Search

Julian Redlich spent around six years at Booking.com, ending as Head of SEO, while the discipline there grew to roughly forty people across development, design, copy, analytics and SEO. He now sits on the other side of the table as an investor at Permira, looking at organic growth across a portfolio that includes mobile.de, Kleinanzeigen.de, Squarespace, Zendesk and Flixbus.

That combination is rare. Dozens of companies cross his desk every year, which means he sees patterns across business models most operators only ever see one of.

## My 8 biggest takeaways from our conversation:

1. The number one thing that...

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.

## My biggest takeaways from this episode:

1) Click-based attribution massively undercounts AI search. In a study from two Peec AI clients, click-based attribution credited AI search with 0.9% of leads. When they simply asked people "how did you find us?", it was 9%. That is 10x. When there is no link to click, people just...

Anita Kirkovska leads Growth and Marketing at Vellum, a YC-backed AI startup. She came up through data science before moving into marketing, which means she approaches organic growth, content, and AI tooling from a different angle than most.

In the last few months she's rebuilt Vellum's website off Webflow into a custom Next.js stack, shipped an AI-native GEO content pipeline, and turned off more SaaS tools than she's added.

## My 7 biggest takeaways from our conversation:

1. It's not about AI. It's about you.

Her line: if you use AI you can be better or worse at your job,...

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...