Talia Wolf: To the untrained eye, Sani and I should be enemies. We should be taking digs at each other on LinkedIn and calling each other out. The reason is I talk a lot about optimising for humans, understanding emotions and decision-making, and Sani talks about optimising for machines, actually making websites machines first for AI and AI agents. So, on the surface, sounds like we're optimising for different things, right? So, today in our interview, here's what I hope to answer. Who should we care about more? The humans making the decisions or the machines shaping them? Welcome back to another Heart Before Cart episode.

Today, I'm joined by Slobodan Manić. Sani is the host of the No Hacks podcast. I have been following for five years now. He is one of the trailblazers with anything to do with AI, agentic web, agents, and he has been constantly talking about the importance of optimising for machines first. Sani is one of the first people who has helped shape how people think about optimisation and he really clearly sees what everyone should be doing right now in order to drive more conversions and actually get the results that they need. This podcast is all about connecting with humans, creating emotional resonance and understanding how people make decisions. Sani's work forces us to ask what happens when the path to those decisions is no longer fully human.

All right, tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, I would say I'm a podcast host and just a curious person. That's the number one thing. And then everything else behind it. A web developer, website optimisation specialist, technical SEO specialist, all that stuff. I'm just curious about why things don't work as well as they should and how we can make them work as well as they should, especially online.

Talia Wolf: I love that because that is literally the mind of an optimiser, right? Someone who always wants to optimise everything. So tell us when you say optimise a website or optimise for AI, what does that actually mean in practice?

Slobodan Manić: It means optimising for humans that are going to use AI to make decisions in some steps of their decision process. So basically it means making the content formatted and designed in a way that AI can consume it, that the machines and the machine systems can consume it and then pass it on to the human that is going to be making the final decision. So it's not about just writing code and not writing content. It's not about not targeting emotions. You have to, but you have to start by knowing what you want to do and knowing how to transfer that knowledge to a machine. Because even with Google with AI mode, that's AI answering and telling the human what to do.

It's not a list of answers that we had before like 10 results, you click the results, you go compare them yourself, take notes and lose half a day on picking running shoes, which is not something I've done many times in the past. Now we can just ask it and my favourite for this is Google AI mode. You can just say, "Hey, March 2026, what are the best running shoes for this and this and this and this type of run?" And then it will pull the YouTube reviews. It will pull all the blogs. It will do Google searches for you and then summarise that for you. So, your content that you're putting on your website, YouTube, wherever, needs to be in a way that the machine can easily consume and understand it and pass it on to the human.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. I love that because obviously you're mentioning the human, which you know I'm all about.

Slobodan Manić: Absolutely. And I like the synergy of creating something for machines that will help humans. And I think that is kind of the key.

Talia Wolf: I guess the question is, what's new? What's happened in the last few years? AI has obviously come but what has made you... because you have been doing so many incredible things over the years other than of course the No Hacks podcast which I listen to all the time. What shifted for you? What was the moment where you're like, "Okay, I need to shift everything that I'm doing right now, my daily job, to doing this." What was the catalyst? What happened? And why do you think it matters now more than ever?

Slobodan Manić: One of the first episodes on the podcast, and this is 2021, was the intersections of technical SEO and CRO. And I always believed that technical SEO was doing CRO for Googlebot. You had to optimise your website in a way that Googlebot can understand it, consume it the same way a human user would. Now, obviously, we've gone way above just pleasing the Googlebot. There are all these agents and LLMs and whatnot. What really pushed me is when I saw that all these big AI companies are trying to get into a browser and they're trying to control the browser and have an agent that controls the browser. Because that means that the user that lands on your website is no longer 100% human.

There's going to be an LLM. There's going to be an AI that influences their decision. Maybe they're just comparing products in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Google AI mode. Maybe they're doing more. Maybe they're using a browser that extracts the information from the page as they're reading it. And then the way your copy is written is not going to be consumed the same way. What really pushed me down this path is when I saw that every single major company wants to be inside the browser because that's where the attention is. I realised that the way we behave online is never going to be the same and pretending it's the same is just foolish.

Talia Wolf: Okay. But obviously, you know, I'm not an AI naysayer, but my feeling is that we are advanced users, right? The people that we talk about when we talk about AI agents and we talk about no one ever going to your website anymore. I always take a few step backs and think, okay, you and I and the people around us are very involved in marketing and AI and building stuff, but my dad, 67-year-old business owner, is not using ChatGPT. He's not using Gemini. He's not close to using agents anytime soon. So I understand the importance but is it really that in a year from now no one will ever visit your website and everyone in the world will be using agents? What is the real risk here, Sani?

Slobodan Manić: I'll get back to that. Will there be humans? There will always be humans. Yes.

Talia Wolf: But go back to my dad. He will never use...

Slobodan Manić: We're in a similar position. It's not that my dad is never going to use it. It's just that when I go out into the real world and I log off LinkedIn, where all the tech bros are talking about comment prompts, when I log off LinkedIn and I see the real world around me, yes, people are kind of asking AI questions. Of course there's AI mode, that's a whole thing. And sometimes you don't even know you're in AI mode. But the vast majority of people, even according to SparkToro's data, are not all in with AI agents now. And I get the hype. I'm just wondering, are we talking about this as if it's already happened when it hasn't?

Talia Wolf: Right. There is like a middle piece there.

Slobodan Manić: It's happening. It hasn't happened. It will continue to happen. What I will say is that it's a behavioural shift. 15 years ago we would say the same thing about our parents. They would never use a smartphone and then they all did. They would never buy online and then they started. During the pandemic they started. So things happen and then the world is just different. Tim Cook will walk onto a stage and say, "From now on, every interaction with your phone will be guided by Apple Intelligence." And there will be an agent telling you what to do. That's how it will happen. It's not going to be people in their 70s, 80s learning about AI agents. It's going to be the devices that they already use that now have an AI agent making decisions, telling them what to do, helping them do things. It's going to be about convenience, and that's how they'll get the majority of people to start using this technology. Not building it. They're not going to be building AI agents. That's ridiculous. Even young people should not be building AI agents in those numbers. But it's going to be a fundamental behavioural change where interacting with the internet is going to be different. I mean, Google just last week, I think they announced they have a Gemini agent that can control your apps on your Android phone and they'll be pushing that.

So, you don't have to go on Instagram and scroll. You can just say, "Hey, go on Instagram and find the top five posts that are interesting today." And it will go in the background on a virtual machine and report back and say these are the five or whatever else.

Talia Wolf: Okay. Pushback. People use Instagram for doom scrolling. When you are overwhelmed and exhausted and tired, emotion comes in and instead of opening a book and reading it or just having a glass of wine with your partner, a lot of people find themselves doom scrolling till 3:00 a.m. So, I get people saying, "Find the top five posts for me." But most of content on Instagram is just me kind of scrolling and send this to my friend. So I understand that technology is being built for it. I'm just saying that the human behaviour isn't there yet. I'm not saying my dad won't use it. My dad will absolutely use it. Again, AI mode, most of the time people don't even know they're in AI mode. So, it's kind of like what you were saying before where it would just be built into Apple devices so you'll get used to doing it. But what you just described is not human behaviour. That's engineers.

Slobodan Manić: What were people doing before doom scrolling?

Talia Wolf: Well, they were reading shampoo bottles.

Slobodan Manić: Watching reruns of Friends and god knows what. Doing stuff with their time, which is escape from reality, whatever it is. Because doom scrolling is just mostly escape from reality. And don't set me on fire for saying this. I really think it's just a useless activity. There will be something else. This might kill doom scrolling and we get an even worse thing. Whatever that is. It's not the need to doom scroll. It's the need to do something and get that hit that doom scrolling gives you.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. But that happens by you trying to escape. Like you could say, give me the top five cat videos, the funniest cat videos that happened today.

Slobodan Manić: And this is not just Instagram. Obviously, this is about any app in the world.

Talia Wolf: Okay. So, I guess my question is what is the risk? If I am now a marketer, I need to optimise. I've got so many things on my plate, Sani. I have to optimise my campaigns. I have to bring in leads, demo requests. I have to get more sales. What is the risk of not preparing my website for machines, for AI, at this point?

Slobodan Manić: First, I'll go back to the question you asked earlier. Will this mean humans will not be browsing? And I'll just go back to something that Rand Fishkin, a mutual friend, told us on my podcast. When mobile was introduced, it just spiked. The percentage of mobile users spiked. It went up. Now it's like 65, 66%. The total number of desktop users stayed the same. It never went down. This wasn't a replacement for desktop users. It was a new lane that opened up and just things started happening there. I think it's going to be the same way with machines browsing, agents browsing, and humans browsing. Humans are not going away. There will always be, and if we're being honest, a lot of websites don't need to exist, but I'm going to just whisper that. They just don't deserve any traffic and all that. But there will be humans browsing websites. The risk is, if, let's say, by mistake, Cloudflare is blocking access to AI crawlers because by default they do, unless you disable that, you're invisible. You don't even know you're failing. You're not in a forest screaming and nobody's hearing it in that specific channel. Obviously, there's social, there's email, there's direct, there's brand. Yes, that all happens. But we're talking about this specific channel. The risk is that literally silent failure is what happens.

Talia Wolf: It's interesting because on a client call yesterday, we were talking about optimising everywhere, which is what I talk about a lot now. And the fact that yes, we are optimising their website, but the thing that we have to put even more emphasis now on is optimising off the website. So when someone goes into ChatGPT or Gemini or AI mode and they're searching for a certain product, the AI is pulling from all over the web. It's not just pulling from your website. Actually, it's more often pulling from Reddit, from YouTube, from Discord, from LinkedIn. Someone posted something on G2 Crowd 5 years ago and now it's pulling that information. So on one hand I understand the importance, obviously as someone who optimises for conversions and I think about websites all the time. I understand the importance of optimising the website. But it's also, on the other hand, we're saying well AI will be pulling more and more from off of the website because that's where trust is formed. People trust strangers more than brands. So, how important is it? But if most people don't trust brands anyway, isn't it more important to optimise off the website than the actual website?

Slobodan Manić: I read a number somewhere, and I can't remember where it was, that about 80% of the citations you get in AI about your brand are earned, meaning happening somewhere else or coming from somewhere else and not your website. So, this is absolutely true. The way you optimise is really... you don't use your website as a megaphone to tell people what you are, how cool you are, how amazing you are. If you're the only one saying that, there's a problem. If there's nobody else in the world that's going to say... let's pick a brand. Adidas running shoes are amazing. It's a huge brand. So, this is not a great example. But if you're the only one saying that we have the best running shoes, we have the most popular running shoes, people like us, people trust us, and there's not a single YouTube video to confirm that. There's not a review. There's not a running event where you're present and presenting your latest models. There's no scientific test of how bouncy your shoes are, how stretchy the mesh is on the upper.

If that doesn't exist, if it only exists on your website and nowhere else, why would a human trust you? Let the machines be. Why would a human trust any of that? And yet the model of the last 20 years was shouting on your website, using meta ads and Google ads and getting the person there and just "hey, we'll sell them the pen when they come on the website. We will convince them that this is the thing they need right now." That model was broken from day one and now it's shattered and I'm very happy about that.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. I mean it's broken because it was never about emotion and it was never about the actual customers. It was about "this is my brand. This is what I sell. These are my features and you should believe me because you can't actually get any more information. When you come to buy, you come to my website to make the decision." And you know, I'm just asking these questions to make it hard on you, Sani. On the same client call that we were having yesterday, we also talked about pricing page. And in enterprise solutions, you don't usually have pricing. Here's the thing. We're creating comparison pages. And when you go into ChatGPT and ask it about competitors, it lists pricing. And the pricing isn't visible on my client's website. It's actually not visible on any competitor's websites either. But AI is pulling information from all over the web from people having conversations about our client's pricing and it's incorrect.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah.

Talia Wolf: So now we have to go to the executive team, to the CEO, to the COO, to the CFO, to everyone and say "hey, we know that no one on the web, none of your competitors, are talking about pricing, are saying what their pricing is, because you want to be competitive, you don't want to commit, you don't want your competitors to go against you and say that you're too expensive. But someone else, which is AI, is telling people how much you cost. And if you don't own that narrative on your website and explain it really well, the components of the pricing and why it costs that way, then someone else is telling your story."

So that's my answer to when I was asking you, hey why should the website matter? I think at the end of the day when people come to your website they're more or less convinced that they should give you a try. So the decision has moved. They make the first decision off of the website, but when they come to your website, it has to have consistent messaging and emotion and alignment with everything that's being said off of your website and you have to explain everything and help people make that decision. So now you have to start talking about things you never wanted to, but at least you can own that narrative. Does that make sense?

Slobodan Manić: It makes perfect... well, the only thing that doesn't make sense is hiding your pricing because that never made sense. That is the annoying hoop you're making your users jump through because you can't do it anymore. And which is why I have so much to say against big tech and AI and what they're doing to the world and what they want to do with the world. But this side effect of everyone having to be honest... it's almost like the inversion of that movie Invention of Lying when Ricky Gervais discovers he can lie. It stops. Now it's a lot more difficult to lie on your online properties because it's easy to confirm or deny your claims.

Talia Wolf: Interesting. Okay. So tell me what signals are machines actually looking for when they're evaluating a website. So let's say I want to get started with preparing my website for AI. Other than hiring you of course, what are machines looking for so that I know what to do?

Slobodan Manić: So number one is really how clear the information is, how easy it is to understand. Let's say you go to a homepage of any brand and in the first few hundred words do you see the key information, the most relevant information, or is it just company slogans and hype words? And 99% of the websites, let's be honest, fail this test. Is it very clear, like painfully clear, what this is about? Does the rest of the world confirm that this company is about that? And then there's also a lot of tricks and ways you can structure your content, write your content, have semantic HTML, meaningful, accessible pages, all that stuff. Basically, doing every single thing when it comes to building your online presence the right way without skipping any steps is the way to go. I wish it was more simple than that or more complicated than that. But that's really all you need to do. I would say clarity is the number one thing. Is this what I think it is? And number two is should I trust whatever this website is saying? If the answer to those two is yes and it's obviously yes, then the LLM will cite you and then the AI agents will use you and be able to understand your website.

Talia Wolf: You know what I love about this is that you're essentially saying the same thing that we would say about humans.

Slobodan Manić: That's what people want. We want to be able to read content, right? People want to come into a blog post for example and just know, hey, what are the main takeaways? What is this all about? Why should I read this article? What should I expect? And have it in clear format so that it's in blocks and in sections that you can actually read and digest.

Talia Wolf: So is that true? Do you feel like when you're optimising for machines, you're kind of also optimising for humans?

Slobodan Manić: There's no "kind of." You're absolutely optimising for humans. You just have to follow the rules more strictly. And you have to do everything... when you're reading a long page, one thing that LLMs prefer if they want to cite it is that every section can be self-contained, have a meaning. They can just pull a paragraph and cite the paragraph without having to rewrite the page.

When I'm reading a long page, sometimes I slowly read like people did in the 60s. I just get my coffee and read a long article. Sometimes I just scroll to the part I care about and that part cannot reference to the beginning of the article. I just want the three paragraphs that I care about and they need to have meaning. They need to be easy to consume. That applies to LLMs. LLMs are nothing but a mirror. They're made to behave... the chatbots are made to pretend to be humans. Pleasing an LLM, pleasing AI agents is really very similar to doing things properly for humans.

And I'll just add one more thing. Accessibility. You need accessible pages. People care about accessibility now because of AI. And they did not care about accessibility because of humans. Shame on all of us for that. But at least it's happening now.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. I guess you're making me feel a lot better about AI is what I can say. Okay. Let's try and make it a little bit more practical. Let's say I want to optimise my homepage or we need to optimise our client's homepage. Now, how would you go about that? Is there something you would do differently? So, if you have to optimise a homepage right now that needs more conversions, how would you go about it? How different would that be than what we currently do right now when you're thinking about machines first?

Slobodan Manić: It would not be very different. Like I said, doing it for machines first means you need to follow the rules more closely. And that is the main difference between optimising machine first versus human. And also the reason I keep saying machine first. There's a parallel to mobile first. It's because if you make your website in a way that is going to work for the machines, content is easy to consume. The entities are clearly defined. It's clear about what you're trying to say, what the page is trying to achieve, what are the actions you want the users to take. If you write it in that way and not do a wireframe with Lorem Ipsums, it's much easier to then write or add the human layer on top of that that's going to resonate with humans and really target the emotion. You define the emotions when you're doing this machine first process as well. And then you just write your copy, work on your design, all that stuff because you're tackling the more difficult version of your website first and only then you're expanding. This is the principle of mobile first design. More constraints. Let's get that done. Let's hit the bigger frog first and then we move on to the easier thing. And that's the main thing.

Talia Wolf: I really like this because for many years, one of my biggest speeches to clients was we need to create mobile first content because when you do mobile responsive, what you're actually doing is you're taking a desktop experience and shrinking it down to mobile, but people don't use their mobile devices the same way that they use desktop. So, you have to start with obviously where the biggest impact is, which is mobile, and then you can expand and make it responsive to desktop. And I love that you're using this term now because it's such a good example of you're building it for the machines first because that's where we need to focus. But it's not taking away from the actual experience of humans. Humans still matter. Emotions still matter. It's just about creating it as a certain path or a process that makes the most sense. You start with A and then you move to B and C.

Slobodan Manić: And I'll also add about copy. It really is one of the most frustrating things for me, is when people start with design and wireframe and have Lorem Ipsum text because that clearly means you weren't thinking about your customer, you weren't thinking about your messaging. Now the copywriter or whoever's writing content has to kind of smush all the copy into whatever the designer has allocated to them based on what they think looks pretty and not based on the information that someone actually needs to make a decision.

Talia Wolf: So am I right in kind of putting those two together? It's kind of the same.

Slobodan Manić: You're always right. Yes. Absolutely. This is really what the approach is. This is not like I'm working on this as a framework, a building principle, whatever you want to call it. It's really machine first, human always. It's not humans last. You're always thinking about the human as you are building it machine first. To give you an example, let's say you have a product page or homepage for a brand. If you start by writing in detail all of the schemas that you need to have on that page and all the entities that you need to describe to the machine. If you start by writing the schemas and only then you worry about what the wireframe is going to look like, what the layout's going to look like, what the colours are going to be, it's much easier and much cleaner to get to the end result that's going to be better than if you design the page and then worry about how do we add text that's exactly as long as this Lorem Ipsum because that's the space that the designer gave us for the product copy and how do we add schema on top of everything we have here. No, you just start with the meaning and the knowledge and what the page is trying to say. I know this is not radical. This is just basic common sense of how it should be done. And yet again, most websites start or are born in Figma, which just is not supposed to work out.

Talia Wolf: But I would argue the only thing I would say is that the way you're describing it, at least, is for someone who's just getting started. Like if I'm just getting started and I need to create a website, this is how I would go about it. Start with machines, add in the emotion, add in the human layer, and go from there. But most of us have living and breathing websites with mountains of content. Like, GetUplift. Our website has so much content on it. I can't go and rebuild the whole website. So, is there a difference between someone who's starting out and someone who's already with a living and breathing website?

Slobodan Manić: A blank page is easier to work with. Usually there's more creativity, more freedom to work with it. Yes. But if you have a website with a lot of content like you do, define the key pages and then look at the key pages. Are they really very clear about saying the things that I want them to say? Do they describe GetUplift? Do they describe the services? Is it very clear for someone who has no idea what we are, who is not going to use the UI on the website because the information is getting pulled and sent to an LLM or shown anywhere else?

You have to separate the message from the medium and it still needs to make sense. Because if your message is medium dependent, it's weak. It's not good enough.

Talia Wolf: Got it. Okay. So, are there any common things that marketers or brands or websites do these days that look good to humans or help humans but confuse machines or don't work for the machine first era?

Slobodan Manić: Fluff copy is really the one thing that needs to go away. There's so many websites that just have a need to have the long intro on the page. The stupid things that we say in the first two paragraphs just to set the stage for what's to come. No, you need to open really strong with what you're trying to say and then explain the details. I would say most websites are built the wrong way. Simply because they were not built for this machine consuming it and then distributing it further and then summarising it and telling the user what to do with it. If you look at something like your accessibility tree of your key pages, for example, which is just the interpretation of your DOM, of your page essentially, that some agents use to navigate the page and understand the page. If you can see it in Chrome DevTools, by the way. If you look at your accessibility tree and it doesn't really make sense, maybe clean that up. Clean up your page so it does make sense. If you look at something like a markdown version of your page, which is not the way it works, agents don't consume the markdown version of your page, it's not a standard, but if you look at a markdown version of your page, it's really boiled down to the essentials of what you're trying to say. So when you remove all the graphics, when you remove all of the decorations that the page has, does the meaning stay the same? Do you still get the same conclusions when you're looking at just the copy of the page versus the entire page? If the answer is no, there's a problem and then your web page might be misunderstood.

Talia Wolf: Okay. So I guess where I'm struggling or where I find things challenging is that as we know, all decisions, all buying decisions, are based on emotion and a lot of optimisation, what drives conversions, is storytelling, emotion, resonance. Not fluff, obviously, I'm against fluff. But telling a coherent story that resonates on an emotional level. How do you optimise for machines without losing that component?

Slobodan Manić: You're not supposed to lose that component. You're supposed to define that component before you even start doing anything. And you know, we built something that measures emotions in a... so you can start like that. You need to write in a way that you trigger the emotions you want to trigger. If there's a stock photo in your page that's triggering happiness, you're doing it wrong, right? The core message needs to be the one that triggers emotions and not the decorations and imagery and videos around it.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. But I guess my faith in marketers and brands is a little low because when we get a mission or an assignment, we're just like, "Well, here's further evidence that people don't matter." When marketers are told that what matters now is machines, then they throw out the human component. They don't care about emotions because they think it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is what AI thinks of me. So, how do you find the middle?

Slobodan Manić: That's a very interesting question. The decision maker in the end is always going to be a human. Unless we live in some kind of a utopia/dystopia, I don't know what it is, where machines are making decisions and we're just fat people from Wall-E just floating on a spaceship. Hope not. But the human is the one making the decision. How we get to that decision, all of the steps to convince a human, that has changed. How you reach a human has changed. Your perfect copy on your page used to be what drives the person to a conversion because they land there, they read the copy, maybe they read your about page, your shipping policy, and they make a decision. Is it possible to describe everything you're trying to say in 200 words because that's how it's going to be presented to them? Is it possible to detach, as I said earlier, detach that message from the medium that is your website completely and tweak it any way possible in a YouTube video, YouTube short or a TikTok video or a paragraph or a tweet? Does it still make sense? Is it possible to tell your story in many different ways extracting your core information from your website? If the answer is yes, you're fine. If the answer is no, that's where I would start.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. I mean, it's all about consistency, right?

Slobodan Manić: Absolutely. You and I were talking about this the other day. The funnel isn't linear anymore. And people view seven, eight, nine different touchpoints before they even leave a lead. So what matters is that there's consistency in your messaging and the story that you're telling across the entire web including your website, on YouTube, in Slack when you've got a community there, or Circles, or Facebook groups. Wherever you are, that message and those emotions need to be consistent everywhere.

Talia Wolf: So, I'm hoping that now more than ever, because AI is so dominant, because machines are such a big part of our life, even more now, marketers and brands will understand how critical emotional targeting is. Because without that, without that foundational piece of understanding why do people buy from you on an emotional level, you can't actually optimise anything. Not off the website, not on the website, and you probably can't really optimise for machines because you have to also put in the right information that people care about into the machines, right?

Slobodan Manić: Absolutely. I mean, to go back to the early days of websites and social media, it was very important to have the same logo on every platform you're on because then people can remember who you are. Emotions are the same. The way you talk to your users, to people online, it needs to be consistent on Reddit, your website, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever you are. You cannot be all serious on LinkedIn and then you want to be seen as this funny brand on Instagram. It just doesn't work that way. Even if the platforms are different, you as a brand, you as an entity, and what you are is more important than what the platform rules are. My favourite example for this from years ago is the running sunglasses brand called Goodr. You can recognise a Goodr sentence whatever the platform is because they're this quirky "we don't take life seriously. We don't take anything seriously but we have good cheap running sunglasses that don't move at all when you're running." And you can recognise their copy and their ads. And since day one they were like that. If you can be a brand that is unmistakable, that people can perceive you online and know what to expect from you, you're doing great. Simple as that.

Talia Wolf: So, if someone's listening to us right now and they want to start, they want to get started with optimising their websites for machines. What's one or two things they should do right now?

Slobodan Manić: Define who you are in a document, a list, whatever you want. Write it down. Define who you are and define how you want to say who you are. And then map that to your entire website and your entire web ecosystem because I guarantee you, even to go to the basic things like your business name, your address, your phone number, I guarantee you'll find a place online that has wrong information. Just be very clear about what you're trying to say and be very boring and persistent in saying it. That is the best step one that you can take. Because if let's say OpenAI ChatGPT agent is trying to get information about your brand or brands in your category and trying to recommend you and it finds your business name is different on different platforms. Maybe it doesn't figure out it's the same thing and maybe that's a weaker signal than something that's the same on 50 different places online. Be clear. Be good at what you do. Be clear about what you do and make it easy for other people to confirm that you're doing it well. Which means again your website is not a megaphone for you to scream. People need to hear and expand the message.

Talia Wolf: Yeah. So I know you do website audits to see if your website is ready for machines. Can you give me a sneak peek into what is just the one thing that you see, a mistake or something that you see that always comes up in these audits that you do?

Slobodan Manić: Usually, it's the web ecosystem mapping and consistency of your brand across different properties online. Usually I haven't seen it fully match yet. There's always something on Crunchbase or G2 or whatever platform, Google Places, Google Knowledge Graph. There's always something that's going to say something completely different. I start there. Start with also schema on your website. It's shocking what you can find on most websites.

Talia Wolf: Do you think we will be talking about websites the same way as we are right now in like three years?

Slobodan Manić: No.

Talia Wolf: You... I haven't even said the time yet.

Slobodan Manić: You could have said three months. No. The answer is no. Because let me explain why. A website was always a storefront. Since the beginning of the internet, you come to me, we do business and that's it. It needs to be a warehouse and a storefront. This is the phrase I keep using everywhere. It needs to be a storefront for people who want to come and buy from you directly, but also a warehouse to provide the information about you that others can pull and show wherever they want. That's the main change. The storefront is not going away for most brands, for any I would say. But that is not the only role that a website is going to play in the future.

Talia Wolf: So to summarise, who do you think we're really trying to influence? Humans that are making the decision or the machines that are shaping them?

Slobodan Manić: The who hasn't changed at all. The how has changed dramatically. Humans is the answer.

Talia Wolf: Yes, obviously. Humans. Yay for humans. If we can save our race. Sani, tell everyone where we can find you and follow you and learn from you and hire you to help optimise their websites for AI.

Slobodan Manić: The best place by far is nohacks.co/subscribe if you want to subscribe. So the podcast, there's a blog, there's a YouTube channel. I really am trying to stay on top of everything happening with the AI-driven web, agentic web, because I'm curious and I want to know what happens. All my livelihood in the last 20 years has come from building websites and optimising websites and I feel like this is completely changing how we do that and I want to know how and why it's happening. So nohacks.co is the best place. You can get all the links for all the podcast and social platforms there. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to write about this on LinkedIn daily. I think those are the best ways.

Talia Wolf: I will say that I have been listening to your podcast for 5 years and it's how I learn about everything and I absolutely love it and I think you are one of the most generous people with your knowledge and how you teach. Thank you so much for being on this podcast.

Slobodan Manić: Thank you for having me.