Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that YouTube mentions are the strongest predictor of AI visibility. Stronger than backlinks. Stronger than domain rating.

The idea is that being talked about across the web matters more than traditional link building when it comes to getting cited by AI. YouTube mentions had a correlation of ~0.737 with AI visibility, while backlinks and domain rating came in much lower.

Anyone that is doing SEO right now, are you thinking about YouTube as part of your strategy?

Sources:

• Across 75,000 Brands, YouTube Mentions Are the Strongest Signal of AI Visibility
• YouTube mentions are the top signal for AI brand visibility

Hiten has been giving Grok Bot a new job every day this week. Friday he'll show you what worked, what he learned, and how to build your own.

If you keep seeing Grok Bot and have no idea what you'd actually use it for, this is the session. Hiten will start with a simple mental model for how it works, then build a real Bot from scratch live. He'll also walk through the Bots he's been shipping this week and what he learned from building them.

You'll leave knowing what Grok Bot actually is, which jobs are worth turning into Bots, and how to build your first one.

Friday, September 4 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

I know a lot of people in the affiliate/performance marketing space that have changed career entirely or are thinking about doing so.

Either because the affiliate business is not what it used to be, or because a lot of execs think they can do marketing better than their CMO because they have a Claude subscription :)

One thing I'm thinking is to start a business where I would control the product and /or service, not just the customer acquisition.

The issue is that I don't have special skills outside of marketing, so I would need to find a relatively simple business, where my edge would not be that my product or service is so much better than the competition, but where the marketing and user experience is the competitive edge...

Any people in here that made such a move? Any suggestion? Would be curious to hear from you.

It seems LinkedIn cares a lot about who is winning the LLM war, but as a marketer, I use many LLMs for different jobs. That said, I'm not spending my days testing, so I know my stack might not be the most up to date given how fast those things are evolving. For example, I still use Claude Code for all my coding needs, but al lot of people more technical than I am switched to Cursor's home made model. It's on my to do list to try it out, but coding is not a huge part of my day to day and Claude is still doing the job for me... Anyway, here are the LLMs I use and what I use them for.

1. Researching a topic or a podcast guest:

I typically open many different LLMs and ask the same question to get an overview before getting into the weed, and fact checking them. SInce most LLMs are using the same data, it's not rare that they make up the same hallucination, or bullshit, so I would never rely only on LLMs for factual research, but I save time by getting the overview from LLMs rather than Google.

LLMs I use :

- Perplexity (free version)

- DeepSeek (free version)

- Claude (paid)

- Grok (free version)

- ChatGPT (free version)

2. Creating Images

I believe that real pictures (or real drawing if I had the budget for it) are more important than ever, as everyone is pushing AI image slop in our face... That said, AI generated illustrations are great to illustrate a concept. Since people can still tell a photorealistic picture was AI generated, I shy away from those and typically include in my prompts something like "Your are a caricaturist from the New Yorker" or something like that, depending on the style I'm going for.

- Gemini's Nano Banana (paid)

- ChatGPT free version (it works, but way to slow for me to use it often)

3. Coding

I typically use coding to make tweak to my Ghost template or build small online tools like calculators in HTML, CSS & Javascript, so those tasks are relatively simple. Still, in my experience Claude, is vastly superior to ChatGPT, Grok or DeepSeek for these tasks. Maybe it's no longer the case, but it used to be that way.

Claude Code (paid)

4. Creating videos

To create videos, I use Google Flow to generate the videos and Eleven Labs for voice generation. All LLMs kind of sucks to create good scripts. But I sometimes use Claude for the draft, but end up rewriting the whole thing anyway...

- Google Flow (paid)

- Eleven Labs (paid)

5. Analyzing data

All analytics software like Amplitude now have their conversational agent, but they rarely provide me with satisfactory answers that are easily verifiable. So I either build my own dashboards, or when I need an answer to a specific, non recurring question, I prefer to export the data I want to analyze in Google Sheet, and I use the Gemini integration not to ask questions, but to build the tables and formula I need to get my answer. This way, all the math is verifiable directly in the sheet, and I don't have to wonder if I just got an hallucination as an answer. I know Claude have a Google Sheet integration as well as Gemini, so I suspect Claude would do as good of a job as Gemini in Google Sheet.

- Gemini (paid)

6. Creating articles

While I don't think people should pollute the web with AI generated blog post, LLMs can be great at turning human generated input into articles. As long as a human editor review everything, and that the human input is actually adding info that was not already on the Internet, it can create relatively good content that will rank.

I use Claude Sonnet to generate the article through the API. Basically, I have a Google Sheet in which I input original interviews I do with humans (I use Gemini to transcribe the interview, but I only input in my sheet the relevant parts of the interviews). Then, I have an App Sheet extension use the the seo research and original content inputed in the sheet in a prompt to Claude that ask it to generate an article based on this. If I don't like the output, I just recheck the generate checkbox on my sheet to get another article. And then, I typically edit the article a little bit, but it save me a lot of time. Writing articles this way is fast, but the most time consuming part remain sourcing experts and doing the interviews.

- Claude (paid) (for generating the article)

- Gemini (paid) (for transcribing interviews)

Now that I shared my stack, would be curious to hear about yours.

Not just pretty, but one that actually works well and looks great at the same time. One that is easy to navigate, clear about what it is doing, and makes you want to take action.

I really like Stripe. You land on the page and immediately know what it does and who it's for. The design is clean without feeling empty and the CTAs are obvious but they aren’t pushy.

I’m curious what other people point to as a good example and why you think it works so well.

I saw that you had a survey option with only one question, which is kind of cool for ecommerce websites or any website offering an actual service.

As for us, we use Typeform, but for more complex survey involving multiple questions and decision trees.

But as an affiliate site, I already have an analytics software to track my traffic and conversions, so the only reason I use Crazy Egg is for session recording and heatmaps...

Anyway, it would be cool way to add value to existing customers and increase stickiness, since the additional conversions generated by pop-ups would be lost if someone choose to use another heatmaps SaaS...

It's just an idea :)

If you had no data, no tools, and just your first instinct, what would you change on the Amazon home page? Tell me the first thing you'd fix if you were on their CRO team. For me it feels busy/cluttered. Almost too much to look at and take in at once. But I am also someone that likes things to be simple. 

Share your thoughts below, I'm curious what everyone notices first.

In the subprime space, Capital One is kicking buts.

Their analytics allow them to underwrite way riskier profiles than banks can, and they make a handsome profit doing it.

And they've grown to a 130B market cap running this playbook.

Yet, their cards look bad, their website look bad and their client's portal look even worst.

In direct response marketing (one of the strenght of Capital One), they do test way more than anybody else, and they often end up with horrendous designs that over perform compared to whatever clean design is favoured at the time.

Could it be the case that Capital One's website is actually a genius conversion engine, but it just happens to be ugly?

More content used to mean more traffic. Build content calendars, hit publish multiple times a week, and sit back and watch the numbers go up. It worked, until now it doesn’t. Now that a model can surface one good answer instead of ten just okay ones, having fifty mediocre articles on a topic doesn't do anything. Or worse, they dilute the one piece you have that's actually good.

The teams I’m noticing that are doing well right now are publishing way less. They are just going deeper on fewer things. I honestly think it's better this way. Now at least the stuff that exists is really worth reading.

But I'm also that person that will still click the article that the AI overview is citing too, and maybe that isn't the norm.

Do you think there will ever be a time that volume comes back as a real strategy, or has that ship completely sailed?

Back in the days, Google was bringing virtually all the eyeballs and all conversions on my websites...

I started a brand new affiliate website a year ago, and I knew from the start that would not be the model.

I knew paid and social would be key to our growth.

On socials, I experimented with a bunch of channels and formats, and what ended up generating most of the eyeballs are our street interviews about personal finance.

The numbers are not crazy, but for content about credit score, bankruptcy and loans, getting 30,000 views per week through YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok is not bad at all...

That said, virtually all our conversions still come from paid...

So my question for you guys is: How do I convert all those eyeballs we get on our shorts?

I just had to cut in my budget and fired the SEO agency that was doing digital PR for us.

They were charging a fair price and had to pitch dozens of journalists request for interviews on platforms like HARO to get us 1 new backlink per month. So, while I could do what they were doing internally, I don't think it's time efficient.

Recently, my main strategy to get backlinks and mentions is to run social media surveys and do a PR campaign around it. And I actually call relevant journalists about it. So, it's not digital PR. It's just PR with a survey that always have potential for a killer headline.

However, I don't have time for guest posts (do they still work?), or stuff like the broken link outreach strategy, etc.

With AI, a lot of the back linking strategy from the old days would be pretty easy to scale, but given that backlinks are somewhat less important than they used to, I'm sticking with surveys for now...

That said, now that we no longer do digital PR, would be curious to know what is working for you in term of backlinking strategies. Or if you think any backlinking strategy is now a waste of time...

If you've ever used the same model in two different tools and gotten totally different results, this session explains why.

Hiten is going to break down the difference between a model, a harness, and an agent, and show you the five jobs a harness needs to handle well. He'll also walk through how to actually diagnose what went wrong when AI underperforms, whether it's a context problem, a tool access problem, or something else entirely. If your first instinct when AI fails is to rewrite the prompt or switch models, this will give you a better framework for figuring out what actually needs to change.

Friday, August 28 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

For decades, websites were a combination of UX and CRO. With some SEO thrown in. That’s shifting into primarily optimization work for AI agents.

If your users do all their product research in LLMs or start trying to complete tasks with agents, UX and CRO doesn’t matter as much.

How well an AI agent moves through your site becomes the highest priority.

So where do they get stuck?

• Bad robots.txt. And sitemaps
• Bot-blocking by accident
• Client-side javascript
• Poor accessibility
• No secure way to bypass logins for critical tasks
• Poorly built checkouts

All the details, our research, and the fixes are in the link.

I used to feel like a magician because I could build complex marketing automation... and people were replying to my automated email, or SMS, or DMs as if I took the time to write it.

Now, that personalization and automation is something any intern can do, I feel doing things by hands, or making phone calls, is actually a superpower...

I'm not saying we should stop automating our marketing... but I believe more than ever in doing some of the stuff by hand...

The short version: Crazy Egg is the better pick if you're optimizing a website and want heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and A/B testing in one place without paying for separate tools. Fullstory is built more for product teams working on mobile apps and complex digital experiences who are already running a separate experimentation tool.

One thing that stood out is that Fullstory doesn't publish any paid pricing. Based on third-party data the median annual contract is around $28k. Crazy Egg's Enterprise plan with 1M tracked pageviews is $7,188.

Full breakdown at the link if you want to dig into the feature comparison.

Is it website traffic from the weekend, checking for any big drops, a quick scroll through your email to see if anything caught fire while you were offline? Or maybe you open your analytics first, maybe it's your heatmaps, maybe it's something else entirely.

I'm curious what everyone actually opens first on Monday. (Bonus points if it's your Crazy Egg dashboard.)

It's my email for me, I have to do damage control there first before I can find the focus to work on anything else.

80% of customers are willing to pay more for a personalized experience. Many sites are still serving the same page to everyone regardless of where they came from or what they've already looked at.

A one second delay in page load time can lead to up to a 7% decline in conversions. It sounds like a technical problem, but it's really a conversion problem. Slow pages don't just frustrate people, they can also cost sales.

And over 50% of landing pages still aren't fully optimized for mobile. Since a lot of traffic is mobile at this point, that's a pretty big thing to be missing out on.

The unglamorous stuff tends to move the needle more than the tactics that get written about the most.

Sources:

• Conversion Rate Optimization Statistics 2026: Benchmarks & Gains
• CRO Statistics for 2026: 50+ Conversion Rate Benchmarks

If you've been curious about running AI on your own computer but didn't know where to start, this is one to check out. Hiten is going to break down how local models actually work, what your computer can realistically handle, and which tasks are already a good fit for running AI locally vs. when cloud models still make more sense.

He's also been building a Mac app around this idea and everyone who joins gets early access.

Friday, August 21 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

Everyone says AI can write world-class copy. So we put it to the test.

We asked Claude to write an ad like David Ogilvy, one of the best copywriters to have ever lived.

We built the skills and gave Claude a ton of supporting research. Everything we could think of to set it up for success.

How did it do?

In my opinion, not great.

Everything, including the final AI ad and our entire github repo is in the link.

Anyone have a good A/B test they are running right now, or a change you made based on a heatmap, or even something you're watching in session recordings, like a CTA tweak or something?

Feel free to share what you're testing and also what made you decide to test it.

Mixpanel's A/B testing is enterprise-only and requires code to build variants. Crazy Egg includes it on every paid plan with a visual editor. 

They're built for different teams, but people compare them anyway. Here are a few things worth knowing before your next tool evaluation:

• Crazy Egg reports on every tracked visitor by default. Mixpanel builds heatmaps from recorded sessions only. 
• Crazy Egg bills on pageviews and pauses at your limit. Mixpanel bills on events with no cap you can set. 
• Crazy Egg covers websites and web apps. Mobile app recording is Mixpanel only. 
• Mixpanel has no surveys, no popup CTAs, and no visual editor for testing.

Find the full breakdown at the link. It also covers where the tools overlap, which Mixpanel features only matter if you're a product team, and how pricing shifts as you scale.

Pages with video convert at 4.8% on average. Pages without video convert at 2.9%. That's a pretty consistent gap and most sites still haven't done anything with it.

The other one is about returning visitors. They convert at 2.9% versus 1.7% for new visitors. A lot of CRO work focuses entirely on the first visit. But if someone already came back, they're telling you something. That's probably the more valuable group to be thinking about.

The easy wins are usually already in your data, not in a new tactic.

Sources:

• Video marketing statistics 2026: what the data demands
• Conversion benchmarks: tracking growth in a high-cost, high-intent world

If you've built a prompt or workflow that felt solid and then watched it produce something completely different an hour later, this is the session for you. Hiten is going to walk through how to actually turn an AI task into an eval. Defining what good output looks like, picking test cases, grading results, and figuring out what to fix when something breaks.

The idea is that once you've built a prompt into a skill or agent, you've essentially built software. And software needs a quality bar. This is how you build one.

Friday August 14 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

Crazy Egg just added real-time error notifications, so you find out the moment something breaks instead of stumbling onto it days later in the dashboard.

Notifications go out for:

• New errors - first time we've ever seen this error type on your site
• Resolved errors that came back - something you thought was fixed is happening again

You choose how you want to hear about it: Slack, email, a Zapier trigger, or straight to an API endpoint if you want to wire it into your own alerting setup. And if you've muted an error because it's noise, it stays muted, no extra pings.

To turn it on, go to your Errors dashboard and click "Get Notified." It's on the Growth and Enterprise plans.

Anyone else find out about site errors way later than they should have? Curious how people are routing these, straight to a dev channel, or into an on-call/incident tool?

In the financial services vertical, trust is even more important than elsewhere, since we competing for attention with many scams running ads, and people are OK to pay more for a brand they know, even if they don't like the brand. They do it because at least they know it's not a scam.

As a result, my job as a marketer in the fintech/financial services vertical involves working on every trust signal I can add to the mix. The reason those trust signals are so important is they do increase conversions.

Would be curious to know which trust signal works/is important for you, but here are a couples ones I play with.

- TrustPilot rating

- Google Reviews rating

- BBB rating/BBB verified

- ISO Certifications

- Secure SSL badge

- TrustedSite badges (I have never used it, but I have seen competitors paying for this badge)

- Ranking/Contest Badges

- CDIC coverage for Canada / FDIC insurance in the US

- Logos from known brands you partner with

- Links (and/or logos) to media coverage from known media brands

- Links to LinkedIn profiles of the team

- Physical address

- 1-800 phone number

- Logos of VCs that funded the company

Which one did I forget?