Jes Scholz

What If Your Best Content Comes From Complaints? Your most powerful marketing content might be hiding in customer complaints. Discover how to turn negative feedback, refund requests, and one-star reviews into authentic, high-performing content that ...

What if your best marketing actions come from complaints?

These expose the moments where expectations and brand promise diverge.

The cause is either execution drift, only fixed by owning it… Or positioning misalignment... e.g. you can't be cheap & top quality.

www.zoomsphere.com/blog/what-if...

It is no coincidence agent bounce rates mirror human ones.

AI agents are exposing what users have endured for years.

Your UX sucks.

Treat every agent bounce as feedback. Fix the friction.

This isn’t about pleasing machines. It’s about finally meeting human expectations.

Agent behaviour isn’t broken. Your site is.

In ChatGPT Agent Mode, 63% of first clicks bounce.

The most common causes are:
🟣 Bot challenges
🟣 301 redirect to an irrelevant location
🟣 4xx or 5xx status codes
🟣 Registration walls
🟣 Slow load speed
🟣 Landing pages don't satisfy the search intent

When AI agents do the shopping: Insights from 100 conversations with ChatGPT Agent mode As ChatGPT agents book, buy, and convert for users, SEO must evolve. Make your site agent-readable, accessible, and built to convert.

New article drop! An ChatGPT agents case study giving insights from over 100 journeys. Give it a read: searchengineland.com/insights-cha...

So I’ve started showing dev teams what their sites look like in Lynx.

It's the best way to encourage them consciously code to communicate as much relevant information as possible by leveraging semantic HTML.

A text-based browser that strips pages down to raw HTML and plain text links.

Glossy images? Gone.
Schema markup and Javascript enhancements? Ghosted.
Starting with 200 lines of header links. Groan-worthy.

It it on these bare bones they decide whether to continue to conversion.

🧵 In 2025, I never thought I'd be using the same text-based browser I did in 1995. But here we are. Thanks to AI agents.

Agents don't browser like humans. They don't always consume content in the visual browser of Chromium.

In my testing with ChatGPT, 46% of agent visits began in 'reading mode'.

Where does AI search sit in context of the wider web?

As an exercise in perspective, I estimated how people use different platforms to search for information in the same way they would on Google.

Credit to Forbes, SEMRush, Sparktoro & DemandSage for the input data.

And while this isn't a significant slice of sales yet, you need to be prepared for when AI agents become a key conversion driver.

If CloudFlare, CloudFront, Datadome, or your own security stack allows crawling, but blocks conversion, update it now.

Unless the human has specifically requested your brand, if the AI agent can’t get to you, they’ll go to a competitor. Costing you not only that conversion, but future conversions as the agent's memory builds a preference for your competition.

Is bot protection costing you tomorrow’s SEO sales?

Brands like Wayfair, Lululemon and Glassdoor are shutting the door on agent-driven conversions, likely without realising it.

A robots.txt allow doesn't guarantee access. Bot protection tools often challenge AI agents, stopping them mid-journey.

Crawling for AI search: Balancing access, control, and visibility Crawling has always shaped visibility – but AI search raises the stakes. Learn how to stay seen without losing control.

Wrote up my thoughts on crawling in the AI era. The piece covers:
🟣 Why you should allow (most) AI crawlers
🟣 How to win AI citations
🟣 Why indexing will always be essential
🟣 Why crawling is not only about googlebot

What are your thoughts?

🚪 Accessibility: Offer an API. Else, craft deep links for tasks you want agents to complete.

🔐 Authentication: Agents often need to log in. Friction at this handoff kills conversion. Grow your logged in audience, use OAuth or enable guest checkouts.

Think beyond answers. Enable agents to act.

This shifts SEO. Forget being the top ranked result. Be the easiest, safest and most automatised route to finish a task.

What matters is:

💭 Brand salience: If users don’t name a brand, agents lean toward market leaders, reinforcing incumbent bias. Treat brand entity SEO as table stakes.

Perplexity Comet & ChatGPT agent browsers are at the SEO frontier. Brands don't care, but should.

For years, Google mined Chrome data to inform visibility. AI companies want the same edge.

Under the guise of speeding up tasks & easing cognitive load, we're being pushed toward agentic browsing.

So yes, ensure strong Google Indexing. But also ensure you show up across social networks, Reddit, Wikipedia, industry directories and trusted corners of the open web.

Focus on corroboration. Own the entity graph. That’s how you future-proof your digital visibility.

AI systems cross-references multiple sources to validate answers, reduce bias and surface authoritative brands.

If you're absent in those parallel corpora, you're statistically invisible. Regardless of how well you rank on Google.

Google alone won't future-proof your SEO.

We all know the tea. ChatGPT now pulls from Google’s index when Bing’s falls short. That doesn't mean you can retreat into a Google-only mindset.

SEO isn't Google vs Bing. Effective SEO goes beyond both. It's about corpus optimisation.

1Password says the average employee loses 12.6 minutes a week to password faff. That's about 11 hours a year. Multiply that by the world’s 3.4 billion workers, you get 37 billion hours lost annually.

All in the name of security. Yet most months, another provider is hacked and details compromised.

Logging in to an account is becoming a security drill 😤

🟢 Enter email & password
🟡 Pass Captcha
🟠 Get authenticator code
🔴 Finally get inside, only to be logged out for "inactivity" after a short period of time

Authentication should not be an endurance sport.

📃 Captions matter! Don't re-use the linked URL title. Tailor your caption for the network. Or at least write a prompt to generate captions in your brand voice
⏩ Post multiple times a day (if you've got something worthwhile to say!)

Want to optimise other network for SEO visibility? Follow me

But not every post makes the cut. Google looks at relevance, freshness, popularity & quality.

Earn visibility by:
💁 Naming the entity the post is about
🔗 Use link posts, not image posts
#️⃣ Avoid hashtag stuffing. 1 well-chosen tag is best, 2 max. Ideally in-tweet, else at the end. Never the start

Tweets show up for entities and topics in:
🟣 Twitter carousels (appearing in ~0.25% of US mobile queries according to both SEMRush Sensor & Similarweb's Rank Ranger)
🟣 'What people are saying' carousels
🟣 Blue links
🟣 Knowledge panels
🟣 Google Discover carousels
🟣 Google News app

5 Twitter tips for SEOs

Done well, social posting is a low-effort way to boost visibility on search surfaces, drive engagement and earn some extra sessions.

Google gives brands multiple touch points across organic. And for those that want more visibility, you can buy your way in with ads.

ChatGPT collapses that space. If you’re not in the citied source, you’re invisible.

So the real question is: Do your users want to explore? Or to execute?

Time saved is a powerful motivator. So users should favour the faster experience. But is it enough to override 20 years of learned search behaviour?

Their decision has big implications for your marketing strategy.

ChatGPT is the opposite. Every prompt costs money, so efficiency is the incentive. It wins when you get what you need fast, and ideally, act on it. OpenAI favours a commission based revenue model. It monetises efficiency. It personalises for intent fulfilment.

Let's talk business incentives in the battle of Search David vs Goliath.

For the Goliath Google, more searches means more money. Every query is another revenue opportunity. It monetises discovery. It personalises to serve ads.

Clickbait titles without real value are like online dating profile pictures…

They get the clicks, but the bounce rate is brutal.

Else, it's not about helping the open web. It's a product play to gain market share riding on the promise of a pay-per-crawl model.