No Hacks: Optimising the Web for AI Agents

213: Why Google & ChatGPT Are Ignoring Your "Dead" Content with Jono Alderson

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Jan 7, 2026

Jono Alderson, a Technical SEO specialist known for his insights on content strategy and AI-driven web discovery, discusses the end of traditional digital marketing. He reveals that most websites are now 'zombies' with outdated content that AI finds worthless. Jono emphasizes the need for 'Upstream Engineering,' focusing on reputation and clarity instead of mere optimization. He warns against manipulative marketing tactics that AI filters out and explains why brands must adapt to a new landscape where identity is derived from various online signals.

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INSIGHT

The Threshold Has Vanished

The classic marketing “threshold” that drags humans to your site is disappearing as agents intermediate decisions.
Jono Alderson says machines now decide access and won't let brands control audiences the way human-focused marketing did.

INSIGHT

Brand Is A Distributed Surface

The web is becoming surface-less: a brand is now an aggregation of signals across many places, not just a domain.
Jono Alderson warns that agents treat all mentions (Reddit, videos, old microsites) as parts of a single entity.

INSIGHT

The Zombie Web Problem

Much of the web is now “zombie” content: technically online but value-extracted and irrelevant to LLMs.
Jono Alderson explains commodity marketing pages (e.g., generic dentist sites) add no new information for models.

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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 models treat marketing fluff like an allergen, and why the future of SEO isn't about meta tags, it's about "Upstream Engineering."

In this episode, we cover:

[00:00] The Death of the Threshold: Why the era of "interrupting humans to get them to your site" is over.
[02:24] The Surface-less Web: Why your brand is no longer just your domain, but an aggregation of everything said about you on the web (Reddit, YouTube, 2013 microsites).
[06:52] The "Zombie Web" Theory: Why "commodity content" (like generic dentist blogs) is worthless to an LLM that has already memorized the facts.
[11:05] The Machine Immune System: Why AI models view persuasive copywriting and sales fluff as "noise" or hallucinations to be filtered out.
[16:40] The Incoherence Penalty: How machines spot the gap between your marketing claims ("We love customers") and your reality (bad Reddit reviews).
[20:30] The llms.txt Trap: Why creating a separate "agent-friendly" version of your site won't work (and why machines won't trust it).
[22:50] MCP (Model Context Protocol): Is this the future of how websites communicate?
[28:14] Upstream Engineering: The new SEO. Why you need to optimize your return policy, logistics, and customer service instead of your title tags.
[33:05] The Timeline: The best and worst-case scenarios for the web in the next 5 years.
[38:39] How to Survive 2026: One final piece of advice for optimizers.

Links & Resources:

Connect with Jono: jonoalderson.com
Follow Jono on LinkedIn

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