AI, Search and the New Age of Visibility
Airtree
Channel
Interviewed Person
Malte Ubl
Description
"Hey ChatGPT, why is my search traffic dropping?" The way we search is changing fast. As AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini reshape how users find and engage with information, SEO is evolving into something new — AEO, LLMO, GEO — we haven’t even yet agreed upon a term! This deep dive featuring Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Finder Co-founder and COO Jeremy Cabral, and Airtree Partner Jackie Vullinghs unpacks how generative AI is rewriting the rules of discoverability, and what it means for your product, content, and growth strategy. What was once a period of experimentation has already matured into a new strategic paradigm where content, architecture and product design must adapt to emerging AI-driven interfaces. Airtree is a venture capital firm backing Aussie and Kiwi founders, building the iconic technology companies of tomorrow. We’re powered by our network, dedicating extraordinary resources to help founders shortcut company-building firsts and accelerate their journey from idea to global household name As one of the largest and most active early-stage investors in Australia and New Zealand with $2 billion funds under management, Airtree’s 120+ portfolio features the region’s breakout tech companies, including Canva, Go1, Employment Hero, Pet Circle, AirwaIlex, Immutable, SafetyCulture and Linktree. Learn more: https://airtree.vc Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/airtree-ventures Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/airtreevc Malte Ubl is the CTO of @VercelHQ. Previously, Malte was a Principal Engineer responsible for Google Search Rendering and Engineering Director for Google Search. He is the creator of AMP and co-architect of Core Web Vitals, a founder of JSConf EU, and a MACH Alliance board member. Jeremy Cabral is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of global fintech, @FinderAU From his hometown of Sydney, Jeremy has been instrumental in making Finder Australia's most visited comparison platform and pioneered its launch strategy for new markets all around the world. Today, Finder helps over 2 million people each month make smarter financial decisions across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Jackie Vullinghs is a General Partner at @airtreeventures, a venture capital firm with a mission to back the most ambitious and unrelenting Australian and Kiwi founders, building the iconic technology companies of tomorrow.
Tags
Transcript
Hello and welcome everybody. Um today we are talking about AI and search. Um we were just having a little uh giggle beforehand about um the fact that there is as yet no prevailing acronym for what this is called. So for now we're going to call it LLM SEO. Uh Maltza I'm following your blog post. But um you know obviously this is a a pretty
pretty momentous time for a lot of people. Um the impact on SEO for companies that have relied on SEO has been pretty stark over the last few months. Um and at the same time lots of people are seeing the opportunity in um a new version of SEO for uh getting your traffic from LLMs. Um, and so we're bringing together today Malta and J Jeremy to talk about how to how to take advantage of this moment and and prepare your startup well for getting traffic from LLMs.
Um, so on to introductions. Um, Malta, welcome. Um, Malta is currently the CTO of Vasel. um previously principal engineer responsible for Google search rendering and uh engineering director for Google search um so has a lot of experience in and around this world Jeremy is uh co-founder and COO of finder um he's been instrumental in
making finders Australia's most visited comparison platform and uh pioneered it launch launch strategy for new markets around the world and SEO is one of his favorite things so um welcome to the party Jeremy Thanks for having me. Um, so maybe where I can get started is um, just a little bit of context setting. I think Malta, the reason we uh, even got introduced to you was your fantastic blog post about LLM SEO um, a few weeks, months ago. Um, time is flying at the moment. Um, and uh, and we
also saw um, your CEO Glammo mentioning that 10% of your signups are coming from chat GBT today. So perhaps we could just start with a bit of context around you know how important was SEO for your business um before and um and how's that shifted since the emergence of LMS? Yeah, I think the super interesting topic. I think in many ways we are as a developer facing business, right? Um, we're at the forefront of of this as the as the product market fit for for like Agentic software and and software
engineering is absolutely insane. I think many folks here probably have software teams that use um hopefully our own tool reo stuff like cursor etc b code right to to to chog code and and these lms are just incredibly good at code right um and so people are already using them for the type of use cases that that we're specializing in and but we can I think essentially expect that the future outside of the coding domain
will will look similar it just takes a little bit longer because it's more difficult to tune the the models for for those use cases. And yeah, so I mean in a way we we I will say and this is probably very diff different to time. We were not a business that was like had a very very strong SEO strategy. Our SEO strategy was to be present on the internet to to you know produce content that people like. We're very focused on social media um probably more so than than SEO. And
so in a way we were almost surprised when we saw that there was just this incredible uptake in traffic from chatbt and in particular traffic that converts. You might imagine that like I mean we are very in a way we're very strongly hit by a reduction in traffic and substitution to LLMs but not in a way that hurts our business which I think is important to to understand because like again like the the software engineers they have questions and and it's in the best thing in the world if a
Video Details
- Duration
- 54:04
- Published
- July 24, 2025
- Channel
- Airtree
- Language
- ENGLISH
- Views
- 96
- Likes
- 2
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