Can you just unpack this a little bit further, though? Give us an example of something where you found something out that you thought was gonna be high-performing for the brand and was not, and what underpinned that, why it wasn't, and then what you changed it to.

I would say across almost every one of our customers, whether it's Zillow or Cox Automotive or some of the biggest banks in the US, what we constantly see is that marketers will confuse impressions with relevance.

And I know that everyone talks about how impressions are a vanity metric, yet they are the number one metric that everyone still looks at.

And so when you see that a, let's say, piece of content is getting a ton of traffic, you may think to yourself, "This is good." Maybe you see that it's getting engagement.

You may think to yourself, "This is great." But what if people are actually consuming this content asset and not getting what they actually came there for? What if they're actually having a really shitty experience, where they're getting to the end of that content asset and they're thinking, "Boy, this was completely useless.

This was SEO games that basically caught me and got me to read all the way through." So across all of our customers, one of the first things we do is we create this quad chart where we have one axis is impressions, and the other axis is either conversions or brand affinity.

And so they can easily tell which are the assets and which are the experiences that are driving a ton of traffic, but they're getting people to leave and never come back, and that's what we call corrosive.

So how do you counter that, given that most of our brands have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers? One website is not gonna work for everyone, right? So dynamic fluid websites.

What's more important in the AI era? Trust, traffic, or personalization?

I'm gonna go with personalization, because I think personalization drives trust, and, um, ultimately word of mouth is going to drive traffic.

Thanks for coming on, being our guest.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'll, I'll definitely keep you posted on that.

I'm opinionated on these things.

Why those two?

I think CMS is predicated on the idea of pages and the proliferation of pages, which is categorically opposed to the quality of human experience as well as the quality of agent experience.

So it just makes no sense that it would, it would continue in the world of tomorrow.

Um, GEO because I think, I think the fundamentals of SEO apply, and I think as a category, um, it, it probably is just a subcategory essentially of what you need to do to do good marketing.

... you know, decided to call it something different.

Totally.

Yeah, I mean, we're calling it AI experience infrastructure, and I think it's, it's a needed kind of new category to, to articulate that in today's world, you need a new infrastructure for both the AI native buyer and the agent.

And so it is in some ways fulfilling the purpose of a CMS, NGO, and SEO, and all the other kind of, uh, acronyms that deal with the website, but I just think those, those kind of older stack, um, solutions are, are probably not gonna be around.

We pr- everything that is long-lasting and proven, everybody wants to write off as dead.

We love a clickbait headline.

We just, we can't, we can't live without it, so I think-

Uh, is there anything else that marketers, uh, think incorrectly about the purpose of a website that's gonna change in the next three years?

Yeah.

I think today we're just jamming everything into the website.

It's like this iceberg that sits above water, and it's gigantic, and it's just too hard to consume for both agents and humans.

I think we're gonna end up submerging 95% of this underwater in just an agent-to-agent MCP, um, that will enable really fast access to most of the information, and then the experience of this website or knowledge site will really become that 5% that's above, that's above water.

So could you talk a bit about, go back 10 years when you founded the company, what were you trying to do? What problem were you trying to solve? Fast-forward 10 years, has that problem changed?

We started Notch actually here in Cannes to some extent.

That was my first Cannes ever, 2016.

My co-founder and I were here, and our dream actually is what I think we've made, we've made real, which is to make the internet a more personalized, relevant experience.

Back then, we couldn't understand why there was so much great content and so many great digital experiences, and yet the experience of the internet for a consumer still felt really static and generic.

And so back then, we did what we knew how to do.

He's a design nerd, I'm a data nerd, and together we built a digital intelligence and optimization platform that now is used by most of the Fortune 500.

And then, you know, we, we started to, to partner on websites and what a good websites mean today.

What's the scariest part of putting all of your revenue at risk?

I don't find it scary.

[laughs] So I disagree with the question.

[laughs] I think, I think it's, I think it's scary to not change to outcome-based pricing.

I- we live in a world where everything is either usage or outcome-based, and I think it's one of the main reasons why you're seeing public investors call it a SaaSpocalypse.

So I think if you're riding on giant fees and four-year contracts, I don't think that's gonna be a game that will be played any longer, because there's gonna be companies like Knotch that go out there and say, "You know what? You know what? Pay us when we do a good job."

So how do you rationalize that change where you're essentially taking on more risk because of your pricing model?

Well, um, you have to control the outcomes.

But I guess talk about kind of the, the origin of the new product.

What we saw across the biggest websites in the world, which we measure with Notch, what we saw was the same thing.

There were more agents starting to come to websites than humans, and about a year ago, every single CMO became obsessed with GEO or AEO, which is, how do I make my website readable to agents? But ultimately, LLMs cannot be gamified, and the tricks of GEO, which is publish another 100 blog posts and 10 other product FAQ pages and whatever, it ended up really destroying the human experience.

So in the last six months, we've actually seen crazy high immediate bounce rates, like human beings that actually arrive to websites are getting a horrible experience because they're presented with this agent-ready, agent-first content.

So Ace, the origin story, was really how do we build a system that can personalize for each of these audiences without taking away from the experience of the other?

And that's making the agent side invisible to humans and, and vice versa? Like, how, how does it actually work?

Yeah.

So let me tell you how it works.