In the "Only 1% of Brands Are Ready for AI Search" episode, Peter Kostandenou made a specific prediction about the percentage of website traffic that will come from AI bots in the near future.

What was his number, and what does it mean for how brands need to think about their websites?

Answer at bottom of email

Peter Kostandenou started his first business reselling PlayStation 2 consoles on eBay in the early days of the platform. By the time he was an adult, he'd scaled Hostopia from $3M to $60M in revenue and sold it to Deluxe Corporation for $124M.

Not bad for someone who began with a PlayStation and a dial-up connection.

But the story Kevin and Norm found most interesting wasn't the $124M exit. It was something far simpler. Peter accidentally fell asleep behind the DJ booth at a party. The moment was captured on video, and it went viral on TikTok.

Zero strategy. Zero production budget. Zero intent.

The lesson he drew from it wasn't about virality.

The moment he showed up as a real, imperfect human being instead of a polished tech executive, people connected. That insight shapes everything about how he thinks about marketing local businesses through Mopro, his current AI marketing platform.

His most powerful prediction:

When that happens, your website isn't just for humans anymore. It's for machines. Every piece of content on your site will be read, analyzed, and ranked by AI systems deciding whether to recommend you.

A local business that hasn't posted on social media in three years? "It looks like they're not even in business," Peter says, not just to potential customers, but to every AI system that evaluates them.

The roofing contractor story hit hardest: one bad review nearly destroyed a client's business entirely. Not because most customers cared. Because AI systems were using it as a trust signal to stop recommending him.

Reviews are no longer just social proof. They're infrastructure.

The search world is fracturing. Google still dominates, but ChatGPT, Perplexity, and TikTok Search are taking real bites out of its market share. The brands that treat these as separate problems will optimize poorly for all of them. The 1% who understand the unified picture are building moats that will be nearly impossible to cross in three years.

Peter (Only 1% of Brands Are Ready for AI Search) and Steve Wiideman (Future of Search, MMP #014) together map the full terrain, from technical foundations to behavioral shifts.

Watch These Misfits Episodes to Dive Deeper:

Retargeting is not "show the same ad to everyone who visited your site." That's how most brands do it. That's not a strategy. It's a waste budget.

The Smart Retargeting Playbook:

1. Segment by recency.
Someone who visited your site 2 hours ago has very different intent than someone who visited 30 days ago. Build separate creative for 1-day, 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day windows.

2. Segment by behavior.
Product page visitor, cart abandoner, and checkout abandoner each get different messaging. The checkout abandoner is your hottest prospect - they were buying. Treat them that way.

3. Tell a sequential story.
Ad 1 (days 1-3): remind and reinforce. Ad 2 (days 4-7): add social proof or urgency. Ad 3 (days 8-14): introduce an offer or incentive. Ad 4 (days 15-30): soft re-engagement. This is a narrative, not just repetition.

4. Exclude converters.
Nothing destroys brand trust faster than retargeting someone with an ad for something they already bought. Exclude purchase events rigorously.

5. Cross-sell in the post-purchase window.
The 14 days after a purchase are a retargeting opportunity most brands ignore. This is when brand loyalty is forming, and when a complementary product offer is most welcome.

Featured snippets (the "position zero" answer box above organic results)are both a traffic driver and a primary AEO signal. They're the most common source for AI-extracted answers.

To earn featured snippets: target question-based, long-tail queries where a snippet is already showing. Structure your answer with the target question as an H2, a direct 40-60 word paragraph immediately below it (no links within the answer paragraph), then supporting detail.

For list-type snippets, use proper HTML ordered or unordered list tags with concise item descriptions. For table snippets, use proper HTML table markup.

Monitor your featured snippet wins and losses. Competitors can displace you, and you can displace them by creating more specifically formatted direct answers. A featured snippet position today significantly increases your likelihood of being cited in AI Overviews tomorrow.

For help with email marketing for your brand, contact dragon.fish

The Brand: Oatley

The Strategy: Oatly didn't enter the oat milk category quietly. They entered it picking a fight.

Their packaging says things like "Wow no cow!" and "Post milk generation" and "It's like milk but made for humans." Their billboards have been deliberately provocative. They were sued by the dairy industry and turned the lawsuit documents into a billboard. The packaging literally says "This is what happens when you abandon social taboos and just say things."

The Result: By 2021, Oatly achieved a $10B valuation at IPO. In markets where they had strong brand presence, they commanded premium prices over competitors offering nearly identical products.

The Lesson: Picking the right fight, one your audience already sympathizes with. This is one of the most powerful differentiation strategies available to a challenger brand. The enemy makes the story.

The charring levels inside bourbon barrels are numbered 1 through 4, with Level 4 known as "alligator char" because the wood surface resembles alligator skin. This extreme charring creates a natural filter that removes sulfur compounds and produces the vanillin compounds responsible for bourbon's signature vanilla and caramel flavor notes.

The charring process was discovered largely by accident in the early 1800s and has been refined into a precise science. Different distilleries use different char levels for specific flavor profiles.

Buffalo Trace uses primarily Level 3 char for their flagship expressions, while some craft distillers experiment with Level 4 for heavier, bolder flavor profiles.

The next Collective Minds Society Cigar & Whisky trip is Feb 18-22, 2027

• Start your audit by querying ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with your brand name plus your category ("best [product type] for [audience]"). Document whether you appear, what is said about you, and which competitors are mentioned instead.

• Use AI to generate a list of 50 questions your ideal customer might ask that relate to your product or service category. Then check each one across AI search platforms to see where you appear and where you don't.

• Ask AI to evaluate your homepage, top product pages, and most important blog posts for "AI citation readiness": is the content structured with clear questions and direct answers? Are statistics attributed? Is schema markup present?

• Have AI draft a gap analysis comparing your content coverage to your top two competitors. What topics do they rank for in AI answers that you currently don't address?

• Use AI to generate a 90-day content plan specifically targeting the queries where competitors appear in AI results but you don't. Each piece should be structured to earn a featured snippet or AI citation.

• Ask AI to write updated meta descriptions and page titles for your top 20 pages, optimized for both human click-through and AI citation likelihood.

Sample Prompt:

"I sell [product] to [audience]. Here are my top 10 keywords: [list]. Search each of these as if you're a potential customer and tell me: do you cite my brand or my competitors? What would it take for my brand to appear in your answers?"

Most brands have never audited their AI search presence. The ones that do it first in their category gain a 12-18 month head start.

Q: What percentage of website traffic comes from AI bots now, and how should brands prepare?

Peter predicted AI bots will represent up to 50% of all website traffic in the near future. That means your website must be optimized for machine readability, not just human experience. Schema markup, clean HTML structure, clear factual statements, and complete metadata all matter more as bot traffic rises.

Q: How do Google reviews affect AI search recommendations?

Reviews are now treated as trust infrastructure by AI systems. Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all incorporate review data when evaluating whether to recommend a business. Recency matters: a business with no reviews in 12 months signals inactivity to AI systems, regardless of the volume of older reviews.

Q: What is the most underused SEO strategy for e-commerce according to Steve Wiideman?

Adding price ranges to title tags. Steve changed Skechers' title tags to show price ranges (e.g., "Women's Running Shoes - From $49") and saw over 300% improvement in click-through rates. The tactic is simple, takes minutes to implement, and almost no e-commerce brands have done it.

Q: Is TikTok a real search engine or just a social platform?

TikTok is now a genuine search engine for 15-20% of search behavior, especially for audiences under 35. Users search for product reviews, tutorials, recipes, and local business recommendations directly on TikTok. A brand without a TikTok presence is invisible in a meaningful slice of modern search behavior.

Peter predicted that AI bots will represent 50% of all website traffic in the near future on the "Only 1% of Brands Are Ready for AI Search" episode of The Marketing Misfits.

His conclusion: websites are no longer just for human visitors. Every page must be readable and credible to machine systems that decide whether to recommend your brand.

Watch the full conversation