Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast SEO Under Siege: 2025’s Collapse of Google Traffic
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Mar 9, 2026 
Malte Landwehr, CMO and Chief Product Officer at Peak AI with senior in-house SEO experience at Idealo. He discusses AI-driven collapse of organic traffic and why SEOs must shift from clicks to model-driven metrics. He covers grounding and source selection for LLMs. He explains multi-platform visibility, measurement without clicks, and how merchants should prepare for agent-led shopping.
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Travel Test Proved ChatGPT Can Replace Google
- Malte tested using ChatGPT instead of Google during a 10-day trip to South Korea and it successfully guided his itinerary and purchases without issues.
- The experience convinced him AI search adoption will accelerate rapidly and motivated him to join the space rather than fight the change.
AI Discovery Breaks Clicks And Volume Assumptions
- AI discovery breaks core SEO assumptions: there is no stable search volume, results are highly personalized, and many prompts never produce clicks.
- LLM answers often cite third-party discussions (Reddit, news) rather than direct brand pages, changing how discovery funnels work.
Optimize For Grounding Not Model Training
- Influence the grounding step (web search used to justify LLM answers) rather than trying to change foundational model training data.
- Prioritize making your documents retrievable and cited in the grounding process to appear in LLM responses.