Jes Scholz describes herself as an SEO futurist. Not what works today, but what will keep brands relevant in three to ten years. She spent years as International Digital Director at Ringier, a major Swiss media company, leading digital transformation across 140+ media and e-commerce brands before moving into independent consulting.
Her current work centers on preparing enterprises for a world where AI agents browse websites alongside humans. These agents read code in text-based mode, abandon sites at the first sign of friction, and feel zero brand loyalty. The interstitial popups, cookie walls, and conversion tricks that worked on humans fail completely on bots. Jes sees this not as a crisis but as a long-overdue correction: the web was supposed to be built on semantic standards, and AI agents are simply enforcing what developers should have been doing all along.
On the podcast, she argued that a decade of obsessing over clicks and conversions has corrupted brand marketing. Marketers got spoiled by granular tracking, optimizing for 24-hour attribution windows while ignoring fundamentals like clean code and semantic HTML. The result: a generation of websites built to manipulate human psychology, and those manipulation tactics are invisible to AI agents that parse code rather than see visual design. Her practical advice cuts through the noise: test your website by asking ChatGPT to complete your conversion goal, view your site through a text-based browser like Links, and accept that younger marketers will need to learn how to operate without perfect attribution. The brands that will thrive aren't scrambling to add AI features. They're the ones that built solid technical foundations all along.
AI agents are abandoning websites with bad code. Short-term metrics broke marketing. Now AI is forcing a correction.
