You Rank Consensus, Not Pages: Malte Landwehr on LLMs

Your pricing page is not what the model is reading. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI wrote his bachelor thesis on PageRank, ran in-house SEO at Europe’s largest price comparison site, and now measures brand visibility inside answer engines for a living. His argument: LLMs resolve to consensus, so five stale Reddit threads and an old G2 profile will happily overrule the price you changed last week. Key takeaways One canonical page cannot create consensus. The same fact has to be findable in enough places that agreeing with you is the cheapest option. He is against a separate .md URL and for serving markdown by user agent. Same URL, different response. He also calls it cloaking, out loud, and says he would not do it to Google. Fan-out queries are a placement map, not a keyword list. Target the cited pages that already name several of your competitors. Watch the words the model adds that you never prompted. The pattern rotates; the method is to keep watching, not to memorise this month’s word. Two live manipulation surfaces, both already measurable. Hallucinated domains inside fan-outs, and paid advertorials being treated as grounding sources. On this page Why consensus beats your canonical page Against a second URL, for serving by user agent Fan-outs as a placement map Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Why consensus beats your canonical page If you only talk about your pricing on your pricing website and then you change your pricing and then there are five Reddit threads and two reviews on random blogs that still talk about your old pricing, ChatGPT will answer with your old pricing if a user asks about it.— Malte Landwehr The remedy is distribution of a single fact rather than optimisation of a single page. G2, Yelp, your own footer, social profiles, press release boilerplate, the help centre, the product docs. The goal is to make agreeing with you cheap to verify. LLMs are looking for fresh content. So refreshing content, updating it, and then also making sure there’s a machine readable last updated date.— Malte Landwehr Against a second URL, for serving by user agent I would not do that. As an SEO, I don’t want the same content on two different URLs. It wastes crawl resources. If humans land...