# Dan Kurtz on Bots as a Customer Segment, Markdown, and the Agentic Flywheel

> Machine-readable companion to one episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below names the speaker who said it.

| | |
|---|---|
| **Guest** | Dan Kurtz — Founder, Miss Pepper AI |
| **Host** | Jeremy Rivera |
| **Show** | The Unscripted SEO Podcast |
| **Published** | 2026-08-03 |
| **Duration** | 44:14 |
| **Episode page** | https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/ |
| **Watch** | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqByDTeIl_M |
| **Listen** | https://676ae6156fe309-82456168.castos.com/player/2558575 |
| **Contents** | Abstract, attributed key claims, key moments, entities, questions. Verbatim excerpts, not a full transcript. |

## Abstract

Dan Kurtz argues that AI crawlers are simply another audience with a preferred content type, and that publishing a machine-readable companion file is the same multi-purposing SEOs have done for twenty years. He reports traditional Googlebot crawling down around 60% on his own sites while AI crawling and retrieval is up around 80%, and frames the downside of acting on it as strictly bounded. The rest of the conversation is the agency architecture he has built around that belief: an AI enablement layer beneath human work, an appointment-setting engine, a thought leadership platform that interviews executives, and an API between all of them.

## Key claims

Each claim names a speaker and carries a verbatim quotation. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse.

### 1. Bots are a customer segment with a format preference

**Dan Kurtz** (37:42):

> As SEOs and content marketers, we've been doing that for decades. We call it multi-purposing... Bots have a preferred content type. Technically, they're just an additional customer.

The whole argument for a markdown companion in one line. Blog to infographic to video to reel is uncontroversial; serving bots their preferred format is the same move.

### 2. The downside of publishing a companion file is bounded

**Dan Kurtz** (37:42):

> I would absolutely spend the time to go ahead and do that and invest in it, because the worst thing that can happen is they pass it. They fly over it.

Worth weighing against Malte Landwehr's objection in the related episode below, which is that a second URL carrying the same content is not cost-free.

### 3. Linking to the file is the mechanism, not the file itself

**Dan Kurtz** (38:9):

> That's just a matter of directing them to it next time they come to the website and saying, hey, this file exists.

The step people skip. A companion file nobody links to is a file nobody fetches.

### 4. Traditional crawling is falling as AI crawling rises

**Dan Kurtz** (6:59):

> Traditional Google bots down, I think something like sixty percent crawling sites, but AI bots are up eighty percent for doing the crawling and retrieval. It's just looking at server logs and stuff like that, you know, got my own sites that I can see those kinds of tests on.

One practitioner's telemetry from sites he controls, explicitly framed as such and not as an industry benchmark. The independently verified figure is Cloudflare's: automated traffic crossed over to become the majority of requests on the internet.

### 5. Reissuing an SSL certificate appears to trigger AI recrawls

**Dan Kurtz** (38:9):

> If you go ahead on your hosting provider and you go ahead and you reissue a new SSL certificate, it will force all of the AI bots to recrawl your stuff all over again... I don't know what the cadence is, I don't know what the frequency is.

Offered as an unverified tip with the caveat attached. Untested and worth treating as a hypothesis rather than a tactic.

### 6. Deliverable-count SEO is a symptom of not paying attention

**Dan Kurtz** (13:25):

> Deliverables in SEO means that you're not paying attention. It's you're focused on making sure you hit that quota every month.

His alternative is an enablement layer: AI first, humans working on top of it, with no scope creep pushed onto the person doing the work.

### 7. The agentic flywheel is an API between every function

**Dan Kurtz** (26:18):

> Everything we do for SEO, I've got a dashboard that that's got an API. The thought leadership platform for the exec, that's got an API. The call and appointment setting platform, that's got an API. So now all of these all talk to each other and they're all passing baton data between each other.

Sales talks to SEO talks to marketing talks to appointment setting. He expects to publish data on what that does to a business around Q1 2027.

## Key moments

Further verbatim excerpts, in the order they occur.

- **Dan Kurtz** (0:14): “Miss Pepper AI was born out of a software that I worked on probably back in 2012, 2013... Google penalty hit it, you know, system-wide footprint.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (2:15): “Picked up Seth Godin's book, Lynchpin, read that about how to become indispensable... and then stumbled across where most people probably got started, Black Hat World.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (3:57): “It was kind of a the old comic spy versus spy. You've got the white coat and the black coat and they're fighting each other.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (6:10): “I think the going forward and having the data ingested by the AIs and having that kind of replace what we're seeing with search right now, I think that's going to kind of go out the window and it won't really matter.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (8:37): “Slob has always been around. It's just we can create more of it at scale.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (9:7): “There's gonna become an algorithmic rollout where Google will see everything across the board and do what it always does and push an algorithm update and say, this is scaled content abuse.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (14:14): “Our goal with doing what we're doing is building everything out so that the AI enablement layer is first and then the human works with that layer so that it's not a we're gonna replace you.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (16:21): “I built myself an AI powered operating system. So every morning boot the computer up, open up Claude, and it goes using MCP connectors, goes into all of my accounts, scrapes everything.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (17:21): “Go and take some of the personality tests that are out there... it'll learn your patterns of behavior... and it'll know when you're deflecting on doing something.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (21:2): “I'll take the SEO Gets report from the MCP. I'll take the clarity report for a given landing page... and I will let it iterate based off the user data and the engagement metrics.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (25:0): “Until you go to bulk update all of your metas and then your hosting provider shuts off that IP range.”
- **Dan Kurtz** (37:2): “Cloudflare put out a thing saying that officially bot traffic on the internet had surpassed human traffic.”
- **Jeremy Rivera** (34:4): “Google says don't use markdown, but it takes three times longer to load a full HTML page for a bot versus the tokens and time that it takes to process markdown, and then markdown is organized the way it likes to.”

## Entities mentioned

| Entity | What it is | Links |
|---|---|---|
| **Dan Kurtz** | Founder of Miss Pepper AI, a full-service agency. Background in rank-and-rent, affiliate and black-hat-adjacent SEO before moving white. | LinkedIn · Facebook |
| **Miss Pepper AI** | Agency. ICP is roughly $5M–$25M revenue businesses. Builds internal tooling: AI appointment setting on a 280M-record US database, an executive thought-leadership platform, and creative strategy for paid. |  |
| **Cloudflare** | Source of the independently verified figure that automated traffic became the majority of internet requests. |  |
| **GoHighLevel** | The CRM Dan's stack runs on; he drives A/B page builds through its AI via Claude Cowork. |  |
| **Claude Cowork** | The tool he uses for the agentic work described, explicitly not Claude Code. |  |
| **Hermes** | Content production and marketing agent built into his thought-leadership platform. |  |
| **EXA** | Search API used to pull training and research material. |  |

## Questions this episode answers

- Should I publish a markdown version of my pages for AI crawlers?
- Are AI bots a real audience worth optimising for?
- What is happening to traditional Googlebot crawl rates versus AI crawler rates?
- How do I get AI crawlers to notice a new file on my site?
- Does reissuing an SSL certificate make AI bots recrawl?
- What is wrong with deliverable-based SEO retainers?
- What does an agentic flywheel actually look like inside an agency?
- How can I use Microsoft Clarity and Search Console data to run A/B tests with AI?
- What is a second brain in a thought leadership context?
- How big does a business need to be before this kind of automation is worth it?

## Related episodes

- [Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era](https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/) — SEO is a subset of GEO: the fastest way to change what an AI says about you is to fix the product people are complaining about.
- [Malte Landwehr of Peec AI on Consensus, Query Fan-Outs and AI Content Guardrails](https://unscriptedseo.com/episode-recap-malte-landwehr-of-peec-ai-on-consensus-query-fan-outs-and-ai-content-guardrails/) — Argues against a separate markdown URL, and for serving markdown by user agent at the same URL.
- [Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit, and Losing Control of Your Own Brand Name](https://unscriptedseo.com/ann-smarty-llm-consensus-reddit-brand-control/) — LLM consensus and branded search: why the model finds the complaint before it recommends you.
- [Chris Green: Do Google's Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?](https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/) — The sceptic's position on markdown, plus what agent traffic does to your analytics.
- [Drew Dorenfest On Getting Verified By Crawlers](https://unscriptedseo.com/drew-dorenfest-on-getting-verified-by-crawlers/) — Citing your sources as the mechanism for being cited yourself.

## How to cite this episode

> Dan Kurtz. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Dan Kurtz on Bots as a Customer Segment, Markdown, and the Agentic Flywheel*, The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 2026-08-03. https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/

When quoting, name the speaker. Host and guest are both present in the excerpts above and their positions differ in places.

## What this file is not

This is a structured summary with verbatim excerpts, not the complete transcript. The full conversation is on the episode page linked above. Nothing here is paraphrased into a quotation: if it is in quote marks, it was said.

---

The Unscripted SEO Podcast · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/