Scale & Strategy
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This is Scale & Strategy, the hydraulic press of business newsletters (we pack everything you need to know into an easy daily read).
Here’s what we got for you today:
- What is search experience optimization (SXO), and how do you measure it?
- Clawdbot (aka Moltbot) goes viral, with real-world impact
What is search experience optimization (SXO), and how do you measure it?
Zero-click searches are surging, clicks are shrinking, and AI is rewriting the SERPs faster than anyone can adapt.
Celeste Gonzalez argues the answer isn’t chasing more clicks, it’s making the clicks you do earn count.
Why clicks aren’t enough anymore: SXO is the intersection of SEO and UX. As AI increasingly answers queries directly on the results page, the destination click becomes rarer and far more valuable.
But if someone lands on your site and immediately bounces because the page is confusing or full of friction, you’ve wasted the win. Getting the click is just the introduction. The experience has to finish the job.
The metrics that matter: You have roughly 50 milliseconds to make a strong first impression. If the above-the-fold experience is cluttered, unclear, or overwhelming, users leave.
Google’s own patents suggest higher relevance is assigned to content visible without scrolling. That means clear headlines, obvious CTAs, and trust signals like reviews should appear immediately.
Behavioral metrics also tell the real story:
- Dead clicks (users clicking things that aren’t clickable)
- Rage clicks (rapid clicking out of frustration)
These are direct signals that your design is misleading or slowing users down.
The SXO testing workflow:
- Observe behavior with heatmaps and session recordings
- Form a specific hypothesis (e.g., “moving the CTA higher will increase conversions”)
- Test one change at a time
A real SXO lesson: Sometimes the most “beautiful” parts of your site are the biggest problem.
In one experiment, removing a huge hero image and replacing it with a clear headline increased time on page by 158%.
In another, simply making a phone number clickable boosted call clicks by 137%. Small, behavior-driven changes often outperform expensive redesigns based on aesthetics.
We can’t control SERP chaos, but we can control what happens after the click.
SXO shifts the focus from chasing traffic to serving users, protecting ROI no matter what Google does next.
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Clawdbot (aka Moltbot) goes viral, with real-world impact
Clawdbot has managed to cut through the endless daily flood of new AI models and actually capture the internet’s attention.
The assistant originally launched as Clawdbot in December 2025, but rebranded to Moltbot on Tuesday after trademark confusion with Anthropic’s Claude surfaced during its viral breakout. The delayed recognition follows a familiar pattern: most AI tools need time, organic adoption, and real user success stories before momentum truly builds, a trajectory even ChatGPT experienced.
Moltbot stands apart from the typical chatbot. It’s positioned as a far more capable AI assistant that can perform tasks, not just answer questions, living up to its tagline: “the AI that actually does things.”
The use cases are broad. Users can configure it for simple work, like clearing inboxes and sending emails, or for more advanced automation, such as connecting across file systems and apps to run entire workflows end-to-end.
Other differentiators include its open-source nature, multi-platform accessibility through WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Telegram, local execution on your own machine, and expanded memory.
The Deep View CEO Faris Kojok has spent the past few days experimenting with Moltbot and came away impressed. He watched it autonomously automate workflows like linking his Granola account with HubSpot, scanning his Gmail inbox every 10 minutes, drafting replies in his voice, and sending Telegram summaries.
Moltbot’s rise is already creating ripple effects across the AI ecosystem and beyond:
- Because it can run locally, continuously, users are rushing to buy Mac Minis as home servers. Memes about it are spreading across social media.
- Cloudflare’s stock has reportedly jumped in correlation with Moltbot’s popularity, as its viral moment underscores how edge networks may become critical infrastructure for agentic systems.
Still, Moltbot’s structure raises real security concerns. The company itself acknowledges this in its support documentation: “There is no ‘perfectly secure’ setup.”
The emergence of Moltbot reinforces a trend we keep seeing at The Deep View: users increasingly want AI that goes beyond Q&A and delivers real execution. What’s especially notable is how much access and information people are willing to hand over, despite known vulnerabilities and exposure risks, highlighting just how strong the demand is for meaningful assistance, even at a cost.
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