My guest today is Felix Welckenbach, Director of Product for Search and Discovery at HomeToGo, a marketplace where millions of travelers book their next dream vacation rental.

In this episode we’ll talk about how SEO is not a marketing function anymore at HomeToGo but a product capability, what this actually means in the day to day, which companies should also think about making a similar change and why shouldn’t just measure your AI visibility but put more emphasis on the sentiment.

Check out open roles at HomeToGo

Check out the full episode

Check out the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Key learnings from the episode

SEO as a product capability, not a marketing function: Home2Go moved SEO from a standalone marketing team into a combined Search & Discovery product org, owning everything from front door to checkout.
Merge landing pages with the core product: Separate SEO landing pages created inefficiencies like duplicate A/B testing, redundant engineering work. Combining them into one experience improved conversion rates in like-for-like testing.
Shift from solutions to problem definition: The biggest mindset change when moving into product was stopping to think “I need this implemented” and starting to ask “What is the actual customer problem?”
Leadership alignment is non-negotiable: This kind of org change won’t work without senior leadership buy-in. You also need a clear business case: higher revenue, lower engineering costs, or both.
Common metrics unite teams: Revenue and customer outcomes as shared KPIs made cross-team alignment much easier. Visibility and rankings are tracked but not the ultimate measure of success.
Use LLMs as a customer research tool: HomeToGo prompts LLMs to understand brand associations, compares them to competitors, and uses the gaps to build content and PR roadmaps.
Track AI search sentiment, not just visibility: Because LLM outputs are probabilistic and change over time, focus on directional sentiment shifts rather than exact word-by-word tracking.
SEO & PR work pays off in AI search: Years of data-led storytelling and media coverage gave HomeToGo a strong foundation for AI search visibility. Teams already doing PR + SEO together are naturally ahead.
Prepare for platform shifts without overreacting: HomeToGo is building MCPs and testing integrations with AI platforms, but complex, high-stakes purchases like family vacations still benefit from marketplace trust, curation, and customer service.
Double down on strengths over fixing weaknesses: LLMs associated HomeToGo with price leadership from their meta search roots. Leaning into that existing strength may be more powerful than trying to close gaps.

Auto-generated transcript

Niklas Buschner (00:01.484)
My guest today is Felix Welkenbach, Director of Product for Search and Discovery at Home2Go, a marketplace where millions of travelers book their next dream vacation rental. In this episode, we’ll talk about how SEO is not a marketing function anymore at Home2Go, but a product capability, what this actually means like in the day to day, which companies should also think about making a similar change and why you shouldn’t just measure your AI visibility, but put

emphasis on the sentiment. I am very much looking forward to digging deeper into all of those, so welcome to the podcast Felix.

Felix Welckenbach (00:38.26)
Thanks for having me.

Niklas Buschner (00:39.926)
So cool that you agreed to come on and thanks to Malte also for tagging you publicly under my post where I asked for new guests so that there was a lot of pressure for you to actually agree to do this. Yeah. Yeah.

Felix Welckenbach (00:50.964)
Yeah, you finally convinced me, having asked a few times. Thanks Malte for making the match.

Niklas Buschner (00:59.672)
Thanks, Martin. That was great. Let’s talk with something that recently happened for you and at Home2Go. I also already introduced it a little bit. But you recently moved from your old title, which was Director Organic Growth, to Director Product Search and Discovery. And I’d like to know what this is about.

Felix Welckenbach (01:19.624)
Yeah. Yeah. Very good question. And happy to explain a bit of what’s happening. So maybe for context at Home2Go, I very early on back then my colleague Dominik Schwarz, who you might know, set up what we called inbound marketing at Home2Go, which was always a combination of SEO and PR. And those teams worked very closely together to build up landing pages, ultimately landing experience to perform.

while in search on the onsite part, and then a PR team and strategy around building authority to data-led storytelling that led to coverage in media over the years. And that model has been proven pretty successful. think fast forwarding now to the era of AI search, maybe it’s a model that we started quite early, which many companies now pivoting to it. I’ll come to that later.

And then I took that over and that role pivoted into a growth role where it still included anything organic traffic acquisition. So from SEO to PR, but also social media. And then ask home to go as a company grew. We’ve done many acquisitions over the past years. We started out in when I joined as a scale up still, we are now a public company with a big B2B part.

as part of the marketing, the marketplace side and organization, we realized that there’s a lot more scope on the SEO and product side. And so while we’ve always historically been quite product led, we intensified that ultimately to refocus on SEO. So that’s my previous role of director organic growth. And

That means that we’ve always treated SEO as a product even in the previous setup, but now with a lot more focus with a dedicated engineering team, we had a common OKRs and goal set that the teams worked towards too. And this King book maps that we shipped ultimately. And what we then realized and why we made that ultimate switch at the end of last year to search and discovery is that

Felix Welckenbach (03:41.813)
There was a lot of inefficiencies happening internally. So while we’re having a dedicated engineering team working on SEO landing pages that have a lot of shared components with the actual search experience, it felt like it was distinct and rebuilding something that had big overlap with the main product already. And so that’s why we ultimately said, let’s reorganize that and let’s combine our efforts and

On top of that, also saw the search landscape is somewhat changing our landing page historically, but very, very broad destination focused, had a lot of content in depth content. saw that the sub has had become a lot more transactional over time. So it also warranted a change internally on how we organize for that. And then in, you know, in an environment where there’s less and less traffic.

Going to the open web, and I think we get to that later as well, we also notice lower click rates in Google Search over time, and hence more focus on conversion. And so we also said that all the conversion benefits that we are working on, and I still in this example call it actual products, so the actual search and browsing experience users have, is something that we also want to make sure that SEO benefits from.

cut down on the inefficiencies. Yeah. And as a result, made that change. it’s in a very interesting new view and super excited to now be responsible for all of that. And on top of that on-site discovery part, which now spans across anything from front door to inclusive still of SEO learning pages, the actual search and browsing experience to the property details pages, all the way leading up to the checkout.

It also does include the offsite visibility and discovery part, is inclusive of, I mentioned as your learning pages was also LLM search, AI search.

Niklas Buschner (05:46.094)
And what would you say, what is the biggest change connected to that transition from your perspective personally also, because I think it’s also very interesting from a leadership perspective, but then also for the organization as a whole.

Felix Welckenbach (06:02.316)
It’s next to all the, the organizational changes that were part of this. and then the structural changes, it’s ultimately also having wider responsibilities. So for context as a group, I mentioned already home to grass and marketplace side where, our, our team is, is focused on. And we also have a, what we call home to go pro and B2B armor, the software as their services that we provide to the industry and.

as part of that, it’s a, it’s a complex, it’s a complex product with multiple brands. so compared to other bigger, larger OTAs, we have a multi brand and portfolio strategy, which means that, the underlying technology that’s powering everything is, pretty much the same yet. we have different configurations, based on, on the white label and brand we are serving. So, you can think about HomeTripleGroup as a.

as a portfolio approach when it comes to brands. It’s between over 10 brands now, over 30 markets. So it’s quite a big complex organization around it that our team is looking after. And so the whole scale just massively changed. Whereas we always treated SEO as a product in terms of how we build it and how we collaborate engineering, but still very zoomed in on the SEO part. And then now…

It’s almost like we entered into a new room where all of a sudden you see all the other aspects of product as well and having exposure to a lot more different stakeholders with a lot different requirements. And so it definitely needed a change process to transition people also into new roles. So that was, I think the biggest realization as of now to say we are also still transitioning. So this is something we started.

end of last year. And one of the biggest difference I noticed is that in SEO, even though it was product led, we think about solutions quite a lot, right? Like we need this implemented in a certain way, like through certain technical specifications, whereas being responsible for the wider product now, which includes all the other channels from brand direct to SEM to affiliate to CRM, that’s ultimately channeling traffic to the product. All of a sudden it’s more about

Felix Welckenbach (08:27.573)
defining customer problems and outcomes we want to shape and spending time on problem definition. And so that was, I one of the biggest realizations to shift our minds from, is a solution A I want to implement to, all right, what is the actual problem? How can we frame it? How can we validate it? What does the testing strategy look like? yeah, a change process that was needed. And I think a real benefit as well that…

product managers we had that worked in SEO before now also were able to expand their horizon. And I see the team thriving in that new environment. I everyone is liking that new challenge. It comes with a lot of additional requirements to creating transparency to the stakeholders we are responsible for now and talk to right across the marketplace, across the home to go pro segment.

the way I led this in my role as lead for the team is to also give people the room for understanding the domain, starting out with diving into certain aspects of the product or even subproduct and build the knowledge from the ground up, so almost from the bottom up, rather than trying to understand everything at the same time. And we did that change at a very interesting time beginning of the year, which is…

our annual goal setting and planning, but also our OKR setting and goal planning for Q1. So we were thrown into the deep end, but in my judgment so far, with the verdict so far, it’s working out really well. The team is liking the change that we’re delivering against our goals and are slowly adapting to that new environment.

Niklas Buschner (10:17.685)
Hmm. Let’s go through the shift a little bit. You mentioned already that something you saw were inefficiencies that might have been a trigger. I want to understand a little bit better what you saw and maybe also what your thoughts were. And then also how you like came up with this idea, because if people are listening to this and they feel like, Hmm, maybe this is also for us. Maybe not. I don’t know. I think

It’s important for people to understand what to look for to understand if they might also have to go into that direction.

Felix Welckenbach (10:56.883)
Yeah. So what we saw were a few things. I think it started with.

With market dynamics, church dynamics overall, as in customer behavior, what are customers searching for? How often frequently are they searching for it? So we saw quite a lot of volatility in terms of search volume of segments that users are, or keyword segments users were searching for all the way from pre-COVID through COVID and then the years after. So there’s quite a lot has adapted.

At the same time, saw sub changes, right? We’re all aware of how the sub has evolved also since then. I think there’s a lot more transparency around pricing. So we think about the Google Hotel Finder, the Vacation Rental Finder, and Google’s willingness to become the category of, you know, category search landing page. And so this is where…

We saw also an opportunity to, for example, think about how can we then serve property details pages to Google, which we historically never did before. this is something that in the previous setup was a bit tricky to do because it wasn’t necessarily our core competency and the product itself wasn’t really set up for all of a sudden to be receiving search traffic.

It was built almost in isolation. Our team was owning landing pages that were built specifically for SEO. So as we thought about how to make the product itself that is serving millions of customers more search friendly almost, we realized that we also need to then organize around that and make sure that part of what I touched on previously, we are able to A-B test efficiently that if we touch, let’s say, an offer card and the information about a property that we show to users,

Felix Welckenbach (12:54.101)
twice because once we do it on SEO learning pages and then once we do it in the product, these were the inefficiencies we started noticing. And while I’m a big fan of actually of having had that ability to drive a dedicated roadmap within engineering team, because it made us super fast, there were almost no dependencies. We were able to ship it and we built up a ton of visibility over time. We saw that changing after and I think it’s also visible in visibility development. so

that came on top that all of a sudden the approach we had followed wasn’t really quite working and the way forward entailed a lot of real, well, real product work, work on the common product to make it more accessible to search engines as we saw that demand shifting more towards, yeah, towards those page types. Google incentivizing users that via sub changes. And so the conclusion was…

we need to change something and ultimately then decided instead of multiple product teams working on different ends of the product, combine it all and create one layer of responsibility, which is then ultimately our team.

Niklas Buschner (14:10.509)
But it sounds if things are more complicated now, like you have to align with more different stakeholders, you have to bridge the gap between how to build the best product and how to build the best product in a way that it’s also built for discovery and built for search. So would you agree that it’s like more complicated now to ship stuff with a new setup?

Felix Welckenbach (14:36.274)
It is more complicated, which in part, that’s where the fun is. That’s the challenge we took on. At the same time, if you look at the maturity of the SEO product, I would say that we reached a pretty high maturity rate based on, well, performance time spent over the years, they’d be testing done over the years. And in that new environment now where we have the common product,

I think then it is more complex, but then the opportunity we still have ahead of us is only going to be realized if we work across team and if we take a look at the product at a whole. I think that’s distinction before of having an SEO landing page that’s kind of outlying what we do, right? Like normally a setup structurally would be we having a bunch of offers on that landing page because what is the main intent if you search for

vacation rentals in Florida, you want vacation rentals in Florida. So we gave you just that, but it was accompanied by a lot of content, for example, by different filters or different features of property types. Does it have a hot tub, for example? Does it have a pool? Can I bring my pet? So lending pages were complex. Nevertheless, they were still sort of only windows into what we have on offer.

And once you click on that landing page, you would be transported to that actual search experience that we have. So there was still one step in between. And what we realized is that having that one step in between is somewhat unnecessary. I we used to have it and we needed it because just like a few years back, as I mentioned, A, the product wasn’t set up that way. Second, these landing page setups and designs and layout worked really well for us. And so.

There wasn’t any need to combine it back then, but fast forward, here we are. We have that need. And I’m convinced that a landing page where the main user intent that lands on is actually finding, combining, and browsing properties and ultimately booking one for your holiday must be the same page as the landing page. It doesn’t make sense to combine any longer if there’s no…

Felix Welckenbach (17:00.884)
structural, technical, whatever reason. And so this is the mission we set out to do to combine where that makes sense. Where drives upside, especially in the maybe more transactional keyword segments, where the real intent as we know and measured is exactly that. And we have some early proof as well that those landing page types now drive additional and well, enhance conversion rate if you will. for like for conversion rate for like for like comparison.

the new learning pitch type that we are testing, which is the core product, is working better than the previous page.

Niklas Buschner (17:37.846)
And can you walk us through maybe one change or maybe a project that is currently in progress just for people to maybe understand a little bit better what are changes now that are happening in terms of to the actual product, like how the product is changing, how pages are changing, maybe something that came up now. I know you’re still early in the face, but

already from the new collaboration circles that you had established.

Felix Welckenbach (18:09.185)
Yeah. So one project that we’re working on currently is to…

Ultimately combine the landing experience with the core product for some of our brands and some of the keyword segments. And exactly what you mentioned, it did require all of a sudden that we talk to other stakeholders, right? Because Land & Search and SEO was one stakeholder, but there were many other stakeholders involved. so when we first created the vision for how that should look like, we included everyone that has a stake in that. it was.

other product managers, it was other parts of the organization, the partner and the supply team. It was also the demand team on the marketing side. And then a large stakeholder, if you will, of course, also the engineering and tech teams, meaning that we needed to understand what complexity is behind serving the product from a common URL, serving the product with

ultimately, yeah, underneath the same stack. And a very concrete aspect, for example, is filtering. If we want certain facets of the product, let’s say a vacation rental with a pool to come to that as one of the most popular amenities in our industry. If we want that to be indexed, we needed to make it available. We needed to link it internally. so this was then something previously

not really necessary, needed to be available for the user, but now you need to also be search engine readable. so I think there’s a few decisions and trade-offs that needed to be made along the way to ensure are we getting the best of both worlds here and also some sort of flexibility. Right. So for example, we have a lot of traffic still coming from, from SEO, from SEM. That’s a large chunk of our traffic next to two brands and other channels.

Felix Welckenbach (20:17.173)
that is landing on the actual search results page of Form2Morate. land and then they have the ability to filter, set their dates, refine their searches, et cetera. Now that means that we also need some certain personalization ability, meaning a user from SEM, from SEO might need to see different elements on slightly different order. So the ability to also personalize and segment the product.

based on the context that information users have. And so wasn’t a single decision from the SEO team anymore, but required other stakeholders to be involved. One of the topics that’s still open and in discussion is how do we approach A-B testing? What do we do about, and how do we transfer what we use to…

what we are calling CI testing or causal inference testing. ACO-AB testing, how do we combine that with a now focused or much more CRO focused AB testing on the product side? How do we bring both together so we can allow and test for what’s working well to impact automated rankings? And also as a channel of that now, LLM visibility and AI search visibility while at the same time.

We make sure that we can run a B test, which we do run a lot of in parallel in the, in the product every day. And so it just requires you to, to think about, yeah. Other stakeholders, other stakeholder requirements at the time, at the same time, also an ability to compromise, because, if you have your, again, your solution in mind, this is exactly how it will look like. It’s likely not going to work. if SEO.

And search is not the main stakeholder, but there’s many others at the same time. so, yeah, that’s, that’s maybe an example of, of how that process is, is going and on how we’re approaching it.

Niklas Buschner (22:27.405)
And you said that you just started the transition. Basically, what do you expect? How long will it take like to, how would you say like having all systems operational? If you want to call it like that.

Felix Welckenbach (22:41.281)
Yeah, that process will be going on for a little longer. I think on the team side, we’ve made that initial transition. People are ramping up on the domain. think they’re becoming experts in their subproduct.

especially that unification project I mentioned, I wrote probably.

still take the majority of this year for sure at one and then leading into probably the third quarter of this year, potentially the fourth quarter as well.

Niklas Buschner (23:20.279)
Got it. And can you share a little bit maybe about what’s on the roadmap now for like the new search and discovery products or something that

Obviously, I don’t want you to spoil any secrets, but something that is on the horizon that maybe also people listening to that are like passionate users of Home2Go to search for their next vacation. What can they expect to be brought to the product?

Felix Welckenbach (23:48.279)
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a few themes that we are thinking about in, in terms of what features we don’t like to, like, I don’t like to think in features only more. So how can we enhance the, the customer experience at a whole wider, like end to end across all the different touch points. And one of the major goals this year is to drive further repeat and retention. ensuring that the product experience.

that we’re building is also leading to more customers coming back through organic channels, direct through app. We are also very focused on pricing and providing excellent prices and discounts and communications around that. Our industry is very price competitive. I mentioned Google is also creating a lot of price transparency by allowing users to compare ultimately also in the vacationer that find already very early on.

I’m sure LLMs will get there. We’ve seen the advances in e-commerce, with the, I think it’s UCP from Google, Check CPT, their own protocol ultimately to also allow price comparison and discovery and shopping on LLMs exactly. Then not surprisingly, AI is a big one. We actually just today released a press release and announcement that we worked on a new

version of what we group as Dash, which is our AI companion that features on the marketplace. it’s a chatbot, ultimately, that you can ask questions to about the property, aspects of the property, what aspects of your booking. And we were really able to cut down the amount of agent escalations that previously happened for the bot. So normally the process was,

You had a problem, you couldn’t find the answer, would call us up or send us an email. Now we have that customer service and chatbot for customers in between. They would use it and they would get answers to questions right away. I’d like around the property again, cancellation policies look like, et cetera. And then our customer service teams can focus a lot more about helping customers that have longer lasting questions or.

Felix Welckenbach (26:11.5)
questions that needed more research or help them with the booking even, for example. And we have already a variety of features that are live, not all of them are live on all channels like Web and App, but for example, we are summarizing reviews and we are thinking more about how can we make reviews more accessible, can we group them by topics, for example. And we have summaries of our descriptions, offer descriptions, meaning you don’t have to read through

Five paragraphs of text we can give you a summary of what the property really is about what’s exciting about it and Make it a lot more accessible and easier for you just to compare right and how I think about the product journey is that Right now there’s a lot of Cognitive load on the user to make decision we show them every information and they need to make a call based on that I think going forward I like to get

a lot more personalized with the recommendations, understanding user behavior based on the signals they leave on the site, and then tailoring the product accordingly and making sure we show only the most important amenities for that user in time for those searches that they do. And not everything. And so a lot happening on the personalization and segmentation side as well. We have…

a lot of users that come to us and travel with pets, for example. So how can we make their choice easier, right? Their decision-making easier by, for example, highlighting properties that are very pet friendly in an easy and approachable way. And then there’s a large bucket of initiatives that are further around even search.

abilities, if you will, so for example, enabling more semantic search. Even today, we experimented with a filter that allows you to put free text search. So if you like your A-frame houses, classic example, or you like a certain architectural style of a property that you want to stay in, we allowed you to put that into a filter. We would match that against our database of offers in a semantic way.

Felix Welckenbach (28:28.044)
Having understanding of imagery on what images are about. And this is something we are also further thinking about. So how can natural language be used to further enhance the experience, to highlight more properties, to find properties that you wouldn’t have otherwise found. yeah, make that journey a more exciting and tailored to how you are searching, right? Because we all know, you know, in Google, we can see it already. Everyone is forced to kind of use the product in a way that…

the product is best operating at, if that makes sense, versus now in AI search, you can put in whatever you like. And we see that in the variety of data, in ways how people prompt and search and speak. And ultimately, this is what we we also like to enable more on the home-to-go marketplace side.

Niklas Buschner (29:20.241)
And I mean, historically, obviously things are also changing a lot in organic growth. People in SEO and people in search used to think about KPIs like maybe SysTrix, Visibility Index, Rankings, Traffic. Obviously you also mentioned that that has shifted way more to critical business results like signups, conversions, revenue. Now the product world, I’m not a product guy, but from what I know, for example, from smart people,

is they look at like customer satisfaction survey like CSAT score, NPS, NRR, net revenue retention, all of that. What is a set of KPIs that you, as far as you can share, that you agreed on like in the new setup that everybody will work towards? Because I could imagine that this is also something that needed a little bit of alignment.

Felix Welckenbach (30:16.023)
Yeah, yeah, you’re right. And I the big benefit we have is that at Home2Go we’ve always operated very performance driven and especially revenue driven. So while visibility is part of our goal set, just to have a top line benchmark, there’s always been quantitative measurement in terms of traffic, conversion rates, things like revenue per user, and ultimately revenue that the channel at a whole drove.

And connected to, know, how are we organizing internally and like, how’s that shift going? think this made the shift easier if anything, because we are speaking a common language already. And the common language is the customer outcome. mean, like what, what customer outcome do we want to drive that is ultimately beneficial for the business. And that’s revenue that’s measured in revenue. The few strategic measurements that that’d be adding on the product side are users checking out on site or.

is like how can we drive bookings that drive bookings of users that check out onsite on the marketplace, one of the strategic measures, for example, but ultimately the common denominators is bookings and revenue.

I think on the marketplace side, hence why also that move from SEO, if you will, into that new org has made it a easier is that historically we’ve been working together across the marketplace sites already, Like SEO set sort of at the intersection. But in my mind, you can’t separate the demand side.

or the marketing side from the product side and from the partner side, because on the marketplace, they’re often very intertwined. have a lot of trade-offs and they need a lot of alignment. so that alignment is a lot easier if you have a common metric that speaks to it. And you can break down that metric, right? And say, okay, what is a leading indicator for maybe a lagging metric like revenue to go up? And then you can have maybe more specific operational metrics for the partner team for a common goal.

Felix Welckenbach (32:29.465)
one SEO team for a common goal and for maybe even a partner team for a common goal. And then we can drive those together. So this is how we think about planning overall. It’s an adaptive OKR framework, but that common metric is super important. yeah, rankings, visibility do play a role, but ultimately we are measured by outcome, customer outcome that we changed.

the output of that is revenue for the business. And so that’s also how we measure it.

Niklas Buschner (33:05.953)
And if you think about other companies, what would you say, which companies should maybe make a similar move or at least consider making a similar move like Home2Go did or is currently doing?

Felix Welckenbach (33:20.247)
Yeah, that’s a very good question.

Felix Welckenbach (33:26.595)
think it depends a bit on your business model, ultimately, what type of company you are, B2C. This product led setup, for example, is, I think, well suited for Marketplace. I think in my career, Marketplace is sort of the common trade. Started out in dating and matchmaking and like live entertainment, ticketing, ultimately travel.

And vacation rentals, I see commonalities between, you know, the, the setup there. so I, I’d say, I’d say it depends as well on, on, on that. So what is your ultimate, what’s your ultimate setup? and your goal set. But also what relevance does search SEO AI search have for your product? And then we haven’t.

quite touched on how it interlinks with LLM visibility, but ultimately what we see in change user behavior is that more and more of the decision-making process is almost like front-loaded through LLMs, meaning that research being done about products like, for example, we have a channel management software in the group called Smubu. And as a host, you can download

As a host, can sign up for Smubu and then you can create a property or if you have multiple properties also in there and you can sync calendars across multiple sites. For example, it’s an OTS that you like to list. So it’s very helpful product for hosts that want to maximize their exposure and not do any manual work on syncing calendars, setting pricing, etc. individually. so

What we saw there is that’s a product where normally there’s quite some research involved, meaning what players are in the market, what are the pros and cons. And we saw that there is a lot of that happening in LLMs already. And we know that because we see generally speaking that there is, that traffic is more engaged, of higher value and better converting. It’s definitely pure traffic or less traffic than, you know, maybe Google would send before and then the share is still small.

Felix Welckenbach (35:52.827)
But A, it’s growing and B, we’re seeing that traffic is of higher quality. So I think the decision is, do we as a business want to be working on that presence, A &A search? And is SEO and revenue from search engines relevant for us? And how much of that is then, let’s say maybe more marketing driven by a dedicated content learning pages and how much of that is actually part of the core product experience?

these could be then demonominators to decide, right, should I organize for that internally as well, or am I comfortable with having different teams? And I don’t think it’s a right or wrong answer. It really depends on your goals, your models, your traffic mix, and maybe the anticipated mix that you’d like to have. That really informs that.

Niklas Buschner (36:49.293)
And if people would start the journey, what do you think? What? What is that they have to get right? Like, do they have to have certain people with certain roles? Do they have to get the alignment right? Do they have to, like have a couple of first projects on the roadmap or what is it that if you say yes,

I will do it. Felix, convinced me. Thanks. Nice, nice episode. But what is critical for success here?

Felix Welckenbach (37:27.002)
Yeah, very important question. Few things come to mind.

One is…

you need a, you need leadership alignment in a structure that promotes that. Meaning if there’s a product team and an SEO team that make a decision to work together, yet senior leadership and management is not really bought in and not really on board with that, it won’t work. And so, A, that team has to do some convincing, get their buy-in, ultimately to make that case. But I think there needs to be alignment, top down around.

how we want to organize our team. So I think that’s one. Second is a clear case of what are we getting out of this combination of teams and responsibilities ultimately. And it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like, does we do it because we do it? It’s like, in my mind, there should be business case behind it. So the outcome.

should be better for the business in that combined sense, whatever that means, right? A higher revenue through maybe better search performance, for example, or lower cost because of lower engineering hours spent on two different products that are ultimately converging. There should be a clear case behind it. And if there is a clear case behind it, think the last bit is to also organize for it. And what that means is in organizations I’ve been part of and worked in,

Felix Welckenbach (39:00.173)
I don’t think there’s been a single one that has said, we like silos and we like to work in silos. think in every single organization, there was a push for let’s work on more topics together. Let’s drive topics together. Let’s work more cross channels. So, you know, all these almost a bit like generic phrases. I’ve heard a lot and a lot of lot, but it really comes down to is having actual projects that you can work on together.

That’s the other part and it’s connected to the second, is the business case. So in our, in our case, was building a product together that we think can perform better in search in LLMs, but ultimately also for our users.

And so there’s a common project that we work on, right? Or there’s other technical aspects from it. If that’s, for example, inclusive of server-side rendering, great. Then we have another stakeholder on board that’s ultimately driving this, and we can work on this together. Or if we know that we are dependent on the partner side, for example, in order to…

provide data from our supply partners that ultimately lead to how we communicate pricing or show discounts on a product, then that’s how common, you know, there’s a common project that we can then, that we can then take, build. so.

I would, yeah, so it’s, you know, it needs also substance and it needs a roadmap of these common projects going forward in order to make it successful. Because otherwise you can set some goals maybe, and you can have the writing on the wall, but unless there’s any concrete action steps and any concrete projects to work on, then I think this…

Felix Welckenbach (40:53.029)
this common ownership approach is probably not gonna work.

Niklas Buschner (40:57.869)
Another topic that you’re passionate about and that we somehow touched on a little bit with AI search and visibility. And that I also mentioned in the intro is, is AI search tracking. And, but I know from us talking before this recording that you are approaching it slightly different than most people. So can you share a little bit about what you’re doing there?

Felix Welckenbach (41:27.811)
Yeah, good point. Not sure it’s super different to what others do. So maybe for context, we started also early on to try to understand AI search visibility, right? First and foremost, because I’m curious of what’s happening, of how we are ranking up and performing and benchmarking against other, often larger OTAs. And as part of that, was looking for some solution. We found one. And

I’m also totally aware of the limitations and this big debate going on on how representative it is. For me, when I first started it, it was almost R &D doing some research, like trying to understand. knew it was not probably, in the beginning with tracking only a handful of prompts, not very representative of the whole market of users within AI search, but it’s also not needed. I just wanted a snapshot and oftentimes you have a snapshot.

That snapshot sparks some conversations internally. can then create a buy-in, start a project, all of a sudden, you know, it gets the ball rolling. And this is also what happened here. And we even used side note, our AI search visibility, for example, in once we had tracked it more comprehensively in an earnings call. And the message was, look, home to go is a lot more visible than most of our larger OTAs competitors in.

like classic search and here’s the picture in AI search. So we had some proof that what we were doing previously had also had good impact and positive impact on our AI search visibility. Most and foremost, I believe because we had extensive, had done extensive PR work over the years that led to a high quality coverage in essentially all the top newspapers in Europe and even the US. And so that set us up really well.

fall to doing well in AI search. We talked about this and published that. And yes, I said, I think that got the ball rolling internally to think about how we can be tactically approach it. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of shortcomings. to your point coming to, know, what are we doing differently? We started early on to try to use LLMs almost as a customer market research instrument, meaning that

Felix Welckenbach (43:53.125)
One of the first things we did was next to setting up prompt tracking is to compare and benchmark ourselves to our competitors. And even just qualitatively and say, what are, for example, associations that you have with the likes of Airbnb and booking.com and VIA.bo that you have with Home2Go? And what are associations with these brands that you don’t have with Home2Go and why? And then we got a pretty good list of ideas of

What LLMs think of us based on the entirety of the internet, if you will. And I think my takeaway, our team’s takeaway was, well, if that’s something LLMs know, there’s a chance that customers know as well, right? And that they see the limitations or the opportunities we have there. And so how we approached it then was to break that down a bit further and try to structure it. We haven’t built any tooling around it, but ultimately this sort of the next step.

We do this on multiple accounts, so A, on the PR team to also identify what are narratives out there about our brand that we can double down on. And what are maybe even narratives that we need to create because customers or LLMs out there don’t seem to understand that about our brand. Like it’s something that we understand about ourselves, but for some reason we haven’t spread that message before, or we haven’t really talked about this much in our marketing. And so now we have an indication.

that we can and we should. And the next step then is measuring is that changing the narratives perceived and what is the impact on customers that we see because of that. that’s one thing we do. then, yeah, maybe an example on, I think just last week, my HR team approached me and said, we’ve done some research on LLMs about our employer brand. So what do you know?

Where do we have an opportunity to influence what potential candidates hold roles to think about home to go? And I found that super interesting because internally we naturally leaned into the AI search side. think within the SEO team, we had a lot of understanding of how people search, their intent, how we build products that cater for it. had the relationships to different stakeholders like tech team, the PR team.

Felix Welckenbach (46:16.944)
But I really loved seeing that it is not gate-capped by us. It’s not us that had to do it, like us as an SEO team, but it sparked some interest within the company to also use LLMs and use AI search for the same exercise, ultimately. And I was really happy to see that, that this is the development.

Niklas Buschner (46:41.879)
That’s a cool and also very interesting an example. I immediately thought about, I mean, open AI and anthropic, they both should probably also do the same. you go to Claude and then you go to JGTB and you enter, Hey, I want to apply for a role at open AI and anthropic. Where should I go? And then they also should put their, like AI search or whatever teams on shaping the narratives. But.

Can you share a little bit how you approach it practically? Like if I would, for example, want to start it doing for radiant, would you recommend just having some, some prompts like, like tracking stuff? What do you know about radiant is radiant? A good employer is, what do you know about their agency? Right. And we considering working with radiant, what you know about them. Is that how you approach, would you approach it or like, can you share anything specific?

Felix Welckenbach (47:40.914)
Yeah. So we started out very basic, right? That’s had a few thoughts about, like had a few ideas about it. And we just put that prompt. think there’s some key aspects to it. One is, think framing the question a certain way. So it’s not, it’s not too biased as in like what’s good about own to go. And then, you know, you only focus on that, but try to be objective in terms of how you set up the prompt.

second is to observe how results are surfaced. So is that something that models typically answer just based on their world knowledge and based on their training data? Or do they also perform searches? And if they do, what sources do they use? So I didn’t mention that previously, this, think partly I mentioned the first tracking.

Prompts led to then understanding how we’re doing. It led to understand what sources are being used for answering some of those prompts we care about. And then we built a tactical roadmaps for internal our content teams, but also our PR team. So where we saw gaps, for example, of competitors being listed in relevant articles, and because we had a PR team that has already plenty of relationships with journalists set up.

We could use those, right? So was an extension of their work almost having the ability now to understand how LLMs, AI search are thinking about prompts. And so that was added. I think that was good and working. And we see that content we built also made it into sources. It pushed visibility. So I think there’s some evidence that the approach is working. Nevertheless, with regards to consistency, think

after the setup, it’s then, it’s a probabilistic topic and an algorithm underneath, right? So you can’t expect always the same answer based on the same question. I think that’s something that we haven’t quite 100 % figured out. But we also think more about directional results, right? Rather than, I don’t know, putting a numeric value behind it, we would just understand how the answers are changing over time. And if something we did has influenced it. So.

Felix Welckenbach (50:00.816)
It is more about the sentiment maybe of the answer rather than the answer has to be specifically always 100 % the same because we know and see that it isn’t. And we also see that, and I think Malte has talked about this multiple times with his team at BKI, that model algorithms are also changing, right? The variety of how often they do search and do fan out queries and search and highlight search results and search the search results.

is somewhat changing over time. And so it makes the tracking a little bit trickier, but also not impossible. And again, it’s not about super specific word by word correctness, but things like overall sentiment and PKS sentiment analysis that we use for that. But more so running these and then not even on a daily level, but even on a monthly level to see if some of the actions we have done are starting to…

to influence it and yeah that’s maybe some practical tips around it.

too scientific in the beginning, but rather trying to understand the themes and then break them down for you internally and measure results after having taken some action.

Niklas Buschner (51:19.737)
And which interfaces, like in terms of AI search interfaces, do you see as relevant for you? Not necessarily only connected to the sentiment tracking, also in terms of the general tracking, because, I mean, there’s obviously this talk of the town, I’d say, of Chetjibiti basically overtaking Google. I think everybody that looks at a couple of actual data points knows that the growth is

Insane and it’s like come to stay but that Google isn’t going anywhere and then I’d recently spoke to Malte also from from PKI for everybody that does not know him go follow him about perplexity where he was a little bit surprised or He was not surprised because he said perplexity has no mode. So Seeing the usage numbers of perplexity going down was something that he felt like it’s probably inevitable to happen

But I’d like to get your opinion on what is relevant. it AI overviews, AI mode, Chajibipuplexity, Gemini? Because there are so many options for people to track.

Felix Welckenbach (52:28.616)
Yeah. It’s a question. I don’t want to answer again with it depends. think that’s a, that’s almost an SEO disease, I think to say. Yeah.

Niklas Buschner (52:38.579)
Yeah, SEOs are turning into lawyers, actually, you know, I noticed that heavily that we started to do a lot of lawyer talk like it depends, you have to look at it.

Felix Welckenbach (52:47.686)
Yeah, never be specific. Never give anything away. say it depends.

Niklas Buschner (52:51.605)
Yeah, exactly.

Felix Welckenbach (52:57.532)
What we do is on top of…

search prompt and brand entity tracking is to measure referring traffic from LLMs. I mean, that’s the hardest currency we have. And how many users did we actually get from CHPT, from Gemini, from Cloud, et cetera.

What you can see there, I think it’s mirroring almost completely all the market share benchmarks you see out there that the vast majority of traffic is coming from ChetGBT. Now, I think what is hidden in those numbers is that Gemini, think Google disclosed last earnings called about like 600, 700 million or so monthly active users now. So catching up with ChetGBT.

But I think that’s inclusive of AI overviews, AI mode and the ability of distributing their product right to the users on search. You can see search converging, ultimately classic search with AI mode searches converging further and further. think you click on AI overviews now on search and see more, you’re getting directly into AI mode. Right on desktop, example, AI mode.

is already the standard button. If you hit enter, you can still get regular search results, but if you, know, the button is AI mode. So you click, you get into AI mode. And so you can see that experience converging further and further. And so I think a large user, a large amount of users that are using AI mode and AI overviews that engage with those anyway. And then the few that actually do click out, they’re then disguised as Google referrers. So we won’t know.

Felix Welckenbach (54:45.232)
On top of that, think there’s a large amount of, of users that we can’t even track. So even tracking, right? Like we all, we’re grown up in an area where performance marketing was, performance marketing era, where we were able to track everything, like every single touch point. think that’s gotten a lot more opaque now. I platforms make it harder and harder to track, users coming from their platforms to your website, the few that still do. And so.

We, for example, also see that. Not only has referral traffic massively increased from LLMs, so that growth you were talking about, we definitely see that in the numbers. think year on year it’s crazy. But we also see that traffic is not growing as much anymore. So there seems to be some sort of seasonality now that usually happens in our industry. Also be present in the numbers coming from LLMs.

And so we don’t necessarily think about, we need to optimize now for Gemini or for Chatchi BT or for Claude. really think about, right, how can we influence our like off home to go platform visibility together? Right. And almost like we approached building search visibility over the years, which was

Not really saying, we do it for Google or for Bing or for Yandex or Cessna or other search engines. We follow the approach in others’ conversion. think this is how I would think about this as well. That said, I know that the majority of users come from Shred2BT. see it in the numbers. It’s the biggest consumer brand in my mind based on the numbers out there. And the marketplace side where I’m sitting on within HomeToggle group.

is also consumer brand. So I see there’s a big overlap there why we tend to focus on chat CPT in terms of visibility measurements, not too much on perplexity, to be honest. then, Gemini and Google as said, I think it’s hard to differentiate between the exact surface on Google that users came from. And given everyone is somehow using Google search results anyway, think it all comes back to that. if we do well on Google, then we are not doing too bad on these other.

Felix Welckenbach (57:06.971)
surfaces that leverage those results.

Niklas Buschner (57:09.739)
Maybe a question around bridging the, the, the two main topics we focused on a product and then, be like AI search visibility tracking, et cetera. chat GPT has recently made the move to integrate more and more apps basically into the chat GPT product. also for example, with, booking.com. So I’m not a hundred percent aware if it’s already live in Germany or the EU, but.

It seems that this is a strategy where they just want to bring the interfaces from well-known brands and products to the chat GPT product. Is this also something that you could see happening for home to go on? Or maybe is there already something happening that you can share? So what’s your take on this bringing the products into the AI chatbots?

Felix Welckenbach (58:07.315)
Yeah, definitely something we are working on. actually looked at a demo two days ago on an MCP home to go alpha product, if you will, that brings our inventory and search experience onto platforms. Maybe to zoom out a little bit from that. think I’m not too sure if everyone’s aware of like the OTA space, but

I think the number of times OTAs and platforms have been pronounced dead is correlating with how many times SEO has been called dead. Similar approach, right? Always the fear of disintermediation, the next disruption, technical disruption, surface more direct results and pull more direct supply, et cetera. I think there’s some truth in there, right? And at the same time, how we think about it is that…

with regards to platforms at Platform Shift. And by the way, think OpenAI is, there’s some internal memos. think Pip Klöckner mentioned it in one of his podcasts as well. It’s pretty clear that they want to become the next operating system, right? Like ChatGBT and the likes, they want to be your standard choice and then route any type of action, task, question from there on. Which means that, I think for us, this is an opportunity to bring our really good inventory.

Got pricing, good curation, ultimately, data quality, user reviews, et cetera, to that space. I think there’s strategic decisions to be made to what extent. I believe Amazon has decided not allow perplexity, in your example, to use any of their data because they have more to lose than to win. They want to keep the user within their ecosystem. If anything, they want to use their bot roofers in order to go shopping on third-party platforms.

against that strategy and think there’s others in the market, larger OTAs potentially that will go along the same line. you know, making the connection to is this the end of the platform and the marketplace as we know it? I wouldn’t call it the end of the day yet. There’s a things we notice as well with disruptions overall. Adoption takes time right now. It’s like there are some users using OpenAI.

Felix Welckenbach (01:00:35.401)
Gemini, AI search in general for discovery. see this because of what I mentioned earlier, the quality of users, et cetera. And the quality of traffic is higher. There’s less coming, but the ones that are coming that they seem to have already made some decisions at least, and looking for options. And so it’s making sure we influence that decision-making and having narratives in place for that to happen as much as we can.

Ultimately, I there’s a lot that protects platforms, nevertheless, right? So our supplier relationships we built over years. If you look at the supply side of Home2Go, it’s very different aggregation levels from the layers from the single host to a small property manager that’s managing a few properties to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands, to larger OTA partners and…

I don’t even know if platforms have the incentives to build integrations with all of those, right? And the product then, I think, stands unfolds with the amount of choice you have, the inventory you present. Ultimately also, a lot goes wrong in travel, right? Like we know this from our customer service requests. I can see use cases of users using AI search to book, but do I want to risk my annual…

a family vacation with my wife and kids and leave it to ChachiBT. What if something goes wrong? You know, I’m the one to blame. I would, you know, this might not age well, but I would think that there are some products and categories that are maybe more affected by this first. So anything that’s easily comparable, right? Like e-commerce I buy, I don’t know, Samsung phone.

plenty of suppliers, it’s all about price, it’s about delivery speed, it’s about maybe customer, right? It’s a lot easier to compare versus vacations are quite tailored by what I want, very different to what someone else has want. And so while I see there are some use cases where I booked the same hotel, I’ve always again, again, and again, maybe let my agent do that in the future. And we certainly want to be present and test and learn with our MCP and bringing that into LMS, but…

Felix Welckenbach (01:02:52.736)
that the majority of users are now bypassing marketplaces and our curation, the trust they build, we provide payment options, all of that, and sending their agents directly to the property manager, I’d say, at least not in the near future that I can see that.

Niklas Buschner (01:03:12.215)
So would you expect, I’m, know it’s a, it’s a prediction and, but I would like to get your opinion on it. So could you see a future where, for example, what you did, I say a platform to the very scattered inventory that is obviously out there. So if you think about, have to go to all the individual hosts they have, like, don’t want to front anyone here, but maybe rather scrappy WordPress websites, et cetera. So you.

Basically did the have little heavy lifting of a platform to create the inventory make a great user experience for people have great pricing as you said So could you see a future where on top of that? So basically just as another interface on top of what you build having a chat GPT that has Probably compensated in whatever way so has access to your whole inventory and is also tailored more towards

enabling people to ask more specific questions about it. So not just very generic because I, I mean, I feel like so far it hasn’t been done. So what we had was always things with instant checkout, et cetera. So I think it never really worked like meta also, discontinued it last year. No, obviously everybody’s super hyped about the agent to agent protocol and the ACP and UCP and blah, blah, blah protocol.

So could you imagine a future where I can ask Chachi Biti and then Chachi Biti goes to Home2Go and basically I have a full conversation maybe with my family around the table. We have Chachi Biti in the middle of the table speaking to it. And it’s basically our personalized travel guide based on the heavy lifting data inventory, et cetera, that Home2Go provided. And it was a long question.

Felix Welckenbach (01:05:04.254)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly, right. I wouldn’t want to rule it out. Hence, while we are also preparing for it by making inventory available to AI search surfaces and platforms. So MCPs one, you know, UCP, agent to agent, you name it. So we want to make sure that for the use cases, that makes sense for us as a group, as a business, but also for our users that are requesting it, that we can serve it. Right now.

I think the integration that you have to download an app within the AI search app stores, it’s not very seamless. I would think that only a small share of users actually do that. the more it becomes standard, the more to use the chat, chat BT and the likes as your first stop, the more context and data and knowledge.

your assistant has about you, think the more…

Felix Welckenbach (01:06:07.317)
more compelling it also is as a use case, right, to use it. And certainly, think types of searches that are around which destination should I choose and where should I go and where is it warm in winter, for example, that’s already happening. And we see that in the data, right? That’s already traffic that’s left and publishers are seeing less and less of that because it’s exactly the type of questions you just asked. Now, the last step, so to say, to the booking, sure.

Probably, right? Like I can see a future where that happens for some use cases, but I can also see abilities for platforms to make it more attractive to go and book directly. Right? So for example, we have, we have mobile rates with some of our suppliers. So if you book an app rate, so if you book through your phone, we give you, and for your app, we give you a better price than if you booked on desktop. And we know that and we do that because we want.

And no, we know that users that use the app are more loyal overall. So we want to incentivize an occurrence that. And so I could also think of strategies where you use those platforms as another channel. you know, search is one now where I search is one later. And almost like a segue or, you know, an ability to attract them, ultimately give them an incentive to book directly with you though, right? Like.

I can see that happening as well. I don’t think it’s black and white, like it will happen, will not happen. I it will be very nuanced. I, I’d assume that platforms will like us included. Yeah, we’ll have good instruments as well to make sure that our interests are still kept that, you know, the share that is paid then probably as type of an affiliate commission is also a fair share based on the value delivered. So, a few considerations, but definitely preparing for that type of future with.

with the setup of MCP and Deluxe.

Niklas Buschner (01:08:05.761)
Hmm, very interesting. Do you also would you agree that the current time is one of the most exciting times since basically SEO has become a thing?

Felix Welckenbach (01:08:07.794)
Yeah.

Felix Welckenbach (01:08:17.121)
Yeah, definitely. said that to someone, I can’t remember last like a few months ago actually that SEO has always evolved and always changed, but it never changed that much. Maybe besides, you know, very early days where all of a sudden the algorithm was like flipping on its head and, you know, there’s a lot of volatility overall, but in terms of like fundamental changes, I feel like this is the biggest fundamental change to, well, probably our society in total, but…

zooming in definitely also to SEO and it also creates interesting debates, right? Like we can all see this on SEO, LinkedIn and X and so on where we have heavy debates about should it be called GEO or AEO or is it SEO? that all encompassing? And, you know, is it same tactics? Is it different tactics? And I feel a bit like that.

think Mike King mentioned this as one of his topics.

I think it’s bit of a missed opportunity. So yes, let’s figure that out. But I think the more interesting question and the more interesting application of this is to think about, okay, so we as teams and organizations, how can we drive that change? And it’s leading a bit back to what we discussed earlier in terms of setup. Because if your team is already set up that way and has worked in the unity between PR, content creation management and SEO in the past.

think maybe there’s not much change, there’s more tactical change, and then you can debate about, you know, all the content optimization and chunking and slicing and dicing, like to what extent you want to play that. But in terms of, in terms of organizational setup, you’re already one step ahead of others that let’s say SEO is its own channel or is part of marketing. You have a dedicated PR team. You maybe have a dedicated content team. You don’t have aligned goals.

Felix Welckenbach (01:10:20.3)
to incentivize teams to also work on that, all of a sudden it is an exciting opportunity, but how do we go about it? And I think that’s something that I don’t see that much discussed. Like what is the reality in companies and what needs to change in terms of team setup, incentive structures, leadership and change management in order to enable teams all to do work together and make sure that they can A, understand how we’re doing, then you know.

Niklas Buschner (01:10:29.655)
Hmm.

Felix Welckenbach (01:10:48.918)
maybe build a product features, product marketing narratives or content learning pages in order to influence that is something that I think I’m more interested in and would like to discuss and find out a bit more how others are doing it. And I think it’s also sort of underneath a narrative. So my interpretation is teams that have been already organized in this way and for them to go as…

is one of those, like we have always approached it as it’s PR, it’s data led storytelling, it’s press coverage, and it’s making sure that this is also reflected then within the product and paired with like, you know, a good learning experience. Those teams don’t see much of a change for them. It’s a national, natural extensions versus if you were very focused on

maybe just on site and off site and authority building and brand building is nothing you’ve ever been in contact with, then it’s much more of a change and needs, yeah, I think more of a change process to enable that. And it’s maybe then also driving parts of the discussions we are seeing.

Niklas Buschner (01:12:00.171)
Hmm. Felix, I know that you are, very passionate about this topic, but I also know that you have a team to run at home to go. So I want to wrap up our conversation a little bit. And I have a final question for you that maybe could also work as a segue actually to, do an update episode, a couple of months down the road. So my final question is, and I bluntly stole this from Lenny’s podcast, from the U S what.

didn’t we talk about that we should have talked about?

Felix Welckenbach (01:12:36.738)
question.

Felix Welckenbach (01:12:45.73)
Good question. Maybe very specific, but one thing that…

I’m sure if it was Lenny actually or another podcast newsletter I read this in but I thought about this quite a bit since then is

One of our, and I give you some context first, so one of our aha moments almost, when I did this exercise of tracking our brand associations within LLMs, also compared to larger or other OTAs. One of the findings was that we were often identified as price leader, as someone that would have good pricing. And why is that? Because we were, we are coming from a meta,

search history and legacy at home to go. That was how we started. And then we built all these services on top users could book, check out, contact customer service, use our payment, et cetera, over time. So we closed that gap, if you will. But I found that interesting that the association, because of the meta search positioning back then is still price comparison. And it made me thinking of

What if we leaned into more of our strength rather than trying to fix our weaknesses? And I think that will be my question. you know, isn’t that a strategy that things we already doing well, we double down on and do better rather than trying to fix weaknesses or things that we aren’t? And yeah, I think that’s something I like to talk about maybe in a different episode.

Niklas Buschner (01:14:32.651)
Nice. That definitely gives room for thought. think also food for thought basically for everyone, no matter for AI search or just in general in terms of company strategy. So Felix, thanks so much for taking the time for sharing so much. I feel like you’re not doing this often. So I’m very, very happy that you agreed to do it. And I feel like there was so much in for people.

not only in marketplace business models, but also in general, how to navigate an organization through that shift of, yeah, one of the biggest changes we have in this ecosystem since ever. So thanks so much for that. If people want to, like follow you, what is the best, place to, do that.

Felix Welckenbach (01:15:21.431)
LinkedIn is probably best to follow and to contact. And yeah, if there specific questions also, then happy to also respond by email or so.

Niklas Buschner (01:15:35.725)
Awesome. And otherwise, maybe if people are watching this and looking for a new opportunity, probably home to go has always interesting opportunities across, uh, probably not only product, but also other areas. So go check out, uh, home to go, I don’t know.com slash jobs or slash career, probably something like that.

Felix Welckenbach (01:15:54.243)
Correct, yeah. And also reach out directly. We are in fact actually looking for a principal product manager right now in my team to drive some of those topics I mentioned in the beginning. And if you are looking, if this sounded interesting, then yes, please do reach out.

Niklas Buschner (01:16:01.1)
Mmm.

Niklas Buschner (01:16:05.857)
Nice.

Niklas Buschner (01:16:12.457)
We will put the links into the description below. Felix, thanks so much. I think, yeah, we will watch the space closely. I will watch what Home2Go is doing closely and then let’s see if we’ll do a catch up in a couple of months.

Felix Welckenbach (01:16:29.86)
Sounds good. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun and great discussion. Thank you. Bye.

Niklas Buschner (01:16:33.623)
Thanks so much. Bye bye.