Greetings, ghouls, ghosts, and guests! May the spookiness of the season provide just the dopamine cocktail you’ve been craving with zero decapitations or hangovers! Are your products invisible to the Floofies? We hope not. That would be spooky! (Join the conversation this Halloween, as we host a panel on the topic: Agentic Commerce — Tricks, Treats, and the Future of Shopping).
Speaking of adrenaline IV drips, for our second Mapping GEO piece that seeks to answer, ‘How do people find stuff today?‘ How will people find things tomorrow?, I talked with SEO expert Jono Alderson. Jono speaks in frameworks, sees patterns where the rest of us see only chaos, and manages to make the end of the website sound both terrifying and oddly poetic. Read the full article to witness my complete psychological breakdown as Jono delivers an entire semester of “Advanced Philosophical SEO.” We talk about reputation hacking, AI-constructed reality, and other terrors. It’s fun. Really.
Ex) Me: In one sentence, what’s the biggest change in how people find things today vs. five years ago?
Jono: “They don’t click. They find their answer and have their problem solved in situ — and that fundamentally changes the role of the website and breaks capitalism.”
📣Announcement 1: The Conference known as Experimentation island releases its third wave of tickets today from 1-5 pm Eastern! This is a public release, which means you can share it broadly. Learn about all the performers we’ve announced to date, the speaker competition, and all the deals we have on offer! SO MANY DEALS!
You can save up to $900 if you have team members from in-house teams going together!
If you’re an agency or contractor, your in-house client or prospect can save $300!
This release lasts four hours, and 30 tickets will be released. First-come, first-served.
🌊Catch the wave between 1 & 5 pm Eastern today, October 29, 2025, on the Experimentation island website.
📣Announcement 2: It’s alive! 🧪For the first time ever, the Test & Learn Community and the No Hacks Podcast are crossing streams for a live, joint event—a Halloween special exploring the brave (spooky) new world of Agentic Commerce.
On Oct. 31, join Slobodan (Sani) Manić (No Hacks Podcast) and me as we co-moderate a lively discussion with Carlos Truillo and Luiza de Lange, two experts exploring both the practical and strategic sides of this eerie frontier. Prepare for the holiday season ahead with this conversation at the knife’s tip of agentic shopping.
📣Announcement 3: Dr. Kelli Hill is an #Ei2026 keynote speaker! Kelli has spent her career turning data into dialogue & evidence into evolution. She built the Efficacy & Research function at Khan Academy from the ground up, then united it with analytics and engineering to form a cross-functional team dedicated to learning together. Join us at #Ei2026 to hear Dr. Kelli Hill share Khan Academy’s transformation.
🪩Check out Kelli’s #Ei2026 profile page to enjoy Kelli’s walk-on song by Josh Silverbauer. It also has more info about Kelli and her talk.
Working with AI for analytics is different from using it for coding or writing—your prompts need to handle messy data, preserve analytical logic across multiple steps, and translate between business questions and technical implementation. This article shares practical prompting techniques that help AI Analysts move past frustrating loops and incomplete answers to build LLMs that actually think like analysts. Read the full article here.
This section is a roundup of TLC member-curated content.
“More isn’t always better,” argues Talia Wolf. “When you clearly define your prospects’ paths and level of intent, removing an option can lead to clearer decisions, faster action and stronger results.” Check out Talia’s article, “The psychology of a CTA button: Reducing ‘Choice Overload’ to increase conversions.”
Wanna get your product into Chat GPT’s Storefront? Katrin Ribant of Ask-Y’s delightful animated post is not only cleverly rendered just in time for Halloween and the holiday shopping season, it’s also a great resource, Charlie Brown.
Human eggs. Sounds like just another horror film image. But it’s also a concept that’s extremely relevant to optimization today. Learn more in Slobodan (Sani) Manić’s article, “The Zero-Effort Lie: How AI Is Accelerating the Death of the Internet.”
Most AI coding tools help teams build faster, but they don’t help them understand what’s actually worth building. Without feedback, speed alone just means producing more of what might not matter. The real breakthrough will come when AI learns from the outcomes of millions of experiments, using that evidence to guide decisions about what to create next. Read more.
The #convert-sations Slack channel is a treasure trove of insights and candor managed by Marcella Sullivan (TLC: @Marcella Sullivan ). Have you joined the convert-sation yet? We hope you do. It’s a great place to engage and learn more about fellow TLC members.
This month’s Convert-sations dove into some truly thought-provoking questions about the future of experimentation, the metrics that haunt us, and the tests that make our hearts race. From AI layers to terrifying app migrations, this round of community discussion had it all. Here are this month’s winners.
🥇1st Place: Craig Sullivan (TLC: @Craig Sullivan)
Craig tackled the question: “What happens to CRO if you can’t talk to human users directly because there’s an AI layer between every human-computer interaction?”
He shared his insights after being approached by companies trying to “replace” human CROs with AI. Craig broke it down beautifully: while AI can generate ideas, many are either recycled, irrelevant, or just plain bad. As he put it, AI is great at divergence — but it still takes a human to converge on meaningful insight. “AI is good at divergence, the convergence bit needs to be done by humans.”
🥈2nd Place: Till Büttner (TLC: @Till Büttner)
Till answered the question: “Which metric keeps draining the life out of your program? The metric that gets all the attention, but rarely delivers anything meaningful to your business?”
His answer? The good old bounce rate. Despite endless explanations about why it’s a poor measure for understanding real user behavior, many still cling to it. Till summed it up perfectly: “Fight against windmills.” His point reminds us how critical it is to focus on what truly drives value — not vanity metrics that refuse to die.
🥉3rd Place: Steph le Prevost (TLC: @Steph)
Steph responded to the question: “What is the scariest experiment you’ve ever run?”
“A forced push to app! For business purposes, not user purposes. Huge build time due to lots of complex CRM etc and then massive risk due to users not wanting to migrate to app. High risk, high stakes, and frustrating for the user,” Steph shared (we’ve all been there - and I imagine it wasn’t only the users who were frustrated).
We urge you to hop on to the #convert-sations Slack channel to see how other TLC members weighed in — and share your thoughts for next month’s questions!
Oct 31: 🎃TLC & NoHacks Joint Panel: Agentic Commerce — Tricks, Treats, and the Future of Shopping 👻with Slobodan (Sani) Manić (No Hacks Podcast), Carlos Truillo, and Luiza de Lange. 10-11 AM, CDT
Nov. 14: TLC Conversation: Ethical Experimentation with Namrata Aragwal. 10-11 AM, CST
Nov 21-24: The Conference known as Conversion Hotel
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