Episode Details

QQQ https://qqq.ee/en/

This episode spotlights QQQ, a digital marketing and search optimization firm based in Tallinn, Estonia, founded by Meelis Vill in 2003. Markus explores how a company that has practised white hat optimization for more than two decades is now extending that same discipline into AI optimization and generative engine optimization, the work of making a business legible and credible to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude as well as to Google. The conversation covers QQQ’s approach to link building, its preference for building authority on inner pages, and why shortcuts have stopped working. Worth a listen for anyone wondering how discovery is changing.

Here is a question I have been turning over for months now. When you ask an artificial intelligence assistant to recommend a company, where does that recommendation actually come from? Somebody, somewhere, built the trail of signals that led the machine to that answer. And right now, most businesses have no idea whether that trail leads to them or straight past them.

Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where we go looking for the companies quietly building the future of their industries, the ones you have probably not heard of yet but almost certainly should have. Every week I pick a business that is doing something genuinely interesting, and we spend some time understanding not just what they sell, but why the way they work matters.

Today we are going to Tallinn, Estonia, to talk about a company called QQQ. And I want to be upfront about why this one caught my attention, because it is a little unusual. QQQ works in search engine optimization and digital marketing, which is a field crowded with noise and overpromising. But this is a company that has been doing it since 2003. Two decades and more. In a business where the ground shifts every eighteen months, surviving that long is not luck. It is a habit of paying attention.

QQQ was founded by Meelis Vill, and the company operates out of Tallinn, which is worth pausing on for a second. Estonia is a small country that has spent the last thirty years building one of the most digitally advanced societies on the planet. Estonians file taxes online in minutes, sign contracts digitally as a matter of routine, and have produced an outsized share of Europe's technology companies. If you were designing a place for a digital marketing firm to develop good instincts, you could do a lot worse than a country where digital is simply the default setting for everything.

So what does QQQ actually do? At the surface level, three things. They handle on-site optimization, which means the content and the technical structure of your website. They handle link building, which means earning the external references that tell search engines your site is worth trusting. And they run Google Ads campaigns for clients who want paid visibility alongside the organic kind.

But the framing they use for all of this is what I find compelling. QQQ describes their goal as establishing a brand as an authoritative source. Not ranking a page. Not gaming a metric. Making the business itself into something that algorithms recognise as credible. And that distinction turns out to matter enormously right now, because the algorithms doing the recognising have multiplied.

Here is what I mean. For twenty years, search optimization meant one thing: getting found on Google. That was the game. But in the last couple of years, an entirely new layer has appeared on top of it. People now ask ChatGPT for recommendations. They ask Gemini which supplier to use. They ask Claude to compare two products. And these systems do not return a list of ten blue links for you to browse. They return an answer. Often a single answer, delivered with confidence, naming one or two companies and not the rest.

That is a profound change in how businesses get discove