Next Biz Thing #413 qqq.ee
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 discovered, and QQQ has moved directly into it. They call this work AI optimization, and generative engine optimization, and the underlying idea is straightforward even if the execution is not. If a language model is going to describe your industry to a curious buyer, you want the material it learned from to describe you accurately, favourably, and in context. That means the same fundamentals as before, quality content, credible references, clear technical structure, but now aimed at a reader that is not human and never was.
What I appreciate about how QQQ approaches this is that they have not abandoned the fundamentals to chase the new thing. Their material is refreshingly blunt on the subject of shortcuts. They practise what the industry calls white hat optimization, meaning techniques that follow the search engines' actual guidelines and are built around providing value to people. And they are explicit about why. They acknowledge openly that the manipulative approaches can work in the short term, and then point out that they leave a website exposed to penalties that can erase years of progress overnight. That is a more honest framing than you usually get in this field, where the temptation to promise fast results is constant.
Their link building work shows the same discipline. Anyone can accumulate links. What QQQ insists on is that the site pointing at you has to have genuine standing in Google's eyes, because a reference from a source with no credibility carries no credibility to pass along. They manage the whole process for clients, researching which publications are actually relevant to a given business, negotiating the placements, sorting the terms, coordinating publication, and then reporting monthly on exactly what was acquired. They have in-house copywriters producing the articles when a placement calls for real content rather than a bare mention.
There is a small detail in their approach that I think reveals a lot. QQQ prioritises linking to inner pages rather than to homepages. Now, that sounds technical, but the thinking behind it is quite elegant. A homepage says here we are. An inner page says here is the specific thing you were looking for. If someone is searching for a particular service or a particular product, the page that answers that question precisely is the one that deserves the authority. Most operators take the easy route and point everything at the front door. Choosing the harder, more precise path suggests a firm that is thinking about outcomes rather than about volume.
The client roster reinforces the picture. QQQ has worked with Planet42, T1 Mall of Tallinn, Kinnisvara24, Funderbeam and Gjensidige. That is a genuinely varied list. Property, retail, financial technology, insurance. These are not businesses with the same problems or the same audiences, and a firm that can move between them has developed something more transferable than a set of tricks that happen to work in one vertical.
The team stays deliberately compact. Alongside Meelis, there is Merilin Kukkur, whose work spans content writing, strategy and keyword analysis. That combination is telling. In a lot of agencies those are three separate people who occasionally exchange emails, and the results show it: keyword research that never becomes content, content that never serves a strategy. Holding all three in one head produces work that hangs together.
Let me widen the lens for a moment, because I think what QQQ is doing points at something bigger.
For most of the internet's commercial life, being findable meant being ranked. You optimised for a list, and you competed for position on that list, and if you came tenth you were still on the page. What is happening now is that the list is collapsing into an answer. When an AI assistant tells someone which three companies to consider, there is no eleventh result to scroll to. You are either in the answer or you are invisible, and there is no partial credit.
That raises the stakes on everything QQQ has been doing for twenty years. The credibility signals, the quality of the references, the clarity with which a business explains itself, all of that used to determine your position in a ranking. Increasingly it determines whether you exist in the conversation at all. And the businesses that will handle this well are, I suspect, the ones that were already building real authority rather than manufacturing the appearance of it. The shortcuts were always risky. Now they are also useless, because a language model synthesising an industry does not care how many low quality links you accumulated.
There is something quietly reassuring in that. The discipline that QQQ has been practising since 2003, do the real work, earn the credible references, make the site genuinely understandable, turns out to be exactly the discipline the new environment rewards. They did not have to reinvent themselves for the AI era. They had to extend what they already believed into a new set of readers.
That is what I look for on this show. Not the company with the loudest claim about the newest technology, but the company whose existing principles happen to be the right ones when the ground shifts. Twenty years of adapting without abandoning the core idea is a rare thing in digital marketing, an industry that reinvents its own vocabulary roughly every other year while frequently changing very little underneath.
So if you are running a business and you have been wondering what happens to your visibility as more and more of your customers start their search by asking a machine instead of typing into a box, QQQ is worth a look. They are in Tallinn, they have been at this since before most people had broadband, and they are asking exactly the right question about where recommendations come from.
Thank you for spending this time with me. If today's episode gave you something to think about, share it with someone who is wrestling with the same question, and come back next week when we will be spotlighting another business quietly building something worth knowing about. I have been Markus J. Diplama, and this has been The Next Biz Thing. Take care of yourselves, and keep an eye on the small companies. That is usually where it starts.
