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🚨 EXPOSING NOSTRA. AI 🚨
We have exposed some pretty nasty grifts in this space, but Nostra reigns supreme above all others (by a fair margin).
Since we have >30 min video and an intensive Notion document (linked at the very bottom of this post) I am going to just highlight the key areas below.
For those who don't want to watch it all - here's some time stamps that cover the most important/most hilarious parts of the video.
1:08 - Site Speed Scamming 101
4:20 - Beginning of the actual findings of what we caught Nostra doing.
5:25 - Nostra CEO tweets about how vitally important it is to have your most critical information above the fold on your site. Then we show that they almost exclusively marketed their fake site speed scores above the fold.
6:37 - The 'before and after' that shows how radically different the Nostra team made their site after they realized they were being investigated (perhaps my favorite part)
11:05 - Before: YOUR SITE PERFORMANCE SCORE MATTERS
.....
1 day later, Nostra CEO: "Yeah page speed scores are pretty useless" 😂
12:07 - "Nostra clients are 8x more likely to pass core web vitals compared to non Nostra clients"
*Lukas then shows how every single one of their 'success story' case studies are failing almost all core web vitals on their home pages....
15:10 - Jake dives into the technical shortcomings of the Nostra product, from them using a deprecated form of rendering and claiming (falsely) that Google still endorses it, to showing that any visitor logged into any Nostra-enabled site is not fed the cached pages... meaning that many of their highest LTV clients are being given a drastically worse browsing experience.... + lots more!
29:47 - Lukas shows all of the deleted tweets from the Nostra CEO. Suspiciously, all of them just so happen to be based on page speed scores... hmm.
The main points:
- Nostra uses site speed cloaking tactics to artificially inflate performance numbers on Google's Page Speed Insights. There is no ethical reason to do this. It is a tactic used exclusively by site speed scammers.
*A few people may point to the fact that Meta uses Lighthouse scores as one of many contributing factors to showing ads, so certain sites MAY see an uptick in paid performance on Meta while having these fake scores. This is a horrible basis to justify attempting black hat scams on Google tools. I'll be doing a whole separate video for this topic alone, but for now, just understand it is shortsighted and unbelievably stupid.
- They then used those artificially inflated performance scores as the central focus of their entire marketing strategy.
*They have released some hilariously inaccurate/misleading blog posts in the past week that try and claim they don't use cloaking and that their methods are totally ethical... you better believe we are doing a follow-up video that dismantles these blog posts paragraph by paragraph.
- Various current and former clients of Nostra have confirmed that one of their central selling points when convincing them to pay for Nostra (often quoting/charging thousands a month) was that their Google performance numbers were going to go up, which meant a faster site, which meant more revenue. A blatant, irrefutable lie.
- As we dug into their code, we found even more issues. Most notably, their 'crawler optimization' was stripping down pages for both Lighthouse (Page Speed Insights) as well as Googlebot, which means that the contents of any page 'client-side rendered' by Nostra in this way was almost entirely invisible to Google, as it saw basically nothing to crawl and index.
- All of our findings were confirmed by over a dozen well-respected developers in the Shopify space, including high-ranking engineers at Shopify.
- Before we notified Nostra of our investigation into them, Jake Casto (partner in this report) met directly with the Nostra team, including their Chief Lead Architect (?) and asked every question he could to gain as much context as possible. This meeting further confirmed all of our findings and even pushed some further.
- Hours after we notified the CEO of Nostra about our investigation into them and the impending report we would release, their entire site changed.... like... CHANGED. Nearly every mention of 'page speed' or 'performance score' was stripped from the site, including all of their case studies. Additionally, they renamed an entire product. Their 'Crawler Optimization' tool became 'Bimodal Dynamic Rendering'....
- That same night, the Nostra CEO then deleted all tweets insinuating performance score as a benefit of using Nostra (proof shown in the video) and began publicly talking about how useless speed scores are.
A metric they had long lauded as the single-most important aspect of what their tech improves was now "pretty useless" just a few hours later.
- It is imperative to know that we did not mention ANYTHING about our interest in investigating their focus on performance scores as a key marketing strategy. All of these changes were made by them without knowing anything about what in particular we were investigating. Not shockingly, the main scam we were highlighting in our investigation is what was wiped entirely (within literal hours) from their site/their founders personal messaging.
* go look at their site now and try to find any claims about performance scores on their home page. They even took them off the top of all their case studies. (we show this all in the video as well).
- Nostra has since continued to modify their code, resulting in some of their 'success story' clients seeing a 50+ point drop in performance scores (shown in the video). More current and former clients continue to reach out and share more stories about the many sketchy happenings at Nostra.
- Nostra also released a very weak response in the form of 2 blog posts that aim to justify their actions/tech. They have been sharing this with their clients and attempting to patch over the MANY inconsistencies and blatant lies they were caught in. As I said earlier, we will be doing a video dedicated to dismantling these blog posts in detail.
Moral of the story. No SaaS is going to plug in to your Shopify store and drastically increase your performance scores in a matter of moments. Any tool or dev or agency, no matter how fancy they look and how much venture backing they have, will be able to get your Shopify stores' mobile performance scores into the 80/90's under any normal circumstances. If someone says they can...
You are 100% being scammed.
Site speed optimization is a complex development process that takes highly-skilled devs dozens of hours to do properly. No tool can replace this. Don't be fooled into thinking otherwise.
For a deeper look into the technical side, check out the link below.
nostra-deep-dive.com
English
