The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Most SEOs are defending a job that no longer exists. Zak Ali () — General Manager of Finder US ( and one of the rare practitioners who took SEO from the terminal to the executive suite — argues the discipline didn't shrink, it got absorbed. In this episode he and host Jeremy Rivera () get into "search everywhere optimization," why he dissolved Finder's dedicated SEO team, and why retention — not rankings — should be every SEO's core KPI.

Zak started in search in 2015, co-founding the news blog Rant and growing it to ~100,000 readers before joining Finder in 2018 as a publisher, then head of growth, and now GM of the U.S. business — owning organic, paid, email, CRM, and sales.

In this episode:
- Why LLMs turned search engine optimization into search everywhere optimization (a nod to AJ Kohn's "surface optimization" (https://www.infinitevisibilitygroup.com/posts/surface-optimization/))
- The two types of SEOs left: technical SEOs, and SEOs who haven't realized their job is now digital PR and branding
- Why Zak killed the SEO team and rebuilt it as a generalist growth org
- Retention as an SEO KPI — "the traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be"
- How AI is putting the customer first again (and why "slop" predates LLMs)
- YMYL trust signals, editorial independence, and the regulatory "back door" to search
- Google News (be first) vs. Google Discover (entity optimization, and ephemeral traffic)
- The terminal-native stack: Ahrefs MCP, Claude Code (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code), DataForSEO (https://dataforseo.com), building your own LLM tracker, and a "second brain" in Obsidian (https://obsidian.md)
- Information gain and anecdotes — why LLMs can't have experiences (with the obligatory Darmok and Jalad reference)

Chapters:
- (00:00) Meet Zak Ali — Rant, Finder, and Finder Rewards
- (02:55) SEO within LLMs: search everywhere / surface optimization
- (05:26) Selling SEO's value to the executive suite
- (08:02) How AI puts the customer first again
- (09:17) Which pre-LLM SEO strategies survived
- (10:50) "AI is the steroids SEOs needed" & the Helpful Content Update as a correction
- (13:13) Is AI traffic its own channel — or a piece of the puzzle?
- (14:51) Regulated/YMYL industries and trust signals
- (18:21) Google News vs. Google Discover
- (22:06) Retention as the real KPI — and killing the SEO team
- (24:27) Paid vs. organic, and systems thinking
- (26:45) Tools he loves right now
- (28:29) Open-source SEO, MCP, and living in the Claude Code terminal
- (29:27) Second brains, "publisher" agents, and AI org charts
- (34:49) The question for the next guest: is the faceless brand dead?
- (40:44) Rebranding SEO → "search everywhere optimization"

Notable quotes:

▎ "There are two types of SEOs that exist today. There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven't realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding." — Zak Ali

▎ "The traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be. It's only going to get more expensive. Retention should be a core KPI of every SEO." — Zak Ali

▎ "What AI is doing is actually allowing us to put the customer first again." — Zak Ali

Christopher Gimmer bootstrapped Snappa to ~$10K/month off the back of a single blog post — and now he's rebuilding it AI-first while launching GoodMetrics, a cookieless alternative to Google Analytics. In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Christopher and host Jeremy Rivera get honest about what actually still works for bootstrapped SaaS founders as AI Overviews and paid placements quietly eat organic clicks.

We get into why "ranking #1" no longer means the #1 click, how Snappa is moving from drag-and-drop to an AI-first design editor, why GoodMetrics ditched cookies (and shipped an MCP server so you can query analytics through Claude or ChatGPT), the strange new problem of "agent traffic," and why genuinely useful tools now earn links that walls of text never will.

If you're a founder, marketer, or SEO trying to figure out the post-AI-Overviews playbook, this one's for you.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 From finance to bootstrapped SaaS — meet Christopher Gimmer
02:31 Snappa: graphic design for non-designers
04:01 The viral "free stock photos" post that built the distribution
06:46 Overhauling Snappa into an AI-first design editor
10:19 AI Overviews & paid placements eating organic clicks
12:53 GoodMetrics: a cookieless alternative to Google Analytics
18:34 "Agent traffic" — what counts as a visitor now?
22:50 Content strategy: docs, landing pages & tools over blog posts
25:26 SEO in the middle of the Venn diagram (everything feeds the LLM)
28:42 Link building today: distance to seed & SaaS as authority sites
33:50 A question for the next guest: life beyond the content playbook
38:25 Where to find Christopher, Snappa & GoodMetrics

CONNECT WITH CHRISTOPHER GIMMER
Snappa (AI-first graphic design): https://snappa.com/
GoodMetrics (cookieless analytics): https://goodmetrics.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgimmer/
X: @CGimmer

️ THE UNSCRIPTED PODCAST NETWORK
Unscripted SEO: https://unscriptedseo.com/
More from host Jeremy Rivera: https://jeremyriveraseo.com/about/
SEO tools, guides & the keyword forecasting tool: https://seoarcade.com/

You don't rank pages anymore — you rank entities. That single shift, Federico Fancinelli argues, is why AI search quietly favors established brands over the small players everyone hoped it would lift.

Federico is the founder of GeoSonar, an AI-search visibility platform born from a two-year GEO research lab. In this episode he shares what the research actually found: entity strength lives across three layers — infrastructure, narrative, and authority — unified by "coherence" across every channel you own. Say one thing on your site and another on LinkedIn, and the LLMs penalize the discrepancy.

We also get into the stuff you won't hear from Google: why their advice on ranking can't be trusted ("imagine Google as a bank manager…"), how every LLM searches and reasons differently, the move from prompt quantity to strategic prompt categories, and the accidental discovery of "prompt poisoning" — nudging a brand-new brand's grounding just by how you prompt. Federico closes on a hopeful note: even the small can compete if infrastructure, narrative, and authority are coherent — and SEO isn't dead, it just lives *inside* GEO.

Guest: Federico Fancinelli, GeoSonar — https://geosonar.ai/en · Research lab: https://lab.geosonar.ai/ · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federico-fancinelli/

Show notes: https://unscriptedseo.com/you-dont-rank-pages-anymore-you-rank-entities-federico-fancinelli-on-geosonars-geo-research/ · SEO tactics: https://seoarcade.com/seo-tactic-library/

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast.

AI didn't kill SEO — it raised the stakes on the fundamentals. Erika Braeger of Tenspeed on using AI to kill the pre-work (not the thinking), writing humans-first-but-machine-readable, and what AI actually cites at the B2B evaluation stage.

Erika Braeger is Manager of Organic Growth Strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency (organic, AEO, digital PR, design). A former teacher, she leads by building her team's confidence and stripping the busywork out of their day. Host: Jeremy Rivera.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 – Intro
1:30 – Building team confidence (the teacher's method)
3:58 – Innovation: killing the pre-work with Claude skills
5:45 – The new value of SEO & the LLM layer over everything
9:58 – Human-based content, SME briefs & the expert-review layer
16:44 – From a family food blog to B2B SaaS
22:13 – The red line: never rush a website migration
24:48 – Superintelligence? Still running QA
27:36 – Tenspeed's research: what AI actually cites

IN THIS EPISODE
• Managing a strategy team by building confidence
• Using AI to remove pre-work, not the thinking
• Writing for humans first — but machine-readable
• Website migration red flags to avoid
• What AI cites at the B2B evaluation stage

CONNECT WITH ERIKA
Company: https://tenspeed.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikabraeger/
Research — What AI Actually Cites for B2B Evaluation-Stage Prompts

️ THE PODCAST
More SEO interviews: https://unscriptedseo.com
Host: https://jeremyriveraseo.com
SEO tools & guides: https://seoarcade.com

#SEO #AEO #AISearch #ContentMarketing #B2BSaaS

Most agencies are still figuring out what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad from SEOM Interactive already has an answer — and it’s not what you’d expect.

Robert is the Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, a Philadelphia-area digital marketing agency operating since 2008. He joined the team straight out of Temple University in 2015 and has grown into a leadership role running the SEO function across a 40-person team.

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera and Robert get into the reframe that’s been driving strategy at SEOM: it’s no longer about learning AI tools — it’s about proving to LLMs that your clients are trustworthy enough to surface. They also cover why reviews have become multi-platform infrastructure, how digital PR with real owner quotes is pulling ahead, and the phrase Robert coined that’s going into Jeremy’s client deck: “humble experts.”