The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Most SEOs treat link building like a chore. Kristiyan Yankov built a whole agency on it. He’s the founder of Above Apex, a link-building agency niched hard on SaaS — and in this conversation with host Jeremy Rivera he lays out one of the sharpest, most practical models we’ve heard for building links (and brand mentions) in the AI era.

Kristiyan freelanced since high school, went through “generalist hell,” and niched down after Alex Hormozi’s “one avatar, one ICP, one service” clicked. Now he runs SaaS link campaigns full-time — and he’s refreshingly blunt about what actually works.

In this episode

Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local — 5–10 viable strategies vs. a narrow local playbook

The real bottleneck isn’t knowledge, it’s bandwidth — why teams need a dedicated partner they don’t have to micromanage

Two pricing models: per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month (and why no lock-in drives lifetime value)

How to actually evaluate a link opportunity — 5–10 metrics, not just DR: “if it makes sense to me, it makes sense to Google”

The two best SaaS strategies: listicles/roundups (40%+ carry traffic and feed AI Overviews) and reverse expert-quote outreach (they’ve earned BBC links this way)

Anchor velocity, Penguin, and why spammy links get disregarded, not penalized (his read of the Google leak)

Timeline to impact (~30–60 days for well-run sites), the SMB sandbox, and the best DIY strategy for bootstrapped founders: three listicle “buckets”

The big-picture take: AI search is an extension of the fundamentals, not a replacement — and more than half of AI citations trace back to UGC platforms

Chapters

(00:00) Meet Kristiyan Yankov — from “generalist hell” to SaaS link building

(02:56) Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local

(07:07) The #1 hurdle: bandwidth (and the case for a dedicated partner)

(08:37) Pricing — per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month, no lock-in

(12:34) Has AI/LLM demand made link-building budgets an easier sell?

(17:03) How to evaluate a link: “Google isn’t more stupid than me”

(19:59) Is Bing / alternate-engine link behavior worth chasing?

(22:31) The top two SaaS strategies: listicles & expert quotes

(27:03) Anchor velocity, Penguin & spam devaluation

(30:54) Timeline — when link building shows measurable impact

(32:12) Advice for SMBs & the sandbox effect

(35:15) The best DIY strategy: three listicle buckets

(37:08) Where to find Kristiyan

Notable quotes

“You shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify — especially in our industry.” — Kristiyan Yankov“If I look at a link building opportunity and it makes sense to me, it would be the same for Google — because Google is definitely not more stupid than me.” — Kristiyan Yankov“The fundamentals aren’t going to disappear. When the hype is over, my team can still provide everything we do today.” — Kristiyan Yankov

Resources & links

Above Apex — Kristiyan’s SaaS link-building agency (he’s active on LinkedIn 5–6 days a week)

Go deeper on the mechanics in SEO Arcade’s complete guide to link building & authority

Kristiyan & Jeremy both count guesting as link fuel — that’s the idea behind podc...

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