In my consulting work I keep coming back to one uncomfortable truth: too many businesses treat Google like an endless ocean they can fish in every day, and never build an audience they actually own. Four days before this interview I proved the opposite to myself — I had an idea, bought a domain, stood up a WordPress site with REST credentials, handed it to Claude Code, and had humancertifiedcontent.com live within hours. So when Adrian Nikolov, founder of Haide Digital, sat down with me, we were speaking the same language: AI is not the thing taking our jobs, it is the thing letting us finally do the whole job.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation on Castos, or read Adrian’s own recap on the Haide blog.
Don’t Fear It, Grab the Bull by the Horns
The more you cower in fear of the factor that might take your job, the more likely that factor is to take it. Adrian founded Haide about six months ago on exactly that instinct: driven by the idea that AI would take our jobs, he decided to make AI do our jobs better. He has 18 years in SEO and digital marketing, he is a certified Google expert who also runs ads, but SEO is his main game, and Haide means “let’s go” in Bulgarian.
The WordPress Community We Let Slip Away
Adrian and I share a soft spot and a frustration for WordPress. Rand Fishkin and I were discussing on LinkedIn how we lost the community aspect of our own websites to social media, in part because we let comment sections get spammed to death and then ignored them. There is no reason liking, commenting, and building community was not baseline in WordPress 3.2. Adrian’s line stuck with me: imagine if WordPress comments had been built with the quality of Reddit — we would all be told to build a WordPress community to rank in AI instead of relying on Reddit and YouTube.
@unscriptedpodcasts Adrian Nikolov on Unscripted SEO: are you showing up where your customers are looking? business owners need to realize that buyers are researching you on large language models like chatGPT. if you’re not visible, you’re missing out! how are you making your business trustworthy online? #businessgrowth #digitalmarketing #trustworthiness
Owning Your Audience, Even for Introverts
Owning your own audience is mandatory now, but Adrian raised the honest objection: not everyone is built for it. Plenty of successful founders are introverts who are shy on camera and have no social media. His view is that AI fills that gap — the system does not require your face, you edit the comments and get the presence without being the one posting daily on TikTok. He called it turning introverts into social people, and I think that latitude is genuinely new.
Watch Your Users, Stop Guessing
We both love Microsoft Clarity. It is heat maps, but more importantly you can watch a user bump around your site and see the broken image, the failed click, the mouse-rage moment on a non-clickable word that should have been a link. You can see the behavior; you do not have to guess anymore. Adrian pushes clients to study engagement rate and optimize bottom-funnel pages with more content, or less, based on what the data actually shows.
The Honest Take on Prompt Tracking
Adrian asked how I feel about prompt tracking, and neither of us is a true believer. I use it as directionally as I can, sticking a finger in the air. The problem is non-repeatability — Rand Fishkin’s testing put it as high as 80 to 90 percent, so you are fighting for a sliver of repeatability. I pointed to my interview with Paul Bautista and Revolve: a hundred thousand visitors from AI tools sounds incredible until you learn their organic was five million and the AI traffic converted at a laughable rate. The only thing you can truly count is referral traffic from the LLMs and how it behaves.
@unscriptedpodcasts Adrian Nikolov on Unscripted SEO: is seo the future of digital marketing? 🤔 it’s not just about keywords anymore. you need to master ux, development, content writing, and even social media! what skills do you think are essential for success in this new era? #SEO #DigitalMarketing #ContentCreation #UXDesign #MarketingTips
Explaining SEO’s New Value
Adrian’s head-scratcher is the one every honest SEO is wrestling with: how do you explain the new value of SEO to clients who wonder if they can fire the team and switch to AI? His frame is authority and search everywhere optimization, packaged at Haide as organic growth engineering. Mine borrows Matt Brooks of SEOTeric: the LLMs are your least trustworthy customer service rep, first name Claude, last name GPT, and you can finally give them instructions. Claude is a people pleaser, ChatGPT is a people pleaser, so give them the information they seek. That is the shift, and SEO sits at the heart of it.
Connect With Adrian
Find Adrian at haide.digital, read his write-up of our conversation, connect on LinkedIn, and subscribe to his LinkedIn newsletter, Search Engineered. Want the full breakdown? See the complete episode recap.