I just finished recording with Christopher Gimmer — the bootstrapped founder behind Snappa and GoodMetrics — for the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and a few things he said have been rattling around my head since. This is the host’s-chair version: the ideas that changed how I’m thinking about my own work.
Robots with wallets
Christopher is wrestling with a question I hadn’t fully framed until we talked: when your own AI agent crawls a website to research something for you, is that a bot or a visitor? For twenty years the instinct in analytics was to filter bots out — I needed to prove real humans showed up. But agent-to-agent commerce is already happening in the six-figure range and climbing. As I put it on the show: now that these robots might be walking around with wallets, now I’m interested. The bot layer just became something worth surfacing, not hiding — and GoodMetrics being cookieless with an MCP server puts Christopher in an interesting spot to do exactly that.
Why I changed my link building
We spent a good chunk of the episode on how links actually get earned now. Cold outreach is dead on arrival — everyone’s inbox is buried. What still works is being genuinely useful and genuinely connected. That’s why I moved my agency’s link building toward IRL and podcast-centric strategies: co-marketing, real conversations with other founders, community events. Christopher’s line stuck with me — people link to a tool that solves a problem, not another wall of text.
I’m even piloting a new idea off the back of this: finding podcast guests who’ll drop a natural brand mention and request a show-notes link on the next show they guest on. Distributed, earned, relationship-based — the opposite of a link farm.
SEO isn’t a circle next to AI — it’s inside it
Here’s the reframe I keep repeating: everything we do in SEO now has a secondary impact on LLM visibility. An LLM is partly a fancy wrapper around a Google search, so crawlability, technical health, and rankings all feed whether you get mentioned by ChatGPT or Claude. And getting into the training data itself is off-site SEO — mentions, reviews, and yes, being a guest on podcasts. Everything we do will have an impact on LLMs.
The question I’m carrying forward
Christopher left me with the challenge every bootstrapper is facing: the tried-and-true content playbook is getting squeezed, so what comes next? My early answers — affiliates (a good reminder from past guest Nick Eubanks), podcasting as a channel, and the slow, unglamorous work of building an actual community. Google isn’t giving away traffic like it used to. So we build the audience ourselves.
Listen to the full episode: Christopher Gimmer on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. More about how I work at jeremyriveraseo.com/about, and the tools and services behind all this at SEO Arcade.