I’ve been circling one idea across my last several Unscripted SEO interviews: SEO isn’t a slice of the Venn diagram next to LLMs — it lives inside them, and the LLM shell reaches back over social, video, and email. My conversation with Zak Ali, GM of Finder US, gave that thesis a name I’m stealing: search everywhere optimization.
The absorption, not the death, of SEO
Zak — who came up as an SEO and made it to the executive suite — frames it cleanly, echoing AJ Kohn’s “surface optimization”: the discipline didn’t shrink, it got absorbed into something larger. The corollary is uncomfortable for a lot of practitioners: “There are two types of SEOs… and SEOs who haven’t realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding.” He put his money where his mouth is and dissolved his SEO team into a generalist growth org.
Retention — and the thing AI can’t do
His line that stuck with me: “The traffic you have today is as cheap as it’s going to be.” Retention becomes the KPI. And it dovetails with something I keep hammering — the two irreplaceable ingredients in any interview are information gain (a new tactic or factoid) and anecdotes. LLMs don’t have experiences; they can only poorly copy someone else’s. That’s the whole premise behind why I built human-certified content from my library of interviews.
Living in the terminal
We nerded out on the terminal-native stack — Ahrefs and Google Workspace over MCP inside Claude Code, and the fact that open-source SEO tools now put most of an Ahrefs feature set at ten dollars a month with an MCP of their own. It ties back to what Adrian Nikolov told me: AI is the steroids SEOs needed. Related listening: Federico Fancinelli on ranking entities and Mason MacUmber on agentic workflows.
Full episode above. Connect with Zak on LinkedIn.
Turn this interview into action with the SEO SOP: Build an End-to-End “Publisher” Agent — plus a free, no-gate PDF.