Adrian Nikolov, founder of the Bulgarian agency Haide Digital (“Haide” means let’s go), joins host Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to argue that AI isn’t what kills SEO jobs — fear is. With 18 years in SEO, Adrian makes the case for “organic growth engineering”: SEO + GEO + AI automation woven into self-healing topical authority systems that publish, measure, and improve themselves.
🎧 Prefer audio? Listen to the full episode on Castos.
Make AI Do the Job Better — Don’t Fear It
Haide Digital was founded on inverting the “AI will take our jobs” panic. Rather than cower, Adrian decided to make AI do those jobs better and deliver a service that’s highly AI-oriented but backed by vast SEO experience. As he and Jeremy note, SEOs have been rolling with the punches since Panda — and the return of real search competition (the “wild wild west”) is healthy after a decade of everything flowing through Google.
“Driven by the idea that AI is going to take our jobs, I decided to make AI do our jobs better.” — Adrian Nikolov
Self-Healing Topical Authority Systems
Adrian’s biggest AI unlock is becoming the developer himself — building topical authority systems that “heal themselves” through automatically collected data, pulling context from everything related to a project into one database. For a SaaS brand, Haide runs an automated discovery diagnostic (crawling with Screaming Frog, pulling data via DataForSEO through MCPs), then builds a brand voice profile by synthesizing everything the brand ever published plus everything said about it online.
Stop Just Blogging — Build a Duck-Catching System
The old play was “feed the ducks and you have a bunch of ducks.” But top-of-funnel traffic is worthless without a duck-catching system — CTAs, internal linking, and layout that moves readers to the next stage. Jeremy’s fix for incoherent, unlinked blogs: connect WordPress via the REST API, hand credentials to Claude Code, and let AI find related posts and build the internal links “10 times faster.”
“It means ‘let’s go.’ It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.” — Adrian Nikolov, on the philosophy behind Haide
Measurement in the AI Era: Track Referrals, Not Prompts
Both are skeptical of prompt tracking — Jeremy uses it only directionally (“a finger in the air”), citing 80–90% non-repeatability on identical LLM queries. The reliable metric is actual LLM referral traffic and how it behaves: he points to a big clothing brand with 100k AI-sourced visitors that converted laughably against millions of organic sessions. Microsoft Clarity, Copilot citation data, and Bing Webmaster Tools all get their due.
Authority Is the New PageRank
Adrian’s core belief: sentiment and brand trust matter more than vanity prompt tracking. The real work is interviewing the client for true brand values, building a prompt set that matters, then asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest what they say, who they cite you alongside, and which competitors they call a better approach — and why.
“I’m a true believer that authority is the new PageRank.” — Adrian Nikolov
SEO Is the Orchestrator
The Venn diagram of SEO and LLM optimization isn’t a side-by-side overlap — it touches on every edge. Link building and citations, content, and technical SEO all feed AI visibility, so SEO isn’t beside LLM optimization; it’s the heart of it. Adrian’s framing: SEOs are the orchestrators of the new era of digital marketing, and organic is what brands should be built around.
Connect with Adrian Nikolov
- Agency: Haide Digital
- LinkedIn: Adrian Nikolov
- Newsletter: Search Engineered (on LinkedIn)
