Very few people have run SEO as a line item and signed off on the budget that funds it. Zak Ali has done both. He started in search in 2015, co-founded the news blog Rant, and is now General Manager of Finder US — the editorially-independent financial comparison site. In this episode he makes a blunt case: the SEO job most people are defending no longer exists, and the one that replaced it is bigger.
From search engines to “search everywhere optimization”
Zak’s framing (a nod to AJ Kohn’s “surface optimization”) is that LLMs didn’t carve out a slice next to search — they wrapped a shell over the top of it that also reaches social, video, and every other discoverable surface. “LLM really is what took it from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization,” he says. “Now it’s really about being on every discoverable surface.” Finder now runs “content waterfall” techniques — an article becomes a YouTube video, which gets cut into shorts and reels.
Why he killed the SEO team
“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.”
Last May, Zak dissolved Finder US’s dedicated SEO team into a generalist growth org. Editors became spokespeople — “niche messengers” — because you can’t coast off a single surface anymore.
Retention is the real KPI
“The traffic you have today is as cheap as it’s going to be. It’s only going to get more expensive,” Zak warns — so retention should be a core KPI of every SEO. He’s watched Google Discover and News behave like a firehose that shuts off without warning, and points to publishers capturing that ephemeral visit into an email list before it’s gone.
AI is putting the customer first again
Zak pushes back on the idea that “slop” arrived with LLMs — homogeneous content is what SEO already incentivized. “What AI is doing is actually allowing us to put the customer first again,” he says. For a YMYL business like Finder, editorial independence and documented rating methodologies are non-negotiable trust signals anyway.
The terminal-native stack
Finder US has moved into Claude Code, calling Ahrefs over MCP so keyword research happens without leaving the terminal. Zak is blunt that the tooling has flattened: you can build your own LLM tracker on a free DataForSEO tier instead of paying for enterprise suites. It’s the same democratization behind OpenSEO — open-source, usage-based, and MCP-native. He and Jeremy also get into “second brains” in Obsidian, end-to-end “publisher” agents, and why information gain and anecdotes are the two things AI can’t reproduce.
Related episodes
Connect with Zak on LinkedIn. Find more episodes at unscriptedseo.com.
