About the guest

Rob Bonham is an SEO with about two decades of experience spanning local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home-services clients. Today he advises several startups on SEO and works as a fractional SEO manager and director for a handful of agencies. You can reach him on LinkedIn.

What we cover

• Why the “agentic age” feels like the pre-Panda/Penguin wild west — and what that means for strategy
• Why publishing AI content at volume backfires on user signals, rankings, and client trust
• Measuring SEO in a post-attribution world where GSC and LLM data are unreliable
• Link building reborn: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and partner links
• Going independent: contracts, pricing, and filtering out tire-kickers

Episode highlights

Rob's throughline is that SEOs are now “stewards of the AI.” On the Unscripted SEO Podcast, he and Jeremy Rivera trace how AI has automated the low-level work — title tags, meta descriptions, on-page fixes — so the real job shifts to strategy and judgment. The freedom is real; so is the responsibility.

Which is why volume is not a strategy. Just because you can publish 100 city-specific pages for a concrete contractor doesn't mean you should. When the user signals aren't there, Google devalues the content — a reality Jeremy underscores with his own post on why Google Search Console data isn't reliable. Look like a hero for a few months, then watch the site dive.

In a post-attribution world, Rob argues you win by telling the right story with the data you do have — branded-search lift, conversion correlation, the “game of sums.” And he makes the case that link building is an easier sell than ever when reframed as footprint: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and legitimate partner and supplier links.

The back half gets practical. Rob and Jeremy Rivera dig into going independent — setting expectations to avoid scope creep, pricing with conviction (a higher price can itself signal quality), filtering tire-kickers with a small paid audit, and surviving enterprise red tape and net-60 terms.

Connect with Rob Bonham

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbonham

(Rob points people to LinkedIn — he's “tied at the hip” with it — rather than a website.)

About the show

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

Most SEOs are defending a job that no longer exists. Zak Ali () — General Manager of Finder US ( and one of the rare practitioners who took SEO from the terminal to the executive suite — argues the discipline didn't shrink, it got absorbed. In this episode he and host Jeremy Rivera () get into "search everywhere optimization," why he dissolved Finder's dedicated SEO team, and why retention — not rankings — should be every SEO's core KPI.

Zak started in search in 2015, co-founding the news blog Rant and growing it to ~100,000 readers before joining Finder in 2018 as a publisher, then head of growth, and now GM of the U.S. business — owning organic, paid, email, CRM, and sales.

In this episode:
- Why LLMs turned search engine optimization into search everywhere optimization (a nod to AJ Kohn's "surface optimization" (https://www.infinitevisibilitygroup.com/posts/surface-optimization/))
- The two types of SEOs left: technical SEOs, and SEOs who haven't realized their job is now digital PR and branding
- Why Zak killed the SEO team and rebuilt it as a generalist growth org
- Retention as an SEO KPI — "the traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be"
- How AI is putting the customer first again (and why "slop" predates LLMs)
- YMYL trust signals, editorial independence, and the regulatory "back door" to search
- Google News (be first) vs. Google Discover (entity optimization, and ephemeral traffic)
- The terminal-native stack: Ahrefs MCP, Claude Code (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code), DataForSEO (https://dataforseo.com), building your own LLM tracker, and a "second brain" in Obsidian (https://obsidian.md)
- Information gain and anecdotes — why LLMs can't have experiences (with the obligatory Darmok and Jalad reference)

Chapters:
- (00:00) Meet Zak Ali — Rant, Finder, and Finder Rewards
- (02:55) SEO within LLMs: search everywhere / surface optimization
- (05:26) Selling SEO's value to the executive suite
- (08:02) How AI puts the customer first again
- (09:17) Which pre-LLM SEO strategies survived
- (10:50) "AI is the steroids SEOs needed" & the Helpful Content Update as a correction
- (13:13) Is AI traffic its own channel — or a piece of the puzzle?
- (14:51) Regulated/YMYL industries and trust signals
- (18:21) Google News vs. Google Discover
- (22:06) Retention as the real KPI — and killing the SEO team
- (24:27) Paid vs. organic, and systems thinking
- (26:45) Tools he loves right now
- (28:29) Open-source SEO, MCP, and living in the Claude Code terminal
- (29:27) Second brains, "publisher" agents, and AI org charts
- (34:49) The question for the next guest: is the faceless brand dead?
- (40:44) Rebranding SEO → "search everywhere optimization"

Notable quotes:

▎ "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." — Zak Ali

▎ "The traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be. It's only going to get more expensive. Retention should be a core KPI of every SEO." — Zak Ali

▎ "What AI is doing is actually allowing us to put the customer first again." — Zak Ali

Most SEOs treat link building like a chore. Kristiyan Yankov built a whole agency on it. He’s the founder of Above Apex, a link-building agency niched hard on SaaS — and in this conversation with host Jeremy Rivera he lays out one of the sharpest, most practical models we’ve heard for building links (and brand mentions) in the AI era.

Kristiyan freelanced since high school, went through “generalist hell,” and niched down after Alex Hormozi’s “one avatar, one ICP, one service” clicked. Now he runs SaaS link campaigns full-time — and he’s refreshingly blunt about what actually works.

• Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local — 5–10 viable strategies vs. a narrow local playbook
• The real bottleneck isn’t knowledge, it’s bandwidth — why teams need a dedicated partner they don’t have to micromanage
• Two pricing models: per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month (and why no lock-in drives lifetime value)
• How to actually evaluate a link opportunity — 5–10 metrics, not just DR: “if it makes sense to me, it makes sense to Google”
• The two best SaaS strategies: listicles/roundups (40%+ carry traffic and feed AI Overviews) and reverse expert-quote outreach (they’ve earned BBC links this way)
• Anchor velocity, Penguin, and why spammy links get disregarded, not penalized (his read of the Google leak)
• Timeline to impact (~30–60 days for well-run sites), the SMB sandbox, and the best DIY strategy for bootstrapped founders: three listicle “buckets”
• The big-picture take: AI search is an extension of the fundamentals, not a replacement — and more than half of AI citations trace back to UGC platforms

• (00:00) Meet Kristiyan Yankov — from “generalist hell” to SaaS link building
• (02:56) Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local
• (07:07) The #1 hurdle: bandwidth (and the case for a dedicated partner)
• (08:37) Pricing — per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month, no lock-in
• (12:34) Has AI/LLM demand made link-building budgets an easier sell?
• (17:03) How to evaluate a link: “Google isn’t more stupid than me”
• (19:59) Is Bing / alternate-engine link behavior worth chasing?
• (22:31) The top two SaaS strategies: listicles & expert quotes
• (27:03) Anchor velocity, Penguin & spam devaluation
• (30:54) Timeline — when link building shows measurable impact
• (32:12) Advice for SMBs & the sandbox effect
• (35:15) The best DIY strategy: three listicle buckets
• (37:08) Where to find Kristiyan

“You shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify — especially in our industry.” — Kristiyan Yankov“If I look at a link building opportunity and it makes sense to me, it would be the same for Google — because Google is definitely not more stupid than me.” — Kristiyan Yankov“The fundamentals aren’t going to disappear. When the hype is over, my team can still provide everything we do today.” — Kristiyan Yankov

• Above Apex — Kristiyan’s SaaS link-building agency (he’s active on LinkedIn 5–6 days a week)
• Go deeper on the mechanics in SEO Arcade’s complete guide to link building & authority
• Kristiyan & Jeremy both count guesting as link fuel — that’s the idea behind podc...