Adrian Nikolov on Organic Growth Engineering in the AI Era
Adrian Nikolov, Haide Digital · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Unscripted SEO Podcast
BEST QUOTES
“Driven by the idea that AI is going to take our jobs, I decided to make AI do our jobs better.”
— Adrian Nikolov
“That's actually why my brand is called Haide. It means “let's go.” It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.”
— Adrian Nikolov
“I'm a true believer that authority is the new PageRank.”
— Adrian Nikolov
Unscripted SEO interview with Adrian Nikolov
JEREMY RIVERA
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host.
I'm here with Adrian Nikolov, who's going to introduce the agency he's working with, which means "let's go" in Bulgarian.
He's going to tell us where his origins are from in the digital marketing world, and then we'll get into the weeds as much as possible.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Hello Jeremy, thank you for having me.
I am Adrian, the founder of Haide Digital and, as you mentioned, Haide means "let's go" in Bulgarian.
I have around — my God — 18 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing.
I'm a certified Google expert, I do ads as well, but SEO is my main game and it has been for more than a decade.
Haide is a fairly new company. I established it around six months ago, and it was inspired by everything that's happening nowadays in the world of digital marketing and not only — everywhere.
Driven by the idea that AI is going to take our jobs, I decided to make AI do our jobs better and just deliver a service that is highly AI-oriented, but backed up by vast SEO experience and knowledge.
Rolling With the Punches: From the Google Monopoly to the Wild West
JEREMY RIVERA
I think that's the play. The more you cower in fear — if you're afraid of losing your job because of X, that factor is probably going to take your job.
You have to grab the bull by the horns. And it's silly to fear it, because we in the SEO industry have been rolling with the punches since Panda.
We've been rolling with the punches since Google came out; we've lived with the tides of the algorithm changing and shifting.
What's most scary is that a lot of SEOs I saw grew to rely on the monopolistic power of Google to hold the search space. We had the invention of the Chrome browser; it proliferated out.
Alta Vista, HotBot, all of the alternative search engines died. Yahoo folded itself into Microsoft, which became Bing, and Bing became meek and subservient, and people legitimately stopped asking, "well, how do I optimize also for Bing?"
And instead everything from 2010 to 2020 was all Google — everything digital flowed through Google.
And now we have the return of what my other guest Paul Pape called it: we're back in the wild, wild west. The civilization that we thought was there, it's not there.
But it's great to have some competition, because it means we don't have to be so hidebound to a black box system that pays us so little respect.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Indeed, indeed, I agree. I watched that episode, by the way. Great stuff.
Productivity, Distribution, and the Dual Lens on AI
JEREMY RIVERA
I'm curious — when you're looking at AI capabilities, are you looking at it from a dual lens of productivity and distribution, as much as treating it as its own new organ, a semi-organic channel?
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Actually both. I think they're internally connected, both concepts.
Productivity is the spark that drives us. Productivity has always been a thorn in our foot.
Now, with all of the capabilities and the AI automations that exist, we can make more time for us, make more time to be creative — instead of only being productive, because creativity is productive as well.
And in terms of the organic part, it all lines up: being overly productive, using AI to empower your productivity — the steroids we always needed — becoming developers ourselves, the dream of every SEO expert and every person that's been around.
And we now have it. Good times!
The Biggest Unlock: Becoming the Developer
JEREMY RIVERA
What's one of the biggest unlocks for yourself personally — being able to do something that early in your career was kept away from you because of the weight of the lift, the size, the technical difficulty, that AI has solved?
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Building my own tools — literally removing the developer issue and me becoming the actual developer.
Creating complicated tools and instruments that can drive both my productivity and my organic traffic up. Also ads automation, content automation.
Building complete topical authority systems that heal themselves through data that is automatically being collected — creating context from everything in the world related to the projects and just adding it into one database to make it smarter, smarter than everyone on my team, actually. This is just crazy good.
And of course, we all hated when we had to set up our WordPress website — you need to go in and manually tick all the checks in Yoast or whatever you're using, Rank Math, manually add the schema, the structured data, manually push the internal links, so much manual labor that is now gone.
I'm not saying the workload is less — it's even more, because it's so interesting.
It's like an addiction. I used to be a gamer back in the days, and I compare what I'm living through right now with my addiction to StarCraft 10 years ago. I literally don't want to stop.
Building in Hours — and the Community WordPress Lost
JEREMY RIVERA
I was a huge StarCraft II player. I actually ran a huge subreddit, All Things Terran on Reddit, watching all of these matches, posting the streaming video, running a huge community. So I definitely get that addictive nature.
I had a concept four days ago: the value I have in all of these old SEO conversations — I really have a method to all the human-to-human conversation I have. I should make that into a service offer.
So within an hour, I bought the domain, stood up the WordPress site, grabbed the REST credentials, gave it to Claude Code, and within an hour I had a fully functional site, humancertifiedcontent.com.
It's ironic that my human-certified content came out of an AI tool, but the focus was: I can offer you a service and create content based off of conversations I have — that vault — and I've had it pull out anecdotes, pull out insight, pull out quotables.
So I can construct subject-matter-expert content for the SEOs where the Emperor has no clothes, the cobbler's kids have no shoes — SEOs everywhere don't have any good SEO content on their site. That went from an idea to execution within six hours.
Looking at how much content I was able to stage, build up, and fix, this would have been a huge undertaking even two years ago.
I had started using Jarvis, which is now Jasper — in 2015 was the first time I toyed around with an LLM tool and it was pretty janky, not great, well before the ChatGPT revolution in 2023. But the weight of not having to dink around so much just in WordPress, just publishing a blog post.
It's weird to think now how much of my SEO life was just tinkering and pottering around in WordPress, which I love and hate. On one hand it's good open source and a plugin can do anything. And then — but I have to get a plugin for everything. They still haven't fixed the comments issue.
They have a vulnerability of spammers coming in and spamming comments. Me and Rand Fishkin were discussing on LinkedIn that we lost the community aspect of our websites to social media, in part because we allowed our comment sections to be spammed to death, then started ignoring them. And the community aspect slowly migrated over to social media.
If we had not had half of the internet on WordPress with these crappy interfaces, we could have built so much better interfaces to work with our communities. There isn't any reason that the basic architecture of liking a post, commenting and commenting back, building your community, shouldn't have been in WordPress 3.2.
That should have been the baseline we embraced. Instead we let it be taken. And now we have to play in somebody else's garden.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Exactly. And the initial idea of WordPress was for it to be a community platform, a blogging platform. It still is, but imagine if there wasn't such a major issue with all of the spam.
I literally don't know a person that ever commented on a WordPress blog — a non-SEO person, not a "G Pay" or Jordan spam person.
And imagine if this was built with the idea and quality of Reddit — but instead of subreddits, we would all have WordPress websites, and it would have been much, much more powerful.
Heck, nowadays everyone would be saying, "hey, you need to have a WordPress community because you want to rank in AI" instead of Reddit and YouTube. Ugh.
Owning Your Audience (Even If You're an Introvert)
JEREMY RIVERA
The distributed system has kind of collapsed on itself.
It's ironic, because I think at this moment it's more clear than ever that owning your own audience is mandatory. It's a process where you have to actively try to build that, and not treat Google like the endless ocean you can fish in every day and get everything you need.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Exactly, but you know what is a major problem with what you just said? Not everyone is built for creating this audience, and not everyone feels it.
There are introverts. I know a lot of big business people that don't even have social media. I know some fellow startup founders that are just too shy from camera and don't want to feel embarrassed if anyone writes a comment on LinkedIn.
And now AI fills that gap, because the system we're building doesn't really require your face there. You will get the presence, you will edit the comments, but you aren't posting it. It's a different feeling. It's very cool. Turning introverts into social people.
JEREMY RIVERA
I agree there is more latitude and space now. There was a moment where it was like, if you want to succeed you have to build a personal brand too, as a SaaS founder, as a company. There's a lot of pressure on it.
But you're right that there is a growing space where, done correctly — you still have to talk to people, you have to figure out what to do, but you don't have to necessarily put yourself out on TikTok every single day recording as the primary content manufacturer.
There's more, in different ways to do it. What are some of those that you're deploying for some of your clients, and in what verticals?
How Haide Builds: Diagnostics, Voice Profiles, and Topical Authority
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
The verticals — I'll start with that. We are focused on software-as-a-service companies, e-commerce, and fintech. But as a startup brand, we're open to suggestions; if a project seems interesting enough, I'd go for it. Building our portfolio is the main priority right now, growth.
The strategies — I already mentioned the topical authority systems we're building, but they expand to social media as well. Let me give you an example.
We take a software-as-a-service brand and we run the diagnostic first, our discovery process. That's a completely automated diagnostic that runs through all the MCPs. It crawls the website with Screaming Frog.
It pulls all of the relevant keyword data with DataForSEO and stuff like that, the APIs. So we're building a profile of the brand to begin with. Then from that context, starting with the technical SEO, we can start developing the actual topical authority system — first by creating the voice profile of the brand.
Pulling everything this brand ever published on social media, and everything backwards — all of the comments that have been said about this brand on social media — and we synthesize it to create this writer, literally this content creator, which is the new head of content for this brand: the topical authority system.
Topical authority begins within your own website, and it's not only blog articles. Writing blog articles nowadays is like a piece of cake — "hey, write me an article." It's not exactly like that; you'll get a high slop if you do that. But it expands to social media as well. There are a lot of strategies we're currently testing, and most of them are very effective.
For instance, there is the signal interception automation we have, which is practically a news-jacking flow. We get all of the relevant signals in accordance with the brand voice and the topical map.
And from the signal — the article itself, or the publication or press release — we create several pieces of content specifically built for the various social media. For instance, a LinkedIn carousel; we automate the images as well. Instagram shorts, Facebook long form, YouTube shorts even. Everything is handled with AI.
We are very picky and very excited to build each and every system and just play the game. I remember my first AI-generated video — man, it was total crap. But now the things we're able to do are simply amazing.
Of course, we still need editors, but the way I'll hire an editor today is that I want one who knows AI, who uses AI constantly, so he or she can work with me and we're on the same page.
Coming back to the topical authority system — our main goal is to produce content, produce the correct content. The main goal of SEO is to bring organic traffic and leads and money, revenue.
Revenue is not the direct KPI, but it's very achievable. Where I was going with that: we are building content to grab the potential buyers from each part of their stage. We create middle-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel, and top-of-funnel pages.
And embedded within the system, we have a tracking dashboard which tracks all related data to each of the pages we publish. Because a system may look perfect on paper — but you don't know if it is before you get the data.
And that's actually why my brand is called Haide. It means "let's go." It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.
You need the data, because then you feed it back to the system so it automatically improves itself. Covering all of the funnels is just spectacular.
Of course AI adores the content we build, because all of the data and research is plugged in within, and the writing style ticks all the checkmarks of the requirements for being cited on ChatGPT or Claude. Combining this with social media, you literally have a search everywhere optimization platform.
Top, Middle, Bottom: Building a Duck-Catching System
JEREMY RIVERA
I'm curious about how you think people should understand that top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. This comes from my storied history — I've been playing the game since 2007.
I'd describe the content marketing strategy before now as: load up everything into the top of funnel and get as much out there as possible, so we can get as many people on the site as possible.
The argument to be made is not that top of funnel isn't of any use anymore — because they are eating our sandwich. Featured snippets was the first bite. Then LLMs, they're really repackaging what's there.
But the mentality of "just feed the ducks and then you have a bunch of ducks" — well, you need a duck-catching system to turn the ducks into the next stage.
So if you're thinking about top, middle, bottom of funnel, you need to be thinking as much about the navigation: if somebody is on my site reading this, am I pulling them to that middle or bottom with a CTA? Have I done my internal linking to get them to do the next thing? Have I structured the layout of my blog to even let them know there's more?
Or am I just putting up my hands and breadcrumbs and hoping the pigeon will jump and stay in my pocket? Is it more about building sticky systems of content, versus "we're just doing content marketing, here's all the stuff"?
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Yeah, you just described the difference between an SEO and a great SEO. Because great SEOs understand exactly that.
Improving the top-of-funnel pages — you're literally funneling cold traffic to your website. Cold-ish. But if you don't give them that way in — if, for starters, the article is not interesting, if it doesn't grab them in the first three seconds, if they have nowhere to go after that — they will just bounce.
So are you doing it only for the algorithm and for the sake of topical authority that you read on some blog? Or are you doing it to actually be valuable and turn the impression into a click, turn the click into revenue? And it's not gonna be today. I have a theory on impressions.
Impressions are really valuable, especially today. Top-of-funnel pages, yes, that's one aspect of it. We need those impressions, especially new brands. People need to see us everywhere when they're searching for relevant topics.
The more they see us, the bigger the chances get for them to type in directly, do a direct search or put in the URL and convert on the website — or tell a friend. That still remains the best referral of them all: a friend told me.
Stop Just Blogging
JEREMY RIVERA
You're right — it's controversial, but it's stupid to just blog. Think about it: the origin of "blog" was "weblog," and the weblog was a journal entry.
You just vomited your concept out and hoped somebody liked the way you threw spaghetti on the wall. And businesses would be like, "I need to throw spaghetti on the wall to succeed."
And agencies saw that need and didn't take it further — because what you actually need is to very carefully pull those spaghetti threads where they're supposed to go.
I've done so many audits. I audited a concrete wall company's site and was helping their team create content. We're going through all the old content they threw up: "there's a hurricane — yeah, walls help with hurricanes, we should have a post for that." Spaghetti. "You can paint it different colors, here's how paint looks on walls." Like, what? There was no coherent connection.
The amount of blog posts where there's not even a call to action. There weren't headers, there was an image, six paragraphs of text, no links to anywhere else. And you're like, who approves this? We are way past the time when it's acceptable to create content that's not connected to other content on your site.
We have these superpowers now with AI to at least fundamentally connect and see: okay, what articles have I written that are related to other things I've already written? If you can't type in a prompt to analyze your own blog posts, find what you've already made that's related to each other, and ask it to build internal links — what are you doing?
You could use a plugin if you have WordPress. But honestly, just connect it through a REST API. Go into your profile, create an authorized password, give it to Claude Code, and you're able to edit your WordPress site 10 times faster.
Yeah, you gotta go check and make sure it didn't break everything. But, like you said — let's go, let's break something — because what we've been doing is broken.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Yeah — if we end up re-approving and perfecting all of the articles and pages and "this button must be three pixels wider" — come on, let's get it going. Let the people be the judge. The user is always right.
And do you know what is a very frequent problem with agencies I'm seeing all the time, and you've seen it too? They land a large client, an established brand that already worked with several agencies. And what do agencies do? Blogs. They own the blogs.
And that picture you just described — they start doing "no, we must rewrite the previous articles because the previous agency sucked, we'll write you better articles, here's the new content." They still write blogs. Dude, come on.
This is an established brand. Focus on the middle of the funnel. Read the data. Make some linkable assets. Make a knowledge base. Improve the bottom-funnel pages. Improve where the money is. Check if they're ranking. I see this all the time.
JEREMY RIVERA
Make some downloadables, make some PDFs, make a knowledge base.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Bottom-of-funnel pages are very hard to optimize because they tend to rank for very generic keywords, and the way they should be optimized is through internal linking from blog articles to them. All right, that makes sense — but nowadays it's not exactly like that.
Intent is not only top, bottom, or mid. We have search-engine intent as well. Literally, you check for a set of keywords or topics what pages are ranking. You don't want to write an article about low pricing — about concrete low pricing. But perhaps you do, in a different context, you know what I'm saying.
Just optimize the bottom-funnel pages. Give them more content, or remove content. Analyze, study the engagement rate. Check your MS Clarity, or whatever you're using nowadays.
Watching Users and Measuring What Matters
JEREMY RIVERA
I love Clarity. And they added a little integration to pull in Google Analytics data, like a poke in the eye — I want all of Google Analytics data in Microsoft Clarity. They have like six data points, and you can go into the page-level navigation. It feels like GA3 did.
So anybody listening: go add Microsoft Clarity. One, it's heat maps. Two, you can watch your user bump around your site and realize, oh my god, they got to that page and the image was broken.
Oh my god, they got to this section and clicked this and it failed. They rage — it'll even give you mouse-rage moments of people shuffling their mouse around because it's not working. And you can save so much money when you realize, oh my god, my conversion widget is broken, this page isn't working.
Or they're trying to click on this word or image and it's non-clickable. It looks like that was 10 extra clicks that would have gone to the next page — I need to link that. You can see the behavior. You don't have to guess anymore.
And you can also get citation information from Microsoft Copilot now. I have a handful of projects starting to pull that information in.
So combine that with Google, with Bing Webmaster Tools surfacing citation data, and purportedly some projects somewhere are getting Google Search Console citation information in the last month or so. I haven't had one of my projects with it yet, but I'm assured it's out there for some people.
But it's the old classic problem of third-party rank tracking, now with citation tracking — the same problem we had with rank tracking. The more people jumping in the water to check the temperature, the more bodies we're counting of swimmers, and our audience of impressions is bloated.
The Trouble With Prompt Tracking
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
I agree completely. How do you feel about prompt tracking? I have to ask that question. I myself am not a huge fan of it. Not an honest believer.
JEREMY RIVERA
It is what it is. I use it as directionally as possible, and try to caveat to the client: this is sticking your finger in the air. If there's no wind blowing at all, that is a signal. If you're getting nothing, zero, that's something.
But it's a dragon eating its tail. The more prompts you feed into the system for it to track, there's a non-repeatability that's known for these LLM tools.
It's as high as 80 or 90% — when Rand Fishkin tested it across a decent cohort of people. So if 80 to 90% of people who put the same exact query in are given a different result, then you're fighting for that 10 to 20% of repeatability.
So it becomes confusing whether that's an anchor point of "you've reached that level of highest visibility." You have to be careful of conflating it with a true signal.
I think it might be coming soon-ish, as we move from ChatGPT ads being something only at enterprise level for the million-dollar companies. As it trickles further down and they try to capture mid-market businesses, to gain their trust they're going to have to give metrics.
As soon as metrics come out and become industry standard, then we'll have something we might be able to work with. But it has to come from within the engines. These third-party tools have some utility because they can point out when you don't exist at all — helpful, but only at the beginning of your campaign. Once you start showing up, it isn't a truly reliable system. It's really black box.
So the only thing you can truly count is how many referrals of traffic actually came from the LLMs, and how did they behave when they did? One of my interviews was with Paul Bautista, who worked with Revolve, a big clothing brand. He said, "we've got a hundred thousand people coming from AI tools, but they're not converting." For them it was a huge problem.
It looked really good on paper, but the conversion rate compared to organic was laughable — because their organic was five million. So the scale of difference is there. A hundred thousand people from AI citations and tools — that's insane. But they got millions of organic visitors. Take the fraction of how that's converting, and for them it was not a win the way it would have been for others.
So the signal comes down to tracking. I'm grateful for GA finally adding a specific channel of AI assistance — but that means you have to play with Google Analytics to get a report. Hopefully you've got a system to get that out and into something you can actually analyze.
Authority Is the New PageRank
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Do you know what I'm a big fan of? Sentiment analysis. I think that really matters. I'm a true believer that authority is the new PageRank, and the trust the brand builds is very important — people often miss that.
I'm seeing agencies, newly popped-off agencies like me — yeah, I'm talking about other guys — they sell prompt tracking as a service, and I don't even understand what they're tracking.
Whereas you need to first brainstorm and interview your client, understand the brand values, and Claude Code needs to create a full list of prompts that actually matter. You pull this into your system and ask all the LLM guys — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the others — what do they say, how do they answer these exact prompts, and who do they cite you along with? Who do they cite of your competitors as a better version, a better approach, and why? Dissecting that really does matter.
Reverse-Engineering Citations and Earning Mentions
JEREMY RIVERA
It's the portion of link building that was always the most interesting. Don't get into an argument about DA, DR authority scores. What you need to be doing is looking at the pages that were ranking: where were they getting their links from, and what did their profiles look like? That was always the useful aspect.
You realize, okay, three-fourths of this is junk, so I narrow down to the one quarter that looks like possibly usable signals by Google.
And the crazy thing is that reverse engineering is so much easier in an LLM — because you can ask the stupid system, "hey, why did you surface this as a citation? Why is this page up here?" And it's like, "well, this chef was listed in the top 10 chefs of Chicago on the top-10 list blog, cited in this newspaper, and showed up on this directory."
They're telling you that. You can ask. Why aren't we asking? Just ask. And then turn around and do something — have a system to try to get on those.
Stop trying to get guest blog posts or exchange links with questionable people on Reddit. Try to figure out: where can I get this brand mentioned? Can I get the CEO on a podcast? Can I put out a press release that'll show up in this local newspaper? Can I reach out to City Hall for this charitable event we're doing?
Make sure what you do IRL to promote your brand gets reflected online. If you're doing trash cleanups, grab the Eventbrite listing and make sure the description has a link. You'd be surprised how many event aggregator sites have followed links.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Yeah, I've seen some. And you know what's even funnier? Nowadays, to get cited in AI, you don't even need links.
Did you see — I believe it was Pedro Dias — did a sort of experiment. He posted on his LinkedIn that he's the world's best, greatest, most renowned AI expert. And in five minutes he published a screenshot in the comments where AI Overviews are citing Pedro Dias as the world's most renowned expert. Boom.
JEREMY RIVERA
Boom, boom. Looking at what the power sources are — just the fact that Lily Ray pointed it out over a year ago, that LinkedIn has articles and those articles get cited. How many CEOs and founders are posting on LinkedIn but not posting articles? It's just a short hop, skip, and a jump. These are the missing pieces in the puzzle.
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Yeah, completely. By the way, because of that post of Lily's, I started my LinkedIn newsletter, and AI adores it. So I can confirm Lily is telling the truth.
The Head-Scratcher: Explaining SEO's New Value
JEREMY RIVERA
I'm starting to ask this question of each of my guests. What is a head-scratching moment? What's a challenge you're trying to unravel, something you want input on from the next SEO guest — an intractable problem you want to see how they're handling?
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
How are they explaining the new value of SEO to potential leads and clients? Because this is the hardest part.
Currently the market is kind of afraid. Everyone understands AI exists, but they aren't exactly sure what to do with it. "Can we fire our own team and switch it to AI?"
How do they convince and explain it? I myself presented it exactly like I presented here: authority. We need search everywhere optimization. And in Haide Digital, we call it organic growth engineering, which is literally the combination of SEO, GEO, and AI automation — all three put together. But still, it's a very large concept to comprehend for a non-SEO person.
This is quite hard for me and for a lot of fellow SEOs. I don't believe business owners realize how important it is nowadays to surface properly on large language models — because all of your buyers and users are researching you there. They're comparing you with your competitors right there.
And then they're visiting your websites, either with a direct search or clicking the ChatGPT link they got. This would only grow, considering we are adding Google Shopping, agentic shopping as a concept. It's here now. Agents are gonna do my shopping. Why not? And who are they gonna shop from? I believe from the trustworthy stores that have done the work.
Agentic Commerce and Feeding the People-Pleasers
JEREMY RIVERA
I had a guest who said there are more opportunities now, and there are already businesses making more money because they have an AI-capable agent that can sell to another AI agent directly, without a human in the loop. He said that's going to be where a lot of the revenue is.
Restaurants figuring out that their standing order for what they need — that's not going to be a back-of-house thing. They'll feed that list to their agent and it'll reorder that restaurant order. So the manufacturers, the suppliers that create that capability, are going to be winning more and more.
Half of it is what Matt Brooks of SEOTeric said: you need to train your least trustworthy customer service representative, and that's Claude — his first name's Claude, his last name is GPT, and he's a Gemini. At the moment you have a customer support representative who isn't hired by you, but you can give them instructions — you just haven't done so.
So if you think of your site, your resources, your top-of-mid funnel as informing your customer support representative within Claude, within GPT, within Microsoft — in a much more direct fashion than you ever had with Google, you can directly influence the information available about your brand.
Because of the nature of the search engine and the way Google structured itself, it was a very adversarial process to get yourself optimized and put information out there about yourself. Google held the gold keys and could unlock a golden pantry of money, so everybody was trying to optimize for that.
But LLMs operate on a different model that requires data and input for them to do their basic mission. And we haven't adapted that model of thinking. We need to flip this script: I need to better inform these third-party tools of exactly all of the things.
That's why I think the entity-map markdown that just came out — I forget who put it out, I'll put it in the show notes — it's basically, you should map out your entity. We're connected to this company, this is our social media profiles, this is what we do and how we do it. That's what we should have been doing all along.
Schema markup is such a clunky thing — they wrapped it in all this mystery, and it's helpful but it's not helpful. And "we're going to take away FAQ markup — bad naughty boy, you overused the tool we told you to deploy on your site, you're abusing this markup because it's showing up in so many of our SERPs."
Like, what are you talking about? You went to conferences for years to tell us to use schema, and then we actually use schema and you're like, "nope, too much, we're pulling it back, you're abusing it." That's the frustrating reality of optimizing for Google.
So when it comes to LLMs, we've adopted that same mentality — when LLMs are like, "what you got? Tell me about yourself." They have questions I need to answer. I need to give them answers. Because Claude is a people pleaser. ChatGPT is a people pleaser. Help them, please them, by giving them the information they seek. That's my answer.
As you know, SEO sits at the core of this process. Because it is search everywhere, and the Venn diagram isn't a side-by-side overlap for SEO and LLMs. Everything in SEO, LLMs overlap it on every edge.
Everything we do in some way feeds up to LLMs. Whether it's link building and citations — because if you are linked well, you rank well. And if you rank well, you show up in those supporting queries when they don't have the knowledge-base item; they look for more specific information and you show up.
SEO is in the middle again when you're creating content, because LLMs consume that content. It's in the middle for technical SEO, because if your site is slow as shit, it's not going to rank, people aren't going to like it, they'll have a bad experience. So all of these things we've considered SEO — it's not a separate entity, it's the heart of great LLM optimization.
SEO as the Orchestrator
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Yeah, I do believe SEO is the orchestrator of everything else right now. I believe we are the orchestrators of the new era of digital marketing, because we've been for quite some time.
Can you give a job description? You need to know UX, development, JavaScript, WordPress, content writing and copywriting, social media — that's your job — link building, technical SEO, the development part. And what more? Conversion rate optimization, that's on us.
And now, finally, we are in the era where all of that matters even more. It's even crucial. So SEO needs to be even higher in demand.
The demand is high right now, but it needs to be even higher, because it's literally the future. Sure, we have ads; sure, we'll have ads in each LLM, who knows when — but the organic is what stays, and what brands should be built around. Everyone loves money, but go spend it on ads and neglect your organic, and call me afterwards.
Where to Find Adrian
JEREMY RIVERA
As we wrap up, give a shout-out of how people can find you if you're putting content out. You mentioned you have a LinkedIn newsletter — anywhere people can connect, see your thoughts, and if they're smart, forward-thinking SaaS companies, contact you to work with?
ADRIAN NIKOLOV
Of course, you can always visit haide.digital. We have several very interesting tools there that we've built; SEO nerds would love them.
And you can always reach out to me, Adrian Nikolov. My newsletter is called Search Engineered, because I always treated SEO as an engineering issue instead of a marketing one.
