Most arguments about the future of SEO are made by people with nothing at stake in the answer. Zak Ali had something at stake: he runs growth at Finder, the financial comparison site built heavily on organic search, and he acted on his own conclusion in a way that cost him a team structure he had spent years building.

The Two Types Of SEO Left

On the Unscripted SEO Podcast, talking to host Jeremy Rivera about what the role of an SEO actually is now, he put it like this:

“I was talking in our Slack recently and it was like, look, there’s 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. And I think you have to steer into that and see where the writing is on the wall.”

— Zak Ali, Finder

The framing is deliberately uncomfortable. It does not say PR is coming for SEO. It says a large share of SEOs are already doing PR and have not updated the label — which means they are being measured, budgeted and reviewed against the wrong scorecard.

He did not leave it as a take. He restructured:

“And that’s actually why I made a decision — and sorry, I’m ranting a bit here — last May, I decided to kill the SEO team and just have a generalist marketing team. It was a bit rough at the beginning to say, ‘hey, you guys aren’t SEOs anymore, you’re growth marketers,’ because they had spent so much of their time building that discipline. But it was like, look, you have to be able to attack every surface.”

— Zak Ali, Finder

“You have to be able to attack every surface” is the operative phrase. He describes the practical consequence at Finder as far more content-waterfall work — taking one thing and pivoting it into a YouTube video, then cutting that into shorts and reels — “because you can’t just coast off the one surface anymore.”

Where Guesting Sits On The PR Spectrum

The rest of this article is our argument, not Zak’s. He diagnoses the shift; he does not prescribe podcast guesting as the response. We are drawing that line because it is our business, and you should weigh it accordingly.

Traditional digital PR has a brutal conversion rate. You pitch a journalist, you compete against every other pitch in the inbox that morning, and the majority produce nothing. When it works, it works enormously. But the median outcome of a PR sprint is silence.

A podcast booking inverts the economics. The host has an unavoidable, recurring content obligation — a gap in next month’s schedule that must be filled by a human being with something to say. You are not competing for scarce attention; you are supplying scarce inventory. That is why the hit rate on a well-matched guesting pitch bears no resemblance to the hit rate on a cold journalist pitch.

What you get in return is structurally PR output, not SEO output: a third party introduces you as an authority, then spends forty-five minutes treating you as one, on a platform you do not own, in front of an audience they built. The show notes, transcript, episode page and platform listings all carry your name next to your topic. We break down that mechanism in how entity associations move rankings.

What A CMO Should Ask For Instead Of Links

If Zak is right that the job has become branding and PR, then the reporting line has to move with it. A retainer that reports ranking positions for a function whose real output is third-party coverage is measuring the wrong artefact — and it is why these programmes get cut in the first budget review.

Three requests worth making instead, all of which a guesting programme can actually answer:

• Named appearances, not domains. Which shows, which audiences, which hosts — assessed on whether their listeners buy what you sell, not on a third-party authority score.
• Quotable assets produced. How many self-contained, attributable claims did your expert say out loud that a journalist, a competitor or a language model could lift and cite?
• Surface coverage. Where did the one recording end up — episode page, transcript, clips, newsletter, the guest’s own site — and which of those carry a link versus a bare mention.

The distinction in that last point matters more than most briefs admit, and we unpack it in expert mentions and show-note links.

Turning A Season Of Guest Spots Into Coverage

One appearance is an anecdote. A season is a position. The difference is entirely in whether the appearances are planned as a set.

A workable quarterly shape looks like this. Pick one argument you are willing to be associated with for a year — not a topic, an argument, something a reasonable person could disagree with. Book six to eight shows whose audiences overlap your buyer. Make the same argument on all of them, with different evidence each time, because repetition across independent sources is precisely what builds an association rather than a mention.

Then treat each recording as a supply chain rather than an event: the episode itself, the transcript, two or three clips, a written recap you publish yourself, and a version of the argument you can pitch onward to a trade publication once you have several appearances to point to as credibility.

That last step is where the PR framing pays off, and it is the one most guesting programmes skip. Eight appearances making a consistent argument is a body of evidence a journalist can verify in ten minutes — which makes the ninth pitch, the one to a publication, land very differently from the first.

Zak’s underlying warning is worth keeping alongside all of this. Asked about the cost of attention, he was unequivocal: “The traffic you have today is as cheap as it’s going to be. It’s only going to get more expensive.” Every surface you are discoverable on today is cheaper today than it will be next year. That is an argument for starting, not for planning.

Full episode: Zak Ali of Finder on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. If you would rather not pitch yourself, that is what our podcast guest booking service is for — and podcasting as PR covers the citation side.