When I run keyword research and audits for agencies, the same gap keeps showing up: teams still treat content like a pile of blog posts instead of an interconnected system that moves someone from a cold impression to a conversion. That is exactly the gap Adrian Nikolov built Haide Digital to close. Adrian has 18 years in SEO and paid media, and instead of fearing that AI would take his job, he decided to make AI do the job better. If you have been reading our work on building topical authority and smarter internal linking, this conversation is the next chapter: what those ideas look like when you wire them together with AI automation.
🎧 Prefer audio? Listen to the full episode on Castos. Adrian also published his own recap over on the Haide Digital blog.
From the Google Monopoly to the Wild West
We in SEO have been rolling with the punches since Panda. A lot of SEOs grew to rely on the monopolistic power of Google to hold the search space. Alta Vista, HotBot, and the alternative engines died; Yahoo folded into Microsoft, Bing became meek and subservient, and from 2010 to 2020 everything digital flowed through Google. Now we are back in the wild, wild west. Adrian welcomed the competition, because it means we no longer have to be so hidebound to a black box system that pays us so little respect.
Becoming the Developer
Adrian’s biggest personal unlock is building his own tools, literally removing the developer bottleneck and becoming the developer himself. He builds topical authority systems that heal themselves through data that is automatically collected, pulling context from everything related to a project into one database so it becomes smarter than his whole team. The manual labor of ticking every Yoast or Rank Math box, hand-adding schema, and manually pushing internal links is gone. He compares the pull of it to his old StarCraft addiction: “I literally don’t want to stop.”
@unscriptedpodcasts Adrian Nikolov on Unscripted SEO: are you showing up where your customers are looking? business owners need to realize that buyers are researching you on large language models like chatGPT. if you’re not visible, you’re missing out! how are you making your business trustworthy online? #businessgrowth #digitalmarketing #trustworthiness
How Haide Builds: Diagnostics, Voice Profiles, Topical Authority
Haide focuses on SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech. Every engagement starts with a fully automated diagnostic that runs through MCPs, crawls the site with Screaming Frog, and pulls keyword data with DataForSEO to build a profile of the brand. From that context, and starting with technical SEO, Haide creates a voice profile by synthesizing everything the brand ever published and everything said about it on social, effectively spinning up a new head of content. Then a signal interception flow, essentially news-jacking, turns one relevant signal into a LinkedIn carousel, Instagram shorts, Facebook long-form, and YouTube shorts, all tracked on a dashboard. As Adrian says, the brand is named Haide because it means “let’s go”: break stuff, publish stuff, then feed the data back so the system improves itself.
Stop Just Blogging, Build a Duck-Catching System
It is controversial, but it is stupid to just blog. The origin of “blog” was “weblog,” a journal entry where you vomited a concept out and hoped somebody liked how you threw spaghetti on the wall. I once audited a concrete wall company with posts on hurricanes and paint colors and no coherent connection, no CTAs, no internal links. If you just feed the ducks, you need a duck-catching system to turn them into the next stage. Adrian’s take: that is the difference between an SEO and a great SEO. For established brands, agencies keep rewriting blogs when they should focus on the middle of the funnel, make linkable assets and a knowledge base, and improve the bottom-funnel pages where the money is.
@unscriptedpodcasts Adrian Nikolov on Unscripted SEO: is seo the future of digital marketing? 🤔 it’s not just about keywords anymore. you need to master ux, development, content writing, and even social media! what skills do you think are essential for success in this new era? #SEO #DigitalMarketing #ContentCreation #UXDesign #MarketingTips
Authority Is the New PageRank
Adrian is a believer that authority is the new PageRank, and he leans on sentiment analysis. Instead of selling prompt tracking as a service, he interviews the client, has Claude Code build the list of prompts that actually matter, then studies who the LLMs cite alongside you and which competitors they call a better version, and why. The reverse-engineering trick I love: you can literally ask the LLM why it surfaced a citation, then go earn those same mentions, get the CEO on a podcast, put out a press release, grab the followed link on an Eventbrite listing. Adrian even noted you sometimes do not need links at all, pointing to Pedro Dias getting AI Overviews to call him the world’s most renowned AI expert within minutes.
SEO as the Orchestrator
Haide calls its offer organic growth engineering: SEO, GEO, and AI automation put together. Adrian’s head-scratcher for the industry is explaining the new value of SEO to clients who are asking whether they can fire their team and switch to AI. His answer, and mine, is that SEO is the orchestrator. The Venn diagram is not a side-by-side overlap; everything in SEO, from links and content to technical performance, feeds up to LLMs. As Adrian put it, SEO is the heart of great LLM optimization, and organic is what brands should be built around.
Where to Find Adrian
Visit haide.digital for the tools SEO nerds will love, read his own recap of the episode, connect with Adrian Nikolov on LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter, Search Engineered. For the full breakdown — deck, eBook, and transcript — see the complete episode recap on Unscripted SEO.