Job titles lag reality by a few years. Zak Ali of Finder put a marker down on the Unscripted SEO podcast about where the discipline has actually landed, and it is an uncomfortable read if your deliverables have not changed since 2021.
The Two Types Of SEO Left
“I was talking in our Slack recently and it was like, look, there’s two types of SEOs that exist today.”
Zak Ali, Finder
“There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven’t realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding.”
Zak Ali
It is worth sitting with the second clause. Not should be digital PR. Is, already, whether or not the person doing it has noticed. The work has drifted underneath the title.
What Changed When Links Stopped Being The Point
For most of the last decade a link was the unit of account. You could measure it, buy it, report it. What has shifted is that the valuable output is increasingly the reference — the named mention on a source that models and journalists both treat as checkable — and the link is a by-product of it.
That changes the shape of the job. Earning a reference requires something to say, someone credible to say it, and a relationship with the outlet that will carry it. Those are PR competencies, priced and staffed differently from technical ones.
The strategy-library version of this is digital PR for link earning.
The Digital PR Skills SEOs Already Have
The gap is smaller than it looks. Most SEOs can already do audience research, angle selection, competitive gap analysis, and writing to a brief. What is usually missing is three things: a named spokesperson, a pitch cadence, and the willingness to be told no repeatedly.
The spokesperson problem is the real blocker in most agencies, and it is why personal brand building stopped being a vanity project. A quote needs a person attached, and a person needs a track record before an outlet will use them.
Rebuilding Your Deliverables Around Coverage
Practically, the monthly report changes rows. Out: ranking-position screenshots for a curated keyword set. In: pieces of coverage placed, named mentions earned, citations in AI answers, and the share of branded search that followed.
The fastest route into this for a small team is the one that produces a spokesperson and a reference in the same motion — see podcast guest appearances for links and citations. An hour on someone else’s microphone produces a quotable named source, a transcript, and a page that links back, which is three deliverables from one booking.