On a recent Unscripted SEO Podcast episode, I talked with Christopher Gimmer — founder of Snappa and GoodMetrics — about running a bootstrapped SaaS for a decade. Buried in his story are six of the clearest lessons I’ve heard about what SEO actually looks like after AI Overviews. Here they are, straight from the interview.
1. Distribution beats the product
When we launched Snappa, we already had distribution — we had this blog post ranking for free stock photos, and our own free stock photo site. We literally just promoted Snappa within those spots. We did about two thousand MRR in the first month… and got to ten K MRR in about six months. Ninety-five percent of our sign-ups were just coming from that one blog post and our free stock photo site.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
The lesson isn’t luck — it’s sequencing. Christopher had a post ranking #1 for “free stock photos” (and the StockSnap site it spawned) before Snappa existed. The audience was the moat. Build the distribution first; the product plugs into it.
2. A #1 ranking is no longer the #1 click
Even if you’re ranking number one for some of these keywords, the AI Overviews are answering some of those things, and so we’re losing out on some of those clicks. Something like Facebook cover maker… now you might see four paid links. Even if you’re ranking number one for that organic keyword, your link is actually the fifth one on the page.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
Rank has quietly become a vanity metric. Between AI Overviews and paid units, a #1 organic result can sit fifth on the page (eighth if you rank third). Report the click and the conversion behind the position — not the position in isolation.
3. When your tool competes with a prompt box
We’re basically moving more towards an AI-first editor and utilizing some of these APIs… Utilizing AI, you can get way more intricate — multiple layers and elements within your graphic that you would never really be able to create on your own, especially as a non-designer.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
New image models finally handle text and complex, layered graphics, so Snappa is rebuilding around an AI-first editor while keeping the classic one as legacy. The playbook: protect existing customers and build the disruptive version in parallel — model-agnostic so you can swap as they leapfrog.
4. Cookieless analytics and the rise of “agent traffic”
Let’s say I’m using Claude Code and I’m telling my agent, hey, go read all the articles on the site, do a bunch of research and come back to me. Should that be excluded? Is that a bot?… There’s this kind of gray area now… almost like agent traffic that we may want to surface.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
GoodMetrics is cookieless (an anonymized IP + user-agent “visitor signature,” no consent banners) with an API and MCP server so agents can query it directly. That surfaces a brand-new question: when your own AI crawls a site for you, is that a bot to filter — or a visitor to count? As agent-to-agent commerce grows, that layer is worth surfacing, not hiding.
5. Useful tools earn the links blog posts can’t
It’s hard to do traditional link building now, just because everyone’s inbox is full of spam. So I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus yet another blog post with a wall of text.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
Outreach inboxes are saturated, so a text post rarely earns a link. A free calculator or genuinely useful tool does. When you plan content, weight the budget toward things people use, not just read — it’s the same logic behind our keyword forecasting tool.
6. Be a product, not a content site
There was definitely a lot of pure content sites that got hit over the last year or two. But it seems that anyone who’s had a legitimate product within a specific space tends to be doing much better than just a pure content site.
— Christopher Gimmer, Unscripted SEO Podcast
This is “distance to seed” in the wild: Google trusts sites by how few hops they sit from vertical authority seeds, and a long-standing SaaS reads as a seed itself. If you sell something real, your information carries more trust — arguably what the Helpful Content Update was chasing all along.
Want the full conversation? Listen to Christopher Gimmer on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. If your link building still leans on cold outreach, take a look at our podcast-powered and community-event link building services — built for exactly the world Christopher describes — and browse the SEO Tactic Library for 60 more practitioner-tested tactics.