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 some of the clearest lessons I’ve heard about what SEO actually looks like after AI Overviews. Here are the ones worth stealing.
1. Ranking #1 is no longer the #1 click
Christopher has posts that have held the top organic spot for ten years. And yet his traffic is down — because on many queries, the AI Overview answers the question before anyone scrolls. On commercial terms it’s worse: four paid links can push the #1 organic result to fifth on the page. The takeaway isn’t “SEO is dead.” It’s that rank is now a vanity metric unless you measure the click and the conversion behind it. Forecast and report on revenue-driving positions, not rankings in isolation.
2. Real products are the new authority signal
Christopher noticed that pure content sites got battered over the last couple of years, while sites attached to a legitimate product held up. That lines up with a link idea I keep coming back to: distance to seed. Google appears to trust sites based on how few hops they sit from recognized authority “seeds” in a niche. My working hypothesis — a long-standing SaaS is itself a seed. If you are a product (not just an affiliate roundup), you stand out as a real entity, which is arguably what the Helpful Content Update was chasing all along.
3. Useful tools earn links that blog posts can’t
“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
Everyone’s inbox is full of outreach spam, so a text post rarely earns a link. A free calculator, a genuinely helpful tool, an interactive resource — those do. If you’re planning content, weight the budget toward things people use, not just read. (It’s the same logic behind our own keyword forecasting tool.)
4. SEO now sits in the middle of the Venn diagram
I used to picture SEO and “AI visibility” as two overlapping circles. Christopher’s experience convinced me they’re nested. An LLM is partly a fancy wrapper around a Google search — training data plus query fan-out — so if your site isn’t crawlable, or your technical SEO is a mess, or you don’t rank, that degrades your LLM visibility too. Getting into the training data is off-site SEO: mentions, reviews, podcasts, the whole footprint.
5. Docs and landing pages beat the blogging treadmill
With top-of-funnel queries getting eaten, Christopher is investing in comprehensive documentation and product landing pages so LLMs have full detail to cite — not a weekly blog cadence. If you want to be recommended by ChatGPT or Claude, make sure the pages that describe what you do are the best pages on the internet about what you do.
Want to hear 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.