How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing | Adrian Nikolov, Haide Digital

Adrian Nikolov has eighteen years in SEO and started a new agency six months before this recording. Haide means let’s go in Bulgarian, and he founded it on an inversion of the usual fear. Rather than wait to find out whether AI takes the work, he decided to make it do the work better.

Key takeaways

• Authority is the new PageRank. His framing for what the trust layer now does, and why he is sceptical of the tools being sold around it.
• The unlock was becoming the developer. Building his own tools removed the dependency that had shaped his entire career.
• Topical authority is not a blog. His systems build a voice profile from everything a brand has published and everything said about it, then cover every funnel stage and feed the results back in.
• Prompt tracking is directional at best. He says so plainly about a service some of his peers are selling.
• SEO is the orchestrator. Not a channel beside the others. The layer every other channel now runs through.

On this page

• Becoming the developer
• How the topical authority system is built
• Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing
• Authority is the new PageRank
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Becoming the developer

Asked what AI unlocked for him personally, he does not say content or speed.

Building my own tools, literally removing the developer issue and me becoming the actual developer.

— Adrian Nikolov

For anyone who spent a decade filing tickets and waiting, that is the whole answer. The manual labour he lists as gone is oddly specific and instantly recognisable: ticking boxes in Yoast, hand-adding schema, pushing internal links one page at a time.

He is careful to say the workload did not shrink. It grew, because the work became interesting.

I used to be a gamer back in the days, and I compare what I’m living through right now with my addiction to StarCraft 10 years ago.

— Adrian Nikolov

How the topical authority system is built

The pipeline is described in more detail than most agency owners will give you. An automated diagnostic running through MCP connections, a Screaming Frog crawl, keyword data pulled by API, and from that a profile of the brand. Then a voice profile built from everything the brand has published and everything said about it in public.

Only then does content start, across top, middle and bottom of funnel, with a dashboard tracking every page so the system can be corrected by data rather than opinion.

It means “let’s go.” It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.

— Adrian Nikolov

Signal interception

His news-jacking flow. Relevant signals come in, get filtered against the brand voice and the topical map, and go out as platform-specific pieces: a LinkedIn carousel, a short, a long-form post. He still hires editors, but only ones who use AI daily.

Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing

Jeremy’s framing is that the old strategy was to feed the ducks and hope, and that what is missing is a duck-catching system. Adrian’s response is the sharpest line in the middle of the episode.

Yeah, you just described the difference between an SEO and a great SEO.

— Adrian Nikolov

He is not against top of funnel. He wants impressions, especially for a new brand, on the theory that repeated exposure converts later as a direct search or a recommendation. What he objects to is a page with nowhere to go next.

His complaint about agencies is more pointed. They land an established brand and immediately start rewriting blog posts, because blogs are what they know how to sell.

Just optimize the bottom-funnel pages. Give them more content, or remove content. Analyze, study the engagement rate.

— Adrian Nikolov

Authority is the new PageRank

I’m a true believer that authority is the new PageRank, and the trust the brand builds is very important.

— Adrian Nikolov

From there he is openly critical of agencies selling prompt tracking as a product without being able to say what is being tracked. His alternative is to interview the client properly, build a prompt list that reflects what buyers actually ask, and then read who gets cited alongside you and why.

Nowadays, to get cited in AI, you don’t even need links.

— Adrian Nikolov

The measurement problem is the one both of them keep circling. Jeremy’s position is that the only honest count is referral traffic and what it did next, which is why he is glad the analytics platforms finally added a channel for it. If you are trying to read that data yourself, our complete Search Console resource guide covers the reporting side of it.

I do believe SEO is the orchestrator of everything else right now.

— Adrian Nikolov

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What does an AI-first SEO agency actually build?
• Is prompt tracking worth paying for?
• How do I build topical authority beyond publishing blog posts?
• Should I optimise top of funnel or bottom of funnel first?
• How do I get cited in AI answers without links?
• What can Microsoft Clarity show me that analytics cannot?
• How do I explain the value of SEO to a client who thinks AI replaced it?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Paul Baterina on the hundred thousand AI visitors that would not convert, the story Jeremy tells him about measurement.
• Jason Wade on what AI visibility actually means, a second read on the same reporting problem.
• Paul Pape, the guest whose wild west line Jeremy borrows here, on getting owners to engage with their own numbers.

Watch the interview

Find Adrian Nikolov

haide.digital, which carries the tools his team built, and Adrian Nikolov on LinkedIn, where the newsletter runs.

Cite this episode

Nikolov, Adrian. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/adrian-nikolov-organic-growth-engineering/