Snappa has held number one rankings for ten years, and Christopher Gimmer says that is no longer the same thing as getting the click. On a commercial query with four paid links stacked above it, the top organic result is the fifth thing on the page. He is rebuilding the product around that, and building a second one, a cookieless answer to GA4.
Christopher's line about podcast-centric link building is quoted in Every Interview Is a Link-Building Engine and Podcasts, Reddit, and the New Citation Map on SEO Arcade.
Before Snappa there was a post about where to find free stock photos, written during the early Creative Commons wave. It went viral on StumbleUpon, then ranked first in Google for a very large term, and then became its own stock photo site.
Ninety-five percent of our signups were just coming from that one blog post and our free stock photo site.
— Christopher Gimmer
He is unusually honest that this was luck rather than method. It is still the most instructive thing in the episode, because it inverts the usual order. The distribution existed, and the product was launched into it.
Even if you're ranking number one for that organic keyword, your link is actually the fifth one on the page. And if you're ranking number three, you're now like eight links down.
— Christopher Gimmer
Two things are eating the same channel at once and it is worth keeping them apart. AI Overviews answer the informational query outright. Paid placement takes the commercial one, four ads deep, before the first organic result appears.
Snappa survives it on a decade of domain authority and posts that have held position for ten years. He is clear that a new site does not get that cushion, and that he is running into it himself with the second product.
I think the top of the funnel is more or less dead.
— Christopher Gimmer
GoodMetrics exists because GA4 annoyed him and, when he asked around, everyone else too. One vocabulary rather than three: everything is an event, with an optional value or property, so one click outbound link event carries the URL as a property instead of spawning a thousand events.
Essentially we're taking a combination of an anonymized IP address and their user-agent info and creating an anonymized visitor signature.
— Christopher Gimmer
No cookie, therefore no consent banner, which is most of the pitch in Europe. The more interesting problem is the one he has not solved.
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?
— Christopher Gimmer
Traditional analytics filtered bots out. If a person sends an agent to read your site on their behalf, that filter is now deleting demand.
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
His reasoning is about the inbox rather than the algorithm. Everyone’s outreach is buried, so the only thing that still travels is an asset somebody wants to hand to a colleague.
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
Jeremy pushes the same idea further with distance to seed, the notion that a long-standing product site may itself be a trusted origin in its niche. Gimmer’s affiliate example is the test: a pure review site cannot recommend the ten genuinely best backpacks if it earns nothing on them, and a real brand can.
He also asks the closing question every bootstrapper is currently sitting on, which is what to do when the tried and true organic channel stops being enough. Jeremy’s answer includes the SEOgets ambassador list and one of the names on it, Kevin Indig, who has his own episode in this archive.
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introductions and the finance-to-founder background |
| 02:31 | The pain point Snappa was built for |
| 04:07 | The stock photo post that supplied the first users |
| 06:46 | Rebuilding Snappa as an AI-first editor |
| 10:19 | Organic traffic, AI Overviews and paid placements |
| 12:53 | GoodMetrics as an alternative to Google Analytics |
| 15:52 | Events, properties and cookieless tracking |
| 18:35 | Counting agent traffic and bot visitors |
| 22:50 | A content strategy built on docs and landing pages |
| 28:42 | Distance to seed, and how link building changed |
| 34:19 | His question for the next guest: beyond organic |
| 38:25 | Where to find Christopher and both products |
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Snappa | His graphic design tool for non-designers, launched 2015 and now being rebuilt AI-first |
| GoodMetrics | A cookieless, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics, with an API and an MCP server |
| StockSnap | The free stock photo site the viral post spawned, later sold |
| Anonymised visitor signature | Recognising a returning visitor from IP plus user agent, with no cookie involved |
| Distance to seed | The authority model Jeremy raises, in which a real product may itself act as a seed site |
| Agent traffic | His name for the unresolved grey area between a bot and a visitor |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
He is CGimmer on X and Christopher Gimmer on LinkedIn. Both products are linked in the table above, and he asked for feedback from anyone working on AI design.
Gimmer, Christopher. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Ranking #1 Isn’t Enough Anymore.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/christopher-gimmer-bootstrapped-saas-ai-overviews/
Most SEOs treat link building like a chore. Kristiyan Yankov built a whole agency on it. He’s the founder of Above Apex, a link-building...
In this insightful episode of "Mastering Your Google Business Profile: A User-Generated Content Guide," delve into the complexities of managing the content that users...
Are you entangled in the web of Google Business Profile (GBP) mergers? Dive into this essential episode where we dissect the often perplexing world...