From SEO to Orchestration: Finder’s Zak Ali on AI, Marketing & Moats

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: From SEO to Orchestration: Finder’s Zak Ali on AI, Marketing & Moats
Host: John Wright
Guest: Zak Ali
Published: Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:14:00 +0000
Duration: 27:17

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: It's no longer just the assistant. It is the thing that in often cases, especially in engineering, is doing your job better than you are. And so how do you contend with that? It's like you've created Frankenstein's monster and now what, how do you, you know, what do you do with that? Like it's, it's the thing that might be coming for your job is the thing you're now being asked to work for. Well, you know, work with. I recently saw from someone who works at Claude saying that Claude is writing 100% of the code that they're putting in their code base. So Claude is creating itself in a sec. Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, that's, that actually should have always been the driving force is to own your audience, to own your customer.

[00:00:39] John Wright: Um, because I think what SEO did for a lot of companies is you confused traffic with brand salience. That wasn't actually there. You're listening to revenue optimization with StatsDrone.

[00:00:58] Zak Ali: This episode is supported by a few companies pushing the industry forward.

[00:01:04] John Wright: Want your iGaming brand to stand out in a crowded market?

[00:01:08] John Wright: Odys iGaming are the experts in SEO, digital strategy, and brand protection. They help operators and affiliates rank higher, attract the right traffic, and turn visibility into real growth.

[00:01:23] John Wright: Visit otis.global.com slash iGaming and own your market today. That's odys.global slash iGaming.

[00:01:34] Zak Ali: And if you're serious about revenue optimization, you need the right data. StatsDrone helps affiliates track performance, spot revenue leaks, and make smarter decisions all in one place. Turn your data into growth at StatsDrone.com.

[00:02:00] John Wright: All right. We are chatting with Zach Elieb, who's the general manager of finder. Or is it finder.com? Finder, finder.com. It works. Thank company. So we were just having a quick chat before recording. I mean, the obvious topic today is AI. What are you doing with AI, your own personal career? And what does this look like for a big company? Because you said like off record that I think finder has two hard people for the company. And that, that to me sounds like it should be a superpower. But I mean, is what is the company feeling when it comes to AI? Is this like optimism or fear?

[00:02:39] Zak Ali: So I think it's, you know, it's a little bit of both.

[00:02:42] John Wright: When AI first launched, there was a lot of excitement around it.

[00:02:46] John Wright: And I know everyone was sort of trying to get their hands dirty and use it. The thing that happened in 2023, 2024, and even most of 2025 is like, you know, it could do some things and it could make your life easier.

[00:03:00] Zak Ali: But it was never really production ready. It wasn't something you could reliably count on again and again and again to do the thing you needed it to, you kind of had to work with it.

[00:03:11] Zak Ali: It was definitely an aid and it can help speed up thought process. It could help you refine your writing. You know, you could use it for a sort of assistant level tasks, but something happened in December, especially with Claude, specifically with Claude.

[00:03:27] John Wright: It's a whole new ball game now. And with a big company like finder, you know, with a couple hundred employees, the problem, there's a champagne problem and there's a real problem. The champagne problem is that when you work with a lot of brilliant people, everyone wants to build their own things and trying to contain innovation so that it's structured and moving in a way that can be like globally aligned is one issue. That's a good problem to have. That means you have so much innovation that if you can just tame it, you're going to have a rocket ship.

[00:03:59] John Wright: The other problems is getting people to embrace this new latest version of AI, knowing that it is working at a level of an employee almost. It's no longer just the assistant. It is the thing that in often cases, especially in engineering, is doing your job better than you are. And so how do you contend with that? It's like you've created Frankenstein's monster and now what, how do you, you know, what do you do with that? Like it's, it's the thing that might be coming for your job is the thing you're now being asked to work for, you know, work with.

[00:04:37] Zak Ali: But I take an optimistic view on that. And I think it is something that companies are going to have to grapple with.

[00:04:43] John Wright: And that is transitioning your employees from doers to orchestrators. So the folks that really want to just do task by task, by task manually, you know, they, they really specialize in that thing. They want to lean on what they know and lean on their expertise. They probably won't succeed in this next phase. The folks who can adopt the systems thinking and see their entire workflow and put together sort of agents that can work and do the work that you used to do manually yourself in tandem so that you can free up your time to do bigger and better things. Those are the folks that are most likely to succeed.

[00:05:22] John Wright: Yeah. I've heard a couple of really similar discussions where basically it's kind of like, I think it was Jensen from Nvidia that basically said, you know, I'm not getting my developers to do programmer. I'm getting them to orchestrate, solve problems and find problems. And if they can't do it either, then we have a problem, which is yes, they don't really have a job anymore. And that's, that's a scary thing to think about from like, yeah, one of the leading tech companies.

[00:05:48] Zak Ali: Oh, totally. I mean, it's something that I recently saw from someone who works at Claude saying that Claude is writing 100% of the code that they're putting in their code base. So Claude is creating itself in a set.

[00:06:01] John Wright: And that's a, that's a bizarre concept.

[00:06:05] Zak Ali: It's yeah, it's, it's a game changer. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know if you've been following the latest trend, which learners pickle is the Claude bot, which became Bolt bot, which is now open clock. I think it's been recalled open call for quite some time, but, um, but I find that so fascinating because I think where it is right now, it's super in, it's in the infancy of where it is right now as agents. But I think we're actually very close from being able to say, Hey, I need you to do this as if you were doing this with a team or real employees. Like they're actually going to start doing tasks and manual tasks could be able to think, Oh, 110%.

[00:06:44] Zak Ali: I mean, it's, we're getting close to having what we saw in the movie, her, where, you know, you have this autonomous agent 24 seven, who can just do things for you and just build things for you. Uh, one thing we're seeing internally, and this is a frightening concept as well, um, it's being reflected in the stock market, but SAS, a lot of SAS companies aren't going to make it out of this. Um, I've one shotted entire software that we pay for, and I'm not an engineer. You know, and so identifying the parts of your workflow that are bottlenecks

[00:07:22] Zak Ali: to you, or you just wish that thing you paid for did that one thing. You're now able to build that yourself without a lot of complexity. Um, as a moat basically for these companies, it's, it's going to be very hard for them to retain their user base. And, um, I don't know, that's just something that's also been on my mind is that like, what is the new moat? You know, and I know it's going to come in many different forms in the SEO world. That's going to be your authenticity and your video content and your social media presence and your personality, your brand, all of that, because written content, much like, you know, what's happening in engineering now has been commoditized. It's interchangeable.

[00:07:58] Zak Ali: It's not really that special at least, uh, at least SEO content. You know, there's still great writers out there that AI can't compete with. Um, but on this type of content, for sure AI is equal. It's not better a lot of the times. Yeah. I think about companies like Salesforce where, you know, I think a lot of people want to see a company like that fail, but I think you're right. It's kind of like, can you build your own CRM that works better is potentially more secure. It's kind of like you're trusting all of your data in another company, which maybe this is actually part of their USD, uh, that owning your data in some capacity

[00:08:34] Zak Ali: and being able to do LLM and machine learning, but I think this is a perfect example of like, that's probably something you can build in a week and go, let's build our better version of Salesforce. That doesn't just do email, but also connects with Telegram and Teams and all the other chat channels you don't want to deal with. Exactly. Um, what's funny though, which is, which was interesting to me is I, um, was about to start building something cause I just like, Oh, I'm just going to cannibalize all of the sass we pay for. And at one point, Claude did make a good point and was like, look, is this

[00:09:09] John Wright: the thing we're about to build? Do you want it? Is it like super core to your workflow?

[00:09:41] Zak Ali: Then likely they're going to build their own version of it. But if it's something that isn't paid to them and it just helps them do their core thing, it probably makes more sense for you to just pay for the subscription. Yes, technically you could build it yourself, but are you going to maintain it? Do you have division for it? Are you going to do all the security updates and all that? Um, if not better to just let someone else handle it. Okay. So I, I did an interview about a month ago and the guy, uh, Jason authority works for a gain companies and affiliate called gain lounge. And basically he's in charge of customer success. And the things that we started talking about were designing, like he's a designer and a product designer, but now there's a ship where it's like,

[00:10:20] Zak Ali: you're designing for agents and with a company like yours, you guys have really unique data, like you have data that are products that help you make decisions like are there now APIs for these things where, uh, an agent can actually just get the data direct and say, Hey, we're making these recommendations because we're just going to feed it to you.

[00:10:39] John Wright: So that's actually probably one of the, um, moats that a comparison business has, um, so we can't really acquire users via what is a credit card anymore. I mean, you still can, some people still click traditional search and go onto your website. But, um, what we can offer is all of the data about how customers interact with these products, what's good for them, what's not good for them and using that data to influence how, um, these AI companies, um, populate the results is probably where we will have a lot of value. Like, you know, the data is a strong, um, strong mode.

[00:11:15] John Wright: And I think that's, that's true for anyone because if you can, um, hopefully everyone can build the same things to a certain varying degrees, but whoever got there first, it has enough data. They have more, um, insights into their users. They have more content to train itself on, you know, we're not doing that, any of that stuff right now, but, um, I think that's what's going to separate folks is like, can you get there fast enough to get the user base fast enough to make your model better and better and better, um,

[00:11:44] Zak Ali: to sort of beat back the pack of folks at your heels. Yeah. I think what you said is interesting where, you know, the last couple of years, I think SEO and affiliation have kind of had this weird relationship where a lot of people have just basically had to leave affiliation because the types of content they were creating are what you said. Doesn't really work anymore. Like, you know, what is a credit card or what's the best credit card? I mean, yeah, of course you want to search for that, but it's kind of like, um, how you get there is a lot different. It it's, you're asking different questions to get started. And I think now you're going to be dealing more with agents as search engines rather than your old school search. Yes.

[00:12:23] Zak Ali: Um, I, I had thousand percent. Another thing is the where SEO exists in the value chain is another, um, yeah, something I just wrote and read for, uh, Forbes, uh, business councils was SEO is not the top of your funnel anymore. It is connected tissue. It is what's going to send, um, what's going to reinforce your already strong brand positioning. Um, and we're actually seeing that with clients too. You know, we're, we're definitely still super funded by performance marketing and connecting customers with the right products. But because we've been mastering SEO for the last, you know, two decades, almost, um, we actually know how to influence those results so

[00:13:03] Zak Ali: that when someone types in, for example, you know, is Robinhood trustworthy or something like that. And if it's not the answer the partner wants to see it's like, you know, they're kind of coming to us and saying, you know, Hey, how can, uh, improve our reputation, like how do we, how do we influence this? How do we figure that out? Um, so there's this weird, um, sort of value add that I think a lot of SEOs don't necessarily even realize that they know that they can offer yet, which is you actually can become more of a brand position or a brand player. Um, and actually that is what the role of an SEO is today. You're either on the brand side or the product side.

[00:13:38] Zak Ali: If you love semantics and schema and all that, you're probably a product SEO. If you like reputation management and getting cited, you're the brand SEO. But that middle SEO, that sort of Jack well trace doesn't really exist anymore. And would you say that like your company is making a bit more of a conscious transition to say, as a social media is becoming an important part of not just traffic generation, but it's also part of like the trust and branding, which also in my opinion feeds SEO.

[00:14:08] Zak Ali: Bousing percent. Um, actually last May or April, April, May, I actually killed the SEO department in the U S branch and just said, we're just marketers now. We are going to play on every surface. We're going to be on Facebook. We're going to be on Instagram, Tik TOK, YouTube, especially YouTube that gets cited, you know, even more than Reddit now, um, on search that stats. That's sort of your role now is like the role of an SEO as we knew it. Just not there anymore. Department wouldn't be able to pay justify the expense of an SEO, but they would be able to justify a full stack marketing team that can attack.

[00:14:46] Zak Ali: I've heard any surface they need to and just be where our customers are.

[00:14:50] Zak Ali: And would you say that first party data is going to be a big, uh, maybe it'll be important for your company because you guys are already doing it, but do you think this is where affiliate marketing should be going where you need to own your own customer, like you're, you're already doing it with your own products anyways.

[00:15:06] John Wright: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, that's, that actually should have always been the driving force is to own your audience, to own your customer. Um, because I think what SEO did for a lot of companies is you confused traffic with brand salience. That wasn't actually there. So you're like, Oh, I'm getting so much traffic from SEO. It's like, you're not your writer who wrote what is a personal loan is. Um, your content is getting traffic. Your brand is not the deciding factor in that traffic at all. Um, and that's that's sort of been the difference maker for the companies that lost, you know, who have been really shocked by what's happening

[00:15:42] John Wright: SEO and the companies that aren't, um, really like if you want to simplify the role of, um, or how to do good SEO, you know, before it was, you know, you have to do relevancy, you know, there was so E E E A T the whole thing. Actually, no, it's just to be undeniable. Now. Do you think Apple is scared? They're never going to show up in the best computers or Microsoft or, you know, our Android and surface drones. Like, no, they're undeniable. Like you couldn't type in most popular soda and not see Coca-Cola there or Pepsi. So how do you make your brand? One of those is really the questions companies who asked themselves, which it should, should have always been the case.

[00:16:20] John Wright: I mean, build the best product, then it's your marketing is going to be a lot easier. Exactly. Yeah. So going back to first party data, because one thing I've saw in the iGaming space was a lot of affiliate marketers, not really fully owning the player or owning the customer. So for example, it's like you have a newsletter, what most people would do. And I think this is a, maybe a bit of laziness on one specific industry itself, where there's just a lot of money. You would send all of your newsletters to a single campaign or even a default campaign, and I think with, you know, finance, maybe there's always been

[00:16:56] John Wright: dynamic variables or post-backs where you could actually send hyper personalized tracking links to each user and actually follow the revenue. I mean, is this something that finders doing? And do you think this is kind of rare in most affiliate marketing today?

[00:17:11] Zak Ali: I do think it's rare and it shouldn't be. It needs to not be. I think you need to use first party data to determine how effective your marketing efforts are. You need to do assisted conversions. It needs to be a word, a phrase that's just said every day at companies now. I think what affiliate marketers were able to get by with for so long is

[00:17:32] John Wright: last click attribution. It was all just the performance of one channel. It was, okay, Google, my ROAS is plus whatever on Google. So Google's working. My ROAS is this on Facebook. Not seeing how all of them connect to each other.

[00:17:47] John Wright: My wife has a e-commerce business and I was on Ahrefs. She was on Ahrefs looking up her brand name. She's like, oh my gosh, look how much branded search I has.

[00:17:56] Zak Ali: And I'm like, that's not actually branded search. That is people seeing all of your ads on Facebook and then going to Google and typing in that and saying, okay, this company is legit. And then they're converting. And so she was in a predicament where interest was taking credit for conversions, Facebook was taking credit for conversions, organic has taken credit for conversions and the visibility just so clouded on what channel is working.

[00:18:21] John Wright: But you sort of start to realize all that matters is, is your marketing stand less than the amount of revenue you're bringing in. And that's sort of the whole game and then you can optimize and tweak them. But you need to use your first party data to see the whole customer lifecycle and use that to optimize.

[00:18:40] Zak Ali: And I'm less familiar with the finance space other than, you know, it's easy to be like, okay, you know, here's my banks and credit cards and mortgages and use these tools for investing.

[00:18:50] Zak Ali: But you find that, you know, in most affiliate marketing software that we don't really have access to real time data, that we're still behind, that we don't have full data transparency coming from the affiliate programs you work with.

[00:19:04] John Wright: Oh, totally. I mean, the companies that, that are working in a affiliate, but then they don't have like the end to end conversion data, always hard to work because you don't know what's, what's going wrong and you just have no visibility on, okay, are they making it to the shopping cart page, but then not checking out or they, you know, signing up and creating accounts and, and so what will happen is a lot of times these affiliate and on the affiliate end, especially if you don't have that data, you don't know how effective publishing partners are. And so I don't know how I would be too afraid to ever run a program where I didn't have end to end going on. You could be like months would pass and some company could have been

[00:19:42] John Wright: taking you for a ride this entire time because you don't know if it is converting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of trust that affiliates have to put into these affiliate programs where it's like, you know, it's an uncomfortable topic, but I mean, what's to stop a program from deleting data-data manipulating stats and when there's kind of no really laws on the other side of the fence, it's like, you're at the mercy that what they're telling you is just true. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that's why those companies like Impact are so important and to leverage them as much as possible because they actually take care of a lot of that stuff. Yeah. And what I like about Impact, it's kind of like, you know, it's a small

[00:20:21] John Wright: compliment for what we do as a software company for tracking is once they raise, I think they're 150 million about five years ago, the first thing they did was they bought, what was it?

[00:20:32] Zak Ali: Traconomics and there's another one. They bought two tracking softwares right off the bat. Smart. Smart. I mean, that's the right move.

[00:20:41] Zak Ali: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the right move, but I think there's still a lot of people that are kind of like, they just look at affiliate marketing as money and they're not really looking at like the tech and the data side, but my personal take is that in the last, ever since COVID happened, the B2B side of it became more exciting. Like data, business intelligence, that was boring stuff before. And now it's kind of like, these are things you actually see as topics at like, you know, affiliate summit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:10] John Wright: And I wonder if that's because tactics are less the thing now because AI is doing more of the actual marketing work. And so now it's the conversation is shifting to the deeper layer, I guess.

[00:21:24] Zak Ali: So what do you think about like the whole influencer segment where in my opinion, like influencers have always been influential at like selling anything, but it goes without saying, I think a lot of them have, they don't really want to do the things that you guys have to do as a company. Like you have to generate traffic and then you have to manage all the accounts and the deals and there's a less fun part of that business. But do you see this as going to be one of the fastest growing segments for the entire affiliate marketing segment?

[00:21:53] Zak Ali: I do. I think influencer marketing is more important than ever. Again, because of AI, because you don't know if there was any solder effort put into your product. The trust just isn't there anymore. The way it used to be where you're like, oh, well, these are, these are, you know, wire cutter, for example, these are writers at the New York Times. Like, of course I can trust their air purifier review, but now you don't know if it was made by AI. So, and you still don't even trust it. Cause you're kind of like, we know you're doing this just for money and they're, they're two clicks away from getting banned, which I think a lot of them actually have been banned from Google. Yeah. A hundred percent.

[00:22:32] Zak Ali: Um, so I think there's that part of it is that if an influencer recommends something, it can break down a little bit of that trust, lack of trust. Um, if it's someone you've been following for a long time and they generally give good, good advice, you can sort of be more accepting of the fact that, Oh, Hey, they have to make money too, because they're spreading sort of the service. Um, but a lot of influencers are hesitant to work with brands that they don't believe in, especially the top ones there, since they have options, right? They're like, Oh, I'm not just going to promote your whatever. I don't believe in it. It'll hurt my brand. And then that's my value right there. Um, so I do think it does start to even out as you get more influential. Yeah.

[00:23:12] Zak Ali: I think there's always going to be a market on both sides. The people that actually don't care about the reputation. They're like, I'm here for money. And then there's people that they're like, look, I'm going to get the money. Anyways. I don't really need to, uh, you know, toss my reputation in the garbage.

[00:23:26] John Wright: Oh, totally. Um, so far they, there's, there's so some account that I follow in finance. It's like my, my rich BFF. I think that's her name. Yeah. My rich BFF. She, so far I made her some C-suite title. Like they really like, they're locking these people in because I think they understand how powerful they are.

[00:23:44] Zak Ali: That is crazy. I mean, I think, uh, when it comes to like me asking a question, like what would you do, uh, you know, if you were to start your own finance site, I mean, yeah, you want to do things like this where you create content. That's super influential where people say, Hey, we want to find a way to like, this is the second level of affiliate marketing. It's like, is there equity? Is it a better deal? Like, you know, how do we make this? So we're really connected here. Right. I mean, turning every, it's almost like, I think that's the way we're headed is that everyone will become a sub affiliate at some point, like just, I mean, and that already exists. So many of these programs have these links in their footer where it's

[00:24:22] Zak Ali: like refer a friend and get $25. But I think we're might even see that even more as social media has just become such a big part of like discovery at this point. Um, uh, there's a, there's someone, there's a product head of growth. There's something at lovable, which she's really great. Her name's like Elena Barna or something like that. And she gives this big talk about how, um, getting the tastemakers in your industry to talk about you is like one of the, and it's obvious, right? One of the most important things you could do, but there's the other side of it, um, beyond acquisition is the relationship building.

[00:24:59] Zak Ali: And that's another moat that will prevent you from, um, I guess software being table stakes again, um, from you being taken over. Yeah.

[00:25:12] John Wright: Awesome. Um, Zach, uh, really appreciate it. Um, I've learned quite a bit here and yeah, I'm really gonna, uh, take a deeper look into the finance side. It's, uh, we've had a chat about some of the different finance companies I've seen, I mean, I see them all the time. I mean, they show up everywhere. Uh, Reddit, YouTube, uh, Instagram. I mean, you can't, um, you know, not see it. So I just want to pass it back to you and ask how, how can people get a hold of you? Um, so I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on X and blue sky. I'm on LinkedIn is probably my most active, but, and then of course you can

[00:25:47] John Wright: always come to find her where we, uh, are just like everyone else are experiencing sort of the need to really deliver for our customers. And so one of the things we run is a finder rewards where we give you money for good financial decisions. And it's a unique concept. And so, yeah, if you want to follow me personally LinkedIn, but if you want to dive into finance and we'll make a little, maybe make a little bit of money while you do it, uh, head to binder. I might have to just like actually do more research on the company. Like these are some great ideas of things that I think everyone could, I don't want to say pure copy, but those are great campaigns. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.

[00:26:35] Zak Ali: Let's give a shout out to a few affiliate program platforms that are supporting this podcast. That includes IG suite, Affilka and Intelitics. Thanks for the support. And if you're looking to launch your affiliate program or affiliate network, check out these software and learn more at revenue optimization.io.

[00:26:57] John Wright: This is revenue optimization with stats strong, where better data leads to better decisions. If you're not measuring it, you're guessing. See you next time.