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

Speaker A: 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. I recently, um, saw from someone who works at Claude saying that Cloud is writing 100% of the code that they're putting in their code base. So cloud is creating itself, in effect. 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.

Speaker B: You're listening to Revenue Optimization with Snapstrom. This episode is supported by a few companies pushing the industry forward. Want your iGaming brand to stand out in a crowded market? Otis 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. Visit Otis and own your market today. That's o D Y S global iGaming. And if you're serious about revenue optimization, you need the right data station. Helps affiliates track performance, spot revenue leaks, and make smarter decisions all in one place. Turn your data into growth@StatStrong.com.

Speaker C: All right, we are chatting with Zach Ali, who's the general manager of Finder, or is it finder.com finder.

Speaker A: Finder.com either works.

Speaker C: Same company. So, uh, we were just having a quick, uh, chat before recording. I mean, the obvious topic today is AI. Uh, what are you doing with AI in your own personal career? And what does this look like for a big company? Because you said, uh, like, off record, that I think Finder has fewer people for the company. And that, to me, sounds like it should be a superpower. But I mean, what is the company feeling when it comes to AI? Just, like, optimism or, um, fear.

Speaker A: So I think it's, you know, it's a little bit of both. When AI first launched, there was a lot of excitement around it. Um, 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, uh, most of 2025 is like, you know, it could do some things and it could make Your life easier. Um, but it was never really production ready. It wasn't something you could, um, reliably count on again and again and again to do the thing you needed it to, you kind of had to work with. Um, was definitely an aid and it could help speed up thought process, it could help you refine your writing. You know, you could use it for sort of assistant level tasks. But something happened in December, um, especially with Claude, specifically with Claude, um, that 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, 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, um, so that it's structured and moving, um, 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. The other problem 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. Um, but I take an optimistic view on that and I think it is something that companies are going to have to grapple with 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 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 adapt the systems thinking and see their entire workflow and put together, um, 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.

Speaker C: Yeah, I've heard a couple uh, ah, really similar discussions where basically it's kind of like, I think it was Jensen, uh, from uh, Nvidia, that basically Said, you know, I'm not getting my developers to do programmers, uh, getting them to orchestrate, uh, solve problems and find problems and if they can't do 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, uh, one of

Speaker A: the leading tech companies. Oh, totally. I mean it's something that I recently, um, 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 effect. Um, and that's a, that's a bizarre concept. Um, um, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a game changer.

Speaker C: Yeah. And uh, I mean I don't know if you've been following the, the latest trend, which was, I think it was um, the Claude bot which became bulkbot, which is now openclaw. I think it's going to be called openclaw for quite some time. But, um, 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.

Speaker A: But I think we're actually very close

Speaker C: 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

Speaker A: to be able to think, oh, 110%. 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 247 who can just do things for you, um, and just build things for you. One, uh, thing we're seeing internally, and this is a frightening concept as well, um, you can say it's being reflected in a stock market, but SaaS, a lot of SaaS 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 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 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 what is the new moat? 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. It's not really that uh, 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 if not better. A lot of the times, yeah, I

Speaker C: think about companies like Salesforce where, you know, I think, ah, 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 USP of uh, them owning your data in some capacity 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 on a weekend go. Let's build our better version of Salesforce that doesn't just do eo, but also connects with Telegram and teams and all the other chat. Chat channels you don't want to deal with.

Speaker A: Exactly. Um, what's funny though, which is, which was interesting to me is I um, was about to start building something because I just like, I'm just going to cannibalize all of the SaaS we pay for. And at one point Claude did make a good point and was like, look, is this the thing we're about to build? Do you want it? Is it like super core to your workflow? Like is it the something you're going to use every day and maintain and blah, blah. Um, if it's not, then it probably makes more sense. It's probably better leverage on your end to just pay for someone who is going to do the maintenance and whatnot. And so I think that's where we'll probably see um, companies retain their business and companies lose their business. Like if you offer something and it's just so essential to how that company operates, more than likely they're going to build their own version of it. But if it's something that is an aid 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 the vision 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.

Speaker C: Okay, so I, I did an interview about a month ago, and the guy, Jason, uh, Attard, he works for a game company. He's an affiliate called Game 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 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.

Speaker A: So that's actually probably one of the moats, um, that a comparison business has. Um, so we can't really acquire users via, uh, what is a credit card anymore? I mean, you still can. Some people still click traditional search and they 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 populate, um, their results is probably where we will have a lot of value. The data is a strong, um, mode. And I think that's true for anyone because if you can, technically everyone can build the same thing. So to a certain varying degrees, but whoever got there first 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, to sort of beat back the pack of folks at your heels.

Speaker C: 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. You're asking different questions to get started. And I think now you're going to be dealing more with agents as ah, search engines rather than your old school search.

Speaker A: Yes, um, a thousand percent. Another thing is the where SEO exists in the value chain now is another, um, something I just wrote and read for uh, Forbes, uh, Business Councils was SEO is not the top of your funnel anymore. It is connective 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 definitely still super funded by performance marketing and connecting customers with the right products. But because we've been mastering SEO for the last two decades almost, um, we actually know how to influence those results so 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, you know, they're kind of coming to us and saying, you know, hey, how can improve uh, 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 don't 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. 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 Wall trades doesn't really exist anymore.

Speaker C: And would you say that like your company is uh, making a bit more of a conscious transition to say as social, uh, media is becoming an important part of not just traffic generation, but it's also part of like the trust in branding which also in my opinion feeds SEO thousand percent.

Speaker A: Um, actually last May or, or April or May, I actually killed the SEO department at, in the US 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, TikTok, YouTube, especially YouTube. That gets cited, you know, even more than Reddit now, um, on search. That's, that's, that's sort of your role now. It's like the role of an SEO as we knew it, it's 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 any surface they need to and just be where our customers are.

Speaker C: 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 uh, 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.

Speaker A: 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 sort of been the difference maker for the companies that lost, you know, who have been really shocked by what's happening in SEO and companies that aren't m. Really like if you want to simplify the role of um, or do how to do good SEO, you know, before it was, you know, you have to do relevance. You know there's so eat 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, or Android phones? 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 need to ask themselves, which it

Speaker C: should, should have always been the case. I mean build the best product, then it's going to uh, your marketing is going to be a lot easier.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah. So going back to first party data, because one thing I 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 uh, maybe a bit of laziness on one specific industry itself, uh, 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 uh, you know, finance, maybe there's always been dynamic variables or postbacks where you could actually send hyper personalized tracking links to each user and actually follow their revenue. I mean, is this something that finder's doing and do you think this is kind of rare in most affiliate marketing today?

Speaker A: Uh, I do think it's rare and it shouldn't be. It needs to not be. I think, um, you need to use first party data, uh, to determine how effective your marketing efforts are. You need to do assisted conversions. Needs to be a word that's a phrase that's just said every day at uh, companies now. I think what affiliate marketers were able to get by with for so long is last click attribution. It was all just the performance of one channel. It was okay, Google, my roas is plus whatever and on Google. So Google's working my roas is this on Facebook not seeing how all of them connect to each other. Um, my wife has a e commerce business. Um, 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 have. Um, 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 Pinterest was taking credit for conversions, Facebook was taking credit for conversions, organic is taking credit for conversions. And the visibility just so clouded on what channel is working. Um, but you sort of start to realize all that matters is, is your marketing spend, um, less than the amount of profit you're bringing in, revenue you're bringing in and that's sort of the whole game. And then you can optimize and tweak them. But uh, you need to use your first party data, you need to see the whole customer lifecycle and use that to optimize.

Speaker C: 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. Um, 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.

Speaker A: Oh, totally. I mean, um, the companies that, that are working in affiliate, but then they don't have like the end to end conversion data. It's always hard to work because you don't know what's, what's going wrong and you just have no visibility on, um, okay, are they making it to the shopping cart page but then not checking out? Are they, you know, signing up and creating accounts?

Speaker C: And.

Speaker A: 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, uh, 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. Uh, you'd be like, months would pass and some company could have been taking you for a ride this entire time because you don't know if it is converting.

Speaker C: 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, manipulating stats, and um, 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.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. I mean, that's why those companies, uh, like Impact, are so important and to leverage them as much as possible because they actually take care of a lot of that stuff.

Speaker C: Yeah. And what I like about Impact, it's kind of like, you know, it's a small complement for what we do as a software company for tracking is once, uh, they raised, I think their 150 million about five years ago, um, the first thing they did was they bought, what was it, um, trackonomics. Uh, and there's another one. They bought two tracking softwares right off the bat.

Speaker A: Smart. I mean, that's the right move.

Speaker C: 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, they just look at affiliate marketing as money and they're not really looking at like the tech and the data side. But, um, 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, um, Affiliate Summit.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, and I wonder if that's because tactics are, are less of a thing now because AI is doing more of the actual marketing work. And so now it's. The conversation is shifting to the, the deeper layer, I guess, yeah.

Speaker C: So what do you think about like the whole, uh, influencer segment? Where in my opinion, like, influencers have always been influential at like selling anything. Um, 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. Um, but do you see this as going to be one of the fastest growing segments for the entire affiliate marketing segment?

Speaker A: I, I do. I think, um, I think influencer marketing is more important than ever again, because of AI, because you don't know if there was any thought or 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 know Wirecutter, for example. These are writers at the New York Times, like, of course I can trust their, you know, air purifier review. But now you don't know if it was made by AI, so and you

Speaker C: still don't even trust it because 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.

Speaker A: Yeah, a hundred percent. 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 advice, you can sort of be more, um, accepting of the fact that, oh, hey, they have to make money too because they're providing sort of the service. But a lot of influencers are hesitant to work with brands that they don't believe in, especially the top ones, since they have options.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: 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.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's always going to be a market on both sides. The people that actually don't care about the reputation are 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.

Speaker A: Oh, totally. Um, Sofi, they. There's. There's some account that I follow in finance. It's like my. My rich bff or I think that's her name. Yeah, My rich bff. She. Sofi, 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.

Speaker B: That is crazy.

Speaker C: 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?

Speaker A: 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, you know, links in their footer where it's like, refer a friend and get $25. But I think we might even see that even more as social media has just become such a big part of, like, discovery at this point. Um, there's a. There's someone. There's a product head of growth or something at Lovable, which. And she. 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. In it. And it's obvious. Right. One of the most important things you could do. But there's the other side of it.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: Um. Uh, beyond acquisition is the relationship building. And that's another moat that will prevent you from, um, I guess, software being table stakes again. From you being. Yeah. Taken over. Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker C: Um, Zach, I, uh, really appreciate it. Um, I've learned quite a bit here, and yeah, I'm really going to, um, take a deeper look into the finance side. It's. 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. Reddit, uh, 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?

Speaker A: Um, so I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on X and blue Sky. I'm m. I'm all. LinkedIn's probably my most active but. And then of course you can always come to Finder. We uh, ah, are just like everyone else are experiencing sort of the uh, need to really deliver for our customers. And so one of the things we run is Finder, uh, 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 maybe make a little bit of money while you do it, head to Finder.

Speaker C: I might have to just like actually do more research on the company. 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.

Speaker A: Appreciate it.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thanks, John.

Speaker C: Let's give a shout out to a

Speaker B: few affiliate program platforms that are supporting this podcast that includes IG Suite, Afilka and Intellytics. Thanks for the support. And if you're looking to launch your

Speaker C: affiliate program or affiliate network, check out

Speaker B: these software and learn more at RevenueOptimization IO. This is Revenue optimization with Statstrom, where better data leads to better decisions. If you're not measuring it, you're guessing.

Speaker C: See you next time.