Most agencies still sell search, PR and paid as three line items with three owners and three reports. Zak Ali of Finder US thinks that arrangement has already stopped describing the work.
The Two Types Of SEO Left
Ali put it on the Unscripted SEO podcast as bluntly as it can be put:
“look, there’s two types of SEOs that exist today. There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven’t realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding.”
— Zak Ali, Finder US
He did not stop at the observation. He restructured around it: “last May, I decided to kill the SEO team and just have a generalist marketing team.” He is candid that it landed badly at first — “It was a bit rough at the beginning to say, ‘hey, you guys aren’t SEOs anymore, you’re growth marketers’” — because the team had spent years building the discipline they were being asked to widen.
The reasoning was simple: “you have to be able to attack every surface.”
Why Channel Silos Cost You Coverage
The visible cost of a silo is duplicated outreach — two people from the same company pitching the same editor in the same month with different angles, and the editor concluding that neither is worth a reply.
The invisible cost is the one Ali points at. He describes the value of showing up in a “best whatever it is” roundup even when nobody converts: “You may not get the direct attribution to ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot or whatever it is. But if your name sticks out, when they see you on Google” the earlier exposure is doing work you never invoiced anyone for.
He calls this “all of that unseen benefit that you can’t put on a Looker Studio dashboard.” A siloed structure systematically underfunds exactly that benefit, because no single channel owner gets credit for it.
One Brief, Three Channels
This is how we structure it here, rather than something Ali prescribed.
A campaign starts as one brief with one claim — a piece of proprietary data, a contrarian position, a genuinely useful free tool. Search decides what the durable page looks like and which queries it should answer. PR decides who would credibly cover the claim and what the hook is for them. Paid decides which segment to put it in front of first so the organic and earned versions launch into an audience that already saw it once.
The test of whether it is really one system: if the PR angle changes, the on-page copy changes too. If it does not, you have three teams sharing a spreadsheet.
How We Structure A Collaborative Engagement
Our engagements are built around a single brief owner rather than a channel owner, with specialists pulled in per campaign. That is the practical translation of Ali’s “attack every surface” instruction for a business that is not big enough to employ a generalist marketing team of its own.
You can read more about how the channels interlock in Holistic Visibility Across Every Channel, or see the current shape of the work on our services page.
More interviews and channel thinking on the blog.