Say It Anyway

SE Ranking x Planable
  • 5.0 (2)
  • BUSINESS
  • UPDATED MONTHLY

Say It Anyway is the podcast where we say the things about digital marketing you’re technically supposed to keep to yourself. Every week, hosts Mordy Oberstein (Head of Brand, SE Ranking) and Miruna Dragomir (CMO, Planable) take an honest — sometimes uncomfortably honest — look at what’s actually happening across the modern marketing landscape.

  1. 1D AGO

    Stop hacking LLMs (Why and How)

    SEOs are doing what SEOs do. And Mordy has some feelings about it. Two tactics have become the go-to playbook for gaming LLMs right now. The first is chunking: stripping your entire site down to bite-sized snippets — nothing longer than two sentences — so AI models can grab and cite them easily. The second is self-serving listicles: publishing “best [category] tools” posts where you rank yourself number one and fill your competitors in below you. Big companies are doing both. Google has explicitly said they know about both and are working to stop them. And here’s the part people are underplaying: these hacks are working in LLMs — while quietly tanking organic search traffic at the same time. Glenn Gabe, one of the sharpest SEO analysts tracking this, has a name for it. He calls it Mount AI: sites that optimize hard for LLM visibility and watch their Google traffic fall off a cliff. So before you double down on the hack, the question worth asking is: which channel are you actually willing to lose? Mordy and Miruna don’t say never hack. They say understand what hacking costs you — in positioning, in credibility, and in the organizational mindset it creates. Growth hacking strategies don’t build momentum. They borrow it from the future. Nick Leroy, founder of Nick Leroy Consulting, SEOjobs.com, and the SEO for Lunch newsletter, joins to answer how Google will most likely get a handle on LLM quality — and why the timeline is shorter than most people assume.

    18 min

  2. MAY 14

    Don’t Dump LLM Visibility on Your SEO Team

    Here’s an uncomfortable conversation no one wants to have with their CMO. When AI visibility became the next big metric to chase, most marketing leadership did what felt instinctively logical: handed it to the SEO team. Rankings, citations, mentions — that’s what SEOs do, right? Wrong instinct. And in this episode, Miruna explains exactly why. LLM visibility isn’t a ranking problem. It’s a brand perception problem. When you audit why your company isn’t being cited by AI, what you often don’t find isn’t a technical gap — it’s a positioning gap. A signal that the market doesn’t fully understand who you are, what you’re best at, or why you matter. That’s not something an SEO team fixes with an outreach campaign and a few listicles. That’s a CMO problem. Or — as Mordy points out — a CEO problem, because the CMO is usually just absorbing pressure from above. Miruna shares a candid example from Planable’s own experience: their LLM audit didn’t reveal a citation problem. It revealed that the market still perceived them as a niche collaboration tool, not the fully equipped platform they’d since become. The SEO team was never supposed to fix that. It was always a brand repositioning conversation that no one had escalated to the right level. Laura Little, founder of the British Chick Marketing Agency, joins to answer the question that makes a lot of org charts uncomfortable: if LLM visibility is just a symptom of brand visibility, then who should actually own it?

    14 min

  3. MAY 7

    You have to be crazy to advertise on ChatGPT!

    Short answer: yes. Long answer: this episode. ChatGPT is running ads at $60 per impression. Not per click — per impression. That’s Super Bowl money, for a platform where the majority of users still aren’t seeing any ads, you have almost no visibility into who you’re reaching, and the audience came specifically for an answer — not an ad. Mordy and Miruna break down why this feels less like a media buy and more like a fundraising mechanism for OpenAI’s investors — and why the brands currently signing up tend to be the AT&Ts of the world, not the Verizons. Second-tier players in their categories spending Super Bowl budgets for approximately none of the Super Bowl upside. The bigger point: if your brand isn’t showing up in AI results organically, an ad won’t fix that. It’s a brand problem, not a budget problem — and the solution is building the kind of presence that AI wants to mention without being paid to. Jordan Koene, founder of Previsible and host of the Voices of Search podcast, joins to talk about exactly what that looks like in practice.

    20 min

  4. APR 28

    Stop Using AI for Output — Use It as Your Audience

    “How much more can we produce with AI?” is the wrong question. Everyone is measuring AI adoption by output: more content, more copy, more campaigns, more. Mordy Oberstein and Miruna Dragomir argue that framing has teams convinced they’re getting value from AI when they’re actually getting the least interesting thing from it. The smarter move? Use it as your audience. Miruna built a custom GPT trained on her brand’s target personas — not to generate content, but to push back on it. The AI’s job wasn’t to help. It was to simulate a skeptical reader and flag where the messaging wasn’t landing. The result? More useful than any creative brief. From stress-testing a strategy pitch against a simulated CEO to understanding how LLMs reflect internet-wide perception of your brand, this episode makes the case that AI’s real value isn’t in the output it produces — it’s in the thinking it forces. Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro, joins with her own take on using AI for audience research and strategic input rather than task automation.

    18 min

  5. 12/16/2025

    [Debate] Budgeting for multi-engine search: Where should your next $10K go?

    At SEO Foresight 2026 on December 9, join widely respected voices in search—Barry Schwartz, Melissa Popp, Erin Sparks and Grace Frohlich—for a grounded discussion on how teams are planning budgets across today’s multi-engine landscape.  With Google’s AI Mode reshaping results and “answer engines” gaining traction, this session compares real-world approaches without one-size-fits-all prescriptions. What’s on the agenda? Ways teams prioritize among content, citations/PR, technical work, and partnerships/data—plus common trade-offs.What “impact” can mean in 2026: inclusion in AI answers, citation quality, and durable brand visibility.Practical considerations for planning and measurement across multiple surfaces (no one-size-fits-all).Join to hear different perspectives and gather ideas for your own 2026 discussions. Grab your free seat now.

    38 min

  6. 11/25/2025

    Multi-platform search is here: Building brand visibility across Google, TikTok, and answer engines

    Join Jessica Redman, co-founder of Didgeheads and multi-platform visibility strategist, for a fast-paced guide to showing up across Google, TikTok, and AI answer engines. In this episode, Jessica unpacks the psychology behind today’s multi-touch search journeys and shares playbooks for earning inclusion in quick answers (AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity), building TikTok-native discoverability, and structuring catalogs so people and machines find products faster.  You’ll learn how to clarify entities, use structured evidence, and turn long-form content into short, searchable video—plus what to track when clicks are scarce: share of voice, citations, assisted conversions. We also touch on answer-led browsing and new data-sharing rules that keep Chrome intact—and what they mean for channel mix and measurement. Planning portable brand visibility in 2025? Start here.

    40 min

  7. 08/27/2025

    Conversational AI meets cognitive bias: Re-engineering search strategy for the human brain

    Join Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPullRank, as he explores how conversational AI and cognitive bias are reshaping search strategy in 2025. In this episode, Garrett breaks down how chat-style answer engines—like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT—tap into psychological shortcuts that influence how people discover and trust information. Discover how to spot and work with biases such as confirmation bias, authority bias, and the halo effect to guide search behavior without gaming the system. Garrett shares practical tactics for crafting bias-aware, AI-friendly snippets, measuring visibility in a low-click world, and aligning content with both human instincts and machine interpretation. Tune in for advice on adapting to AI-first search, from compressing the “messy middle” funnel to preparing for emerging conversational platforms.

    50 min

  8. 07/24/2025

    AI-ready schema: Feeding Google’s answer engines with structured data

    Join Alex Moss, Principal SEO at Yoast and co-founder of FireCask, as he dives into the world of AI-ready schema and structured data, sharing insights from his 20+ years of experience in technical SEO. In this episode, Alex walks us through how schema has evolved to support Google’s AI-driven answer engines, and why it’s more important than ever to ensure your site is AI-ready. Discover practical strategies for structuring data, writing AI-friendly content, and troubleshooting common markup mistakes. Alex also shares his step-by-step audit process for ensuring structured data is truly working for your site and measurable in search performance. Tune in for valuable advice on entity hooks, knowledge graphs, and advanced SEO tactics that can help you make the most of AI-driven search results.

    37 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Say It Anyway is the podcast where we say the things about digital marketing you’re technically supposed to keep to yourself. Every week, hosts Mordy Oberstein (Head of Brand, SE Ranking) and Miruna Dragomir (CMO, Planable) take an honest — sometimes uncomfortably honest — look at what’s actually happening across the modern marketing landscape.

Information

  • Creator
    SE Ranking x Planable
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    46
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Say It Anyway
  • Show Website
    Say It Anyway