From Law School Student to AI Growth Hacker 🧠 ft. Illia Zhurakovskyi (SemScale)

Can a law student walk away from his degree and become an SEO growth hacker? 🤔⚖️ That’s exactly what happened to Illia Zhurakovskyi, and his view on SEO and AI is refreshingly calm: AI updates are just another kind of Google update. 🔥

In the latest episode of Inside A Hustler’s Brain, I sat down with Illia Zhurakovskyi, Growth Manager at SemScale, a business unit within the Boosta holding company. In only his second podcast appearance, Illia walked me through seven years of link building, team building, and where he thinks search is heading next. 💯

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• ⚖️ How he went from law school to SEO via Harvard’s CS50 course
• 🪜 His climb from crowd marketing specialist to outreach, team lead and growth manager
• 🤖 Why AI changes feel like just another Google update to his team
• 🔗 The shift from classic links to crowd marketing, Reddit mentions and reviews
• 🎯 What separates a junior outreach person from a great one
• 🔮 His prediction: SEOs and link builders will become growth marketers
• 🏢 What changed when SemScale opened its doors to external clients
• 🧰 The AI stack: Sitechecker LLM monitoring, Claude and Grok APIs, internal bots
• 🎪 Why most SEO conference talks go stale so fast
• 💼 Will AI eat human jobs? His honest answer

🎥 Watch the full episode:

👨‍💼 Who Is Illia Zhurakovskyi?

Illia Zhurakovskyi studied business and law in Kyiv, then built a career in SEO, link building and AI search optimization. He has spent almost seven years inside the same holding company and today works as a growth manager at SemScale, Boosta’s SEO and link building service. 🇺🇦

Now based in Katowice, Poland, he’s a familiar face at European SEO and affiliate events, from Boost360° in Warsaw to SEO Estonia, TES Affiliate Prague and the Affiliate Leaders Summit in Lisbon. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. 🌍

⚖️ From Law Student to SEO: Illia Zhurakovskyi’s Backstory

In the final years of university, Illia realised that being a lawyer wasn’t for him. He finished his bachelor’s degree, left during his master’s, and started thinking about what to do next. 🎓

At that point he completed Harvard’s CS50 course on computer science and web development, started exploring job openings, and found the holding company he still works with today. “It was surprisingly very nice,” he told me. 😄

🪜 Seven Years Through Every Part of the SEO Business

Illia’s career path is a great map for anyone who wants to grow inside an SEO company:

• 🗣️ Crowd marketing specialist: hard link building on forums, comments and profiles
• 📧 Outreach on the product side: helping SEO specialists on the company’s own websites
• 🏗️ Service team: joining the biggest service team in the holding, handling content, link building and SEO
• 👥 Team lead: building his own large team in Ukraine
• 🚀 Growth manager: for about a year now, working directly with clients and partners

The surprise? Moving from managing people to talking to clients in the field turned out to be the part he enjoys most, because he gets to share experience with people. 🤝

🤖 SEO and AI: “It’s Very Similar to Google Updates”

Plenty of SEOs are panicking about AI. Illia isn’t. For him and his team, AI changes are not very scary, because they behave like Google updates: you need to be flexible, but you can manage them. 🧘

His team is already working with LLMs and with tools that monitor LLM visibility. He’s honest that it’s still a black box, since you can’t measure AI visibility for a website very well yet. (If you want to go deeper on that, Anirudh Agarwal explained how to rank inside ChatGPT search.) 📦

🔗 How Link Building Is Changing in the AI Era

According to Illia, a large share of SemScale’s clients have switched their link building strategy toward crowd marketing again:

• ⭐ Reviews on platforms like Trustpilot
• 👽 Reddit mentions
• 📰 Media and PR link building

Classic tactics haven’t vanished. They still run guest posts, link insertions and full SEO campaigns for smaller companies. The lesson, again: be flexible for all these updates. 🔄

🎯 What separates a junior outreach person from a great one?

Crowd marketing is the heavy work, he says: real posts on forums and profiles that take serious effort. Outreach is easier in one sense, because many websites are ready to do business with you. But to land the really big websites, “you need to be a master of link building.” Alexandra Tachalova shared her own link building playbook on the show too. 🏅

🔮 The Future: SEOs Become Growth Marketers

I asked Illia about all those videos claiming AI tools can now fully automate outreach. His prediction is bigger than automation: the whole of SEO will change in the next two to three years. 📈

We still need links, of course, but it won’t be the whole point.

Illia Zhurakovskyi

He expects the usual SEO specialist or link builder to evolve into something like a growth marketer, mixing link building with marketing, media and PR. The future currency is mentions and brand awareness, a point Liam Quirk also made about the new rules of ChatGPT SEO. 📣

🏢 From In-House Projects to External Clients at SemScale

For roughly 10 years, the team worked only on the holding’s own products. Opening up to external clients was a completely different model, because clients’ SEO specialists already have strategies, requirements and a vision for their websites. 🧩

So instead of a simple “what do you want to order?” approach, SemScale starts with meetings: what’s your strategy, what do you want to reach? Then they make recommendations and help complete the strategy if it isn’t finished yet. 🤝

🧰 Illia’s AI Tools for SEO and Link Building

• 🔍 Sitechecker: an SEO tool built inside the holding, with its own LLM monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek. His team gets extended monitoring options for clients
• 🧠 Claude API: connected to the company’s internal tools for monitoring links, indexing and pages
• ⚡ Grok API: “surprisingly” useful, because it works well with some of their SEO strategies
• 🤖 Internal bots: find and check donor websites in a huge database, so people don’t sit in Google Sheets all day

I told Illia I’m in the same camp: I use Grok Bot to automate email outreach, create content and run site audits. 🙌

Boosta even has a separate AI optimization team serving all of its roughly 25 businesses. But there’s one rule they never break:

We never send our clients websites without manual human checking.

Illia Zhurakovskyi

🎪 SEO Events: Why Insights Go Stale So Fast

Illia regularly attends SEO events and side events around big expos like SBC and SiGMA, where he says a lot of real business gets done. His frustration is with the talks: many feel more like presentations of services than real insight. 🎤

His favourite example: a speaker opened a lecture on ranking for certain keywords by admitting that a Google content update had dropped that same morning, so he wasn’t sure the strategy still worked. 😅 “Everything goes so fast. It’s very hard to catch really working insights.”

💼 Will AI Eat Human Jobs?

Illia’s view is balanced. AI will definitely take some jobs, such as copywriting and design, but it will also create new roles, like AI content generation teams where one person can do what used to take many. 🔄

When I brought up the massive layoffs at companies like Amazon, Oracle and IBM, he agreed people can lose their jobs. The problem is timing: we’re at a point where old jobs are disappearing but the new jobs don’t exist yet. In a few years we’ll see them arrive. Siddharth Ajmera had a similar take on AI automation and jobs. 🌱

📝 Key Takeaways From the Illia Zhurakovskyi Interview

• ⚖️ Your degree doesn’t lock you in. A free course like CS50 can open a new career
• 🪜 Learn every part of the business: crowd links, outreach, team lead, growth
• 🤖 Treat AI like a Google update: stay flexible, don’t panic
• 👽 Mentions, reviews and Reddit are back in the link building mix
• 📣 Brand awareness will matter more than links alone
• 🧑‍🔬 Automate the grunt work, but keep humans checking quality
• 🤝 With clients, start from their strategy, not your price list

❓ FAQs About Illia Zhurakovskyi

Who is Illia Zhurakovskyi?

Illia Zhurakovskyi is a growth manager at SemScale, a business unit of the Boosta holding company. He studied business and law in Kyiv and has worked in SEO and link building for about seven years.

What is SemScale?

SemScale is Boosta’s SEO and link building service. After about 10 years of working only on the holding’s own products, the team now also serves external clients.

What does Illia think about SEO and AI?

He sees AI changes as similar to Google updates: you need to adapt, but they’re manageable. He expects SEO to shift toward mentions, brand awareness, PR and growth marketing within two to three years.

Which AI tools does Illia Zhurakovskyi use?

His team uses Sitechecker with LLM monitoring, the Claude API connected to internal tools, the Grok API, and internal bots for finding and checking donor websites, always with manual human review.

Where can I watch the full Illia Zhurakovskyi podcast?

Watch it on the Inside A Hustler’s Brain YouTube channel by Jitendra Vaswani, or in the embed above.

🎙️ More Inside A Hustler’s Brain Interviews You’ll Love

• Rohan Chaubey on AI Growth Hacking
• Kira Khoroshilova on International SEO
• Craig Campbell on Top SEO Strategies
• Charles Floate on Parasite SEO
• Lawrence Hitches on Scaling StudioHawk With AI SEO

If Illia’s journey from law school to SEO inspired you, share this episode with a friend who’s thinking about switching careers. 💬 And tell me in the YouTube comments: what’s your #1 SEO question right now?

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