The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera

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100

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Aug 2026

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<p>Hosted by Jeremy Rivera: A 17 year career expert in the SEO industry and his cohost Keith Bresee. Get insights, action items and anecdotes from experts like Lilyray, Kevin Indig, Rand Fishkin, Matt Mellinger and more in the SEO industry, who are not only well-respected, but have really interesting stories to share. 100% unscripted, 100% unrehearsed, 100% unedited, and 100% real. Guaranteed to provide those golden nugget lightbulb moments.</p>

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September 9, 202647 min

Gisele Navarro on Rebuilding HouseFresh After Google - Reddit, AI Bots, and the 2-Minute Visitor

Gisele Navarro is the managing editor of HouseFresh , an independent air-quality review site that buys every unit it tests, runs no ads and takes no sponsorships. In September 2023 Google started taking their traffic away. By March 2024 it was nearly all gone. This is what happened next, told from inside it. HouseFresh started publishing properly in 2021 and had three good years. Then the late-2023 updates landed, and Gisele found herself comparing notes with independent publishers from every other niche who were all losing to the same handful of huge sites. The February 2024 article her team wrote about it got Nieman Lab's attention, and Nieman Lab got Google's. Her own writing on the whole run sits on her HouseFresh author page . Full transcript and recap: https://unscriptedseo.com/gisele-navarro-housefresh-ai-traffic/ In this episode Why they buy every unit they review , and what they do when a US-only product cannot be bought from the UK. The article, Nieman Lab, and the day at Google's HQ with 19 other publishers and a room of engineers. What actually changed in August 2024 and March 2025 , and why Gisele stopped opening analytics entirely. The great decoupling in her own numbers : impressions through the roof, clicks falling, positions holding. Two minutes from ChatGPT, six to eight from Reddit. Her on-site data contradicts the "AI traffic is more engaged" claim outright, and it rebuilt how every page and every HouseFresh video is structured. Why they have not blocked the AI bots , and the wildfire story behind that call. How the community got built : opening r/HouseFresh because the site could not rank, posting the critical reviews nobody else would run, the manufacturer that tried to sue them, and the Linus Tech Tips video that reached millions. What is next : new product categories, an app, and getting air-quality workshops into schools. Jeremy and Gisele also get into the AI slop narrative and what the pace of it did to reader trust, which is exactly why an audience that wants human, expert-sourced content turned out to be the asset worth protecting. Gisele posts the data side of the work on X . Chapters (01:38) No ads, no sponsorships, every unit bought (03:39) The 2023 collapse, and competing with Forbes (05:09) The article that called it out (07:24) The call with Google, then the Googleplex (08:43) August 2024, site reputation abuse, March 2025 (13:28) AI Overviews and the great decoupling (19:16) Two minutes from AI, six to eight from Reddit (23:38) When the AI Overview sells the product for you (26:49) Walled gardens, and why the subreddit exists (31:11) The lawsuit and the Linus Tech Tips video (35:24) "We are the human LLMs" (37:47) New categories, an app, and air quality in schools Notable quotes "How can it be that I'm reviewing an air purifier, and you are reviewing a pair of trainers, and you are reviewing a Star Trek show, and we are all competing with Forbes?" — Gisele Navarro "Right now they are all walled gardens. And tomorrow, from Reddit to YouTube to X, all of them can turn ar...

September 9, 202657 min

Nick LeRoy: If You Can Bullet-Point It, You Are Replaceable

Nick LeRoy has been an SEO for sixteen years and now runs SEOjobs.com , the job board he built because searching "SEO" on LinkedIn still returns a Java developer role with "SEO knowledge, nice to have" buried in the bullets. His read on the hiring market is one word: ugly . For the first time, the supply of SEO talent outstrips demand, which is how, in his words, "a lot of C-plus SEOs were getting six-figure A-plus salaries." AI removed the entry-level rung, and the people most exposed are the ones who built a career on executing the checklist rather than explaining the reasoning. The line that should worry you: "If you can summarize what you're doing in bullet points, you're replaceable." Nick argues for what he calls human-led AI, and asks the question nobody in the C-suite wants: when did 25% efficiency stop being good enough? He has been pulled into meetings about who to cut and refuses them, countering with a better question - instead of halving the team, why not stop hiring until the same team's output doubles? He also thinks Google's results are the best they have been, because a good business should now be reflected by good rankings. He talks through the client who insisted a technical silver bullet explained his fall from #1, until Nick opened an incognito window and showed him competitors who were cheaper, shipped free and had no restocking fee. He writes weekly at SEO for Lunch . Hosted by Jeremy Rivera on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast . Watch the full interview on YouTube: Nick Leroy: SEO Job Market in one word? Ugly.

September 3, 202649 min

SEO SaaS Panel: Patrick Stox, Ben Wills, Ben Senescu

Three founders building SEO software sat down for the first Unscripted SEO panel. Patrick Stox (ex-Ahrefs, ex-IBM, now independent), Ben Wills (OppAlerts) and Ben Senescu (OpenSEO) on what actually changed about building tools, and how to get recommended by an LLM before you are anywhere near the training data. Read the full recap here . The build constraint is gone. Patrick Stox could not have built most of this before and now can, with about a hundred and four free tools live at patrickstox.com . Ben Senescu ships features that work ninety-five percent of the time while running OpenSEO as a team of one. Ben Wills had to run a full database refactor because the LLMs made architectural decisions he had told them not to make. Taste is the new bottleneck. Ben Wills: "AI can produce stuff, but it doesn't have the taste to decide, do we use a B-tree, or do we use binary search on a sorted list. That curation is your taste." Patrick's version from inside Ahrefs: if they had listened to customers, they would still be a low-cost link tool. How to get recommended before you are in the training data. Patrick splits it into two surfaces on two clocks. The training data is slow and largely passive. The retrieved pages are workable this week, so get a call-out onto the lists that already rank. Ben Wills adds the GitHub awesome lists and the free-tool directories that AI tools query when they go shopping for data. Both halves are written up on OpenSEO's blog: Two Surfaces, Two Timelines and What Broke the $99 Ceiling . One tiny word changes the answer. Ben Wills's own test: name a Corolla instead of a BMW when you ask about a trip, and the hotel recommendation changes. ChatGPT memory then carries that context into a completely different chat days later. What they want SEOs to stop doing. Patrick Stox: "Any tactic that is abused will be shut down... they might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past." Ben Wills: if you are going to be a sushi chef, the first year you just make rice. Ben Senescu: give Claude Code or Codex a real afternoon before you write it off. The panelists and their solo episodes: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era , Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing , and Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling . More episodes at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast .

September 2, 202648 min

Laura Hoot: SEO Isn't Dying, It's Hitting Another Boom

Everyone on LinkedIn says SEO is dead. Laura Hoot has been doing it for close to twenty years and sees the exact opposite happening: hiring, not mass firings. She joins Jeremy Rivera to argue that the SEO expert just became the Claude expert, the ChatGPT expert and the Gemini expert without needing a new degree, because the foundation transferred intact. Laura runs SEO for big national multi-location brands at GPO , where the team calls the work "discoverability" - a word she argues was always the accurate one. She started in 2007 writing keyword-dense copy in college, took an SEO-slash-customer-support job at Vrbo when HomeAway was the flagship, and has since worked H-E-B, vet clinics and national retail. Half her career was spent running paid search and organic at the same time, which is why she is blunt about the cost of the silo between them: the algorithms differ, but the intent and the volume data are identical. Jeremy ties it straight back to Lisa Raehsler's episode on Google's AI Max , which now scans a site for its own landing pages instead of requiring purpose-built ones - which is exactly the argument for getting PPC and SEO budget approved in the same meeting. Her strongest claim is that keyword research matters more now, not less . The historical question data sitting in Search Console, Semrush and Ahrefs is the closest available proxy for how people actually prompt an LLM, and she treats it as the predecessor signal rather than a legacy report. She also flags JavaScript as a re-emerging blocker, since AI crawlers are far less patient with heavy front-ends than Googlebot learned to be, and notes that AI-assisted traffic is still a very small share of GA4 across every client she works on - for now. Jeremy pushes on the local-versus-national divide , which Laura calls the single biggest strategic differentiator in her career, and tells the story of a counseling client whose article went three to four times up in organic traffic while the client was simultaneously reporting lost rankings - and none of it converted, because a liver-detox page had started surfacing for cod liver oil and colon cleanses. They get into why WordPress tags poisoned a genuinely good idea, why the four-blog-posts-and-four-links-for-5k agency model is gone and never should have existed, and the "it's goog enough" problem AJ Kohn named years ago about trusting third-party search volume. Laura's advice for the moment: stop optimizing for the surface and start asking where your audience already is. Read the full recap and transcript , and find more interviews at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast .

September 1, 202629 min

AI Max: Now Google Picks Your Landing Page | Lisa Raehsler

Google's AI Max does not just pick your keywords anymore - it picks the landing page it sends paid traffic to, off your own site. Lisa Raehsler , founder and principal SEM strategist at Big Click Co , has the spreadsheet of what you can still opt out of and what turns mandatory in February. Her verdict on the rollout: another Tuesday of Google taking control away from advertisers. Lisa has spent her career in paid search and paid social, contributes to Search Engine Journal , and writes The Paid Media Mix . She came back on Unscripted SEO the same day a batch of AI Max features flipped live in her own accounts, and what she describes is the shift SEO is already living through, arriving on the paid side. Nobody types "project management software" anymore. They type what kind of project management software works with Slack for a small team working internationally. Keywords cannot hold that. Intent can. The full written recap of the conversation is here . In this episode Keywords triggering ads gives way to intent triggering ads - and the old ad-group buckets are what breaks first. AI Max reads the intent, writes the ad, and picks the page on your site to answer the query. That third step is the one nobody budgeted for. Site quality just became a paid media problem. If Google chooses the page, thin and generic pages spend your ad budget, which is exactly when the paid team and an SEO advisory conversation stop being separate meetings. It works beautifully for e-commerce, movies and theaters. It falls apart for B2B, for thin sites, and for anyone running priced landing-page variants. Third-party landing page tools now need an explicit opt-out if you do not want Google routing around them. The window is shorter than it looks - some features already flipped and can still be opted out of, a bigger batch goes mandatory in February. Local Service Ads are migrating into Google Ads , and Google Guaranteed still means background checks plus industry-specific licensure. ChatGPT ads are low converting and only loosely matched , served against the whole topic rather than the actual question. The automation is really imperfect, which is where humans stay in the loop - the exclusions, the ad copy and the page all still need human-certified, expert-sourced content behind them. Chapters (00:00) Keywords stop triggering ads, intent starts (01:36) The query that broke the keyword bucket (03:12) What AI Max actually does on your behalf (04:30) Google's motivation, and the February deadline (06:24) Another Tuesday of taking control from advertisers (08:25) When automatic landing pages help, and when they hurt (10:42) Local Service Ads move into Google Ads (13:45) What Google Guaranteed vetting actually requires (15:56) Are ads coming inside AI Overviews? (18:07) ChatGPT ads: low converting, loosely matched (19:45) What happens to third-party landing pages (20:18) Build the six-month plan before February (24:18) Why SEO and PPC should pool the budget (25:52) What clients are actually asking about (28:18) Where to find Lisa Notable quotes "I think it's another Tuesday of them making decisions and trying to take...

August 23, 202634 min

Why a 5% Close-Rate Lift Beats 20% More Leads | Alex Radetic, Nuvo Agency

Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten. Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency , born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it. In this episode Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business , a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win. Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies , crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters. The speed-to-lead flowchart , call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate. Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year , on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now. ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal , and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews. Read the SERP before you promise the keyword , “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that. Where your impressions actually go , ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions. Publish the pricing , a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size. Honesty as a sales strategy , six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest. Notable quotes “A five percent increase in close rate can actually net you more revenue than a twenty percent increase in leads year over year with the same close rate.” , Alex Radetic “I looked at last year, and the entirety of last year they only got sixty-seven leads directly attributable to ChatGPT. And I'm like, okay, well that's worthless.” , Alex Radetic “It doesn't matter how small a company you are. If you're willing to publish price range information for specific types of jobs, Google loves that stuff.” , Alex Radetic Resources & links Nuvo Agency , Alex's subscription-model home services and B2B websites Alex Radetic on LinkedIn , where he does his organic posting Alex on swaying the LLMs: get branded, get into news stories, get talked about on Reddit. That is a complete guide to link building & authori...

August 19, 202639 min

One Word Changed Every Answer: Ben Wills on Testing LLMs Directly

Ben Wills ran the same hotel-recommendation prompt over and over and changed exactly one word in it: the car he was flying to Los Angeles to pick up. Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari. The hotels moved with the car, and they moved across every ChatGPT model and every level of thinking he tried. Ben started in SEO in 2001 at KeywordRanking alongside Andy Beal and Garrett French, co-founded the link building company ontolo with Garrett, then disappeared into 13 or 14 years of pure engineering. Large-scale crawlers and scrapers written in C by hand. Embedded firmware for an ESP32 inside high-end audio equipment. He is back in marketing now, building AI search visibility tooling at OppAlerts , and his argument is that LLMs finally hand SEOs the thing search engines never did: a fast, direct, testable feedback loop. In this episode The one-word experiment : hold the prompt constant, swap the car, and watch the hotel tier move with it Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine : no waiting for the index, no personalization to strip out The persona is a ranking factor : 100 industries, 10 personas each, 1,100 personas across the July analysis Backlinks, ranking strength and LLM visibility : a decent correlation, with a full page of caveats in front of it How Ben actually uses a correlation : as the anecdotal evidence that tells you which experiment to run Isolating the model : thinking off, fan-out off, then turn each one up a step at a time AI slop as an accountability question : producer standards versus consumer appetite, and whether his own reports qualify Inside OppAlerts : historical PageRank from Common Crawl, news-specific link gap analysis, 20,000+ taxonomy categories The Yandex source leak : a week in a Slack channel with Mike King and Russ Jones, and what the category vectors showed Chapters (00:00) Getting back into the industry after 13 years of engineering (01:32) AI is taking your tasks, not your job (02:58) The one-word experiment: Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari (05:42) Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine (06:39) Twiddlers, patents and the black box (08:22) Ann Smarty, fan-out queries and the return of search principles (10:23) 100 industries and 1,100 personas: the July correlation study (12:45) Correlation is not causation, and Ben's own asterisks (14:29) Isolating the model: thinking levels off, fan-out off (16:25) Engineer brain vs. marketer brain vs. business brain (20:49) AI slop and where the accountability sits (25:03) KeywordRanking, ontolo, pure C crawlers and ESP32 firmware (27:46) news.oppalerts.com and building marketing tools (29:32) Historical PageRank, contact data and campaign personas (31:30) News link gap analysis and 20,000 taxonomy categories (33:36) Vectors, the Yandex leak and CatBoost (37:01) Homework: go build a search engine (38:46) Where to find Ben Wills Notable quotes "One of the most important things for people to understand about the prompts is how one word can completely change the results, the response that you get back." - Ben Wills "The search principles are gonna come right back. You gotta have good quality content. There's gotta be a lot of it distributed across the web. You gotta have backlinks." - Ben Wills "Ann Smarty said ... the fastest way to get into the LLM responses is via SEO. And that's the high...

August 18, 202639 min

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI | Stephanie Long

Stephanie Long , founder and CEO of Mrs. SEO , has been doing SEO for almost two decades, and her verdict on AI is blunt: it did not replace the fundamentals, it raised the price of skipping them. "SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together or you're going to fail." She joins Jeremy Rivera to explain why she built Junction Jack , a human-vetted SEO marketplace aimed squarely at the gig platforms whose "vetted" section turns out to mean vetted by AI. "None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them." Along the way: the broken links AI cites that were never real, the freelancer-versus-agency shift and why clients now want to talk to the owner, a San Francisco IVF clinic that took a year to earn the machines' trust, link building you can actually explain to a nervous client , and whether Google's Helpful Content Update was ever really about helping readers. More episodes at Unscripted SEO . In this episode Why a $20/mo chatbot is not an SEO strategy , and why owners keep believing it is, because they cannot "see" SEO the way they can see an ad. Freelancer vs. agency vs. in-house. Stephanie's newest client had never spoken to anyone but an account executive who could not read the reports either. LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie. Not hallucination. Choosing to lie, unless a second model is set up to watch. Trust but verify. She clicked every link in one AI answer and every one was broken. Then mine your own 404s for the pages ChatGPT invented and build them. "SEO is the batter to your AI." The traditional fundamentals are the base layer, and entry-level on its own no longer clears the bar. Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now. Twenty city pages for a realtor then, hundreds of thousands of pages today. Same move, expanded. Getting niche enough to earn trust. A San Francisco IVF clinic took over a year to surface in the chat tools, fixed with real success-rate data and hyper-local FAQs. Link building you can explain in one sentence. Two-way Q&As instead of guest-post begging, roundup quotes turned into graphics, and asking for "attribution" instead of a "link." New scams to sift through. An agency that bought bad backlinks and, it turned out, bought fake traffic on top of them. Junction Jack. Fiverr and Upwork's fine print says "vetted by AI." Hers says vetted by a human. Chapters (00:00) Meet Stephanie Long, and why SEO is a black hole (04:10) Why owners still think $20 a month will do their SEO (05:53) Freelancer, agency, or in-house: who actually talks to the client (09:18) LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie (10:51) Trust but verify: broken links and imagineered 404s (13:52) "SEO is the batter to your AI" (14:18) Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now (17:01) Is Google intentionally killing the publisher deal? (22:42) The IVF clinic: getting niche enough to earn AI's trust (25:51) You have to actually talk to your client now (27:35) Why clients are finally interested in SEO (31:14) Link building you can explain in one sentence (36:07) Bought backlinks, bought traffic, and who gets hurt (37:15) Junction Jac...

August 17, 202642 min

Gert Mellak: Bot Impressions and the SEO ROI Myth

Gert Mellak has been doing SEO for 20 years from Madrid, and he came on to tell Jeremy that the number at the bottom of every SEO spreadsheet is fiction. Search Console impressions? "Lots of bots produce impressions. All crap." Search volume as a metric on its own? Close to worthless. And the ROI on SEO, he argues, is not measurable unless you stack a hundred and fifty assumptions on top of data that is flawed at every source. Jeremy brought him a live case - a query showing 10 searches a month in the tools and 1,100 impressions in Search Console - and Gert's answer explains it. It is the same problem Jeremy documented in Google Search Console data is not accurate , arriving from the other direction. Gert also walks through his Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid from Search Engine Land, the "do SEO but search engines don't exist" thought experiment behind it, the high-intent metric he uses instead of rankings, and the client who deleted 80% of their content and started ranking again. More of his writing is at gertmellak.com , and his consulting work is at AI SEO consulting . Read the full recap and transcript on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast .

August 13, 202627 min

Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics

Isaac Justesen founded PatientPartners to work with one kind of client: physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and counselling clinics. Coming up on five years in, his blunt read is that the mechanics of ranking a clinic and ranking a plumber are almost the same. What differs is the copywriting and the advertising rules, which change state by state. Key takeaways The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim. Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all. The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names. Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it. Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds. Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do. On this page Why a clinic ranks like a plumber What you are allowed to say The first two things he fixes The leak behind the marketing From curation to selection People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Why a clinic ranks like a plumber The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor. — Isaac Justesen It is a deliberately deflating opening. Healthcare marketing is sold as a specialism, and the technical work underneath it mostly is not. It is still the profile, still the map pack, still proximity and relevance and prominence. But for local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options. — Isaac Justesen Which is a useful thing for a clinic owner to hear before paying a premium for healthcare expertise that turns out to be the same checklist with a stethoscope on the invoice. What you are allowed to say The genuine specialism sits in the copy. Advertising rules for clinical services vary more between states and provinces than most marketers expect, and the platforms enforce their own layer on top. Some treatments are a flat refusal in ads regardless of what your local regulator permits. So the skill is writing something persuasive inside a box that changes shape depending on where the clinic is. Physiotherapy and counselling are comparatively safe ground. Anything speculative is not. The first two things he fixes A Google Business Profile audit. Primary category, secondary categories and the services list are wrong on nearly every clinic he sees, and they are free to fix. Conversion tracking. Not analytics for its own sake. Knowing which enquiries came from where, so the next thousand pounds goes somewhere de...