The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera

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100

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Aug 2026

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About the show

<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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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...

August 13, 202628 min

Ben Senescu on Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling

Ben Senescu is a software engineer who backed into SEO. He wanted to market his own open source projects, found every tool bloated and priced past what a solo builder would pay, and noticed people on r/TechSEO quietly building their own dashboards on top of DataForSEO . He asked whether they wanted an open source starting point, got a yes, and shipped OpenSEO a week later. Key takeaways Open source does not mean free. Ten dollars a month, or bring your own data key, because the data genuinely costs money. That is the objection every professional raises first. The customers are not professional SEOs. They are people who never used the incumbent tools at all, because the price was never reachable. The old ceiling was time as much as money. SEO used to demand ten to twenty hours a week, so a cheap tool would not have helped anyway. He declared bankruptcy on sixty open pull requests. Published a roadmap, stopped taking external PRs, and asked for good issues instead. Horizontal, not deep. Local SEO, AI visibility and prompt tracking before any single feature gets polished. The defining constraint of the era is choice, not capability. Everything is buildable, which makes deciding the whole job. On this page A week from Reddit post to product Why open source still costs ten dollars Who actually pays Declaring bankruptcy on the pull requests I can do anything. What is the one thing? People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper A week from Reddit post to product The origin is unusually honest about validation. Ben did not have a thesis about the SEO tool market. He wanted to market his own projects, hit the price wall, and then noticed other people quietly solving it for themselves in public. So he asked the subreddit whether an open source starting point would be useful, got a yes, and had a first version out in a week. Five months of real engineering followed, which is the part that separates this from a weekend demo. Why open source still costs ten dollars The objection lands immediately when you say open source and then show a price. His answer is the API bill. The rankings and backlink data underneath the product is bought, and that cost does not disappear because the code is public. So there are two doors. Bring your own key and pay the provider directly, or pay him ten dollars a month and let him handle it. Most people never go past the ten. Who actually pays They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before — it was totally inaccessible to them at that price point. — Ben Senescu This is the strategically interesting part of the episode. He is not taking share from Semrush . He is selling to people who were never in that market at all, which is a different business with different competition and a much larger top of funnel. So an affordable SEO tool didn’t make any sense before, because you were going to spend...

August 12, 202641 min

Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit and Brand Search

Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for over twenty years and has stopped getting the request that used to define the job. Nobody asks to rank on Google any more. They ask to show up in ChatGPT. Her answer starts somewhere uncomfortable: the query set that matters most is your own brand name, and it is the one you control least. Key takeaways Growth is what costs you control of your name. The moment people search for you, other people’s pages start ranking for you. LLMs run a branded search before they recommend you. Whatever that search surfaces is what ends up in the answer. LLM consensus means every source saying a consistent thing. She is candid that her own twenty-year footprint fails this test. Reddit takes about six months and punishes promotion. She has watched accounts nearly a decade old get suspended for turning promotional. Citations are not the win condition. Being inside the answer is. Citations mostly do not get clicked. On this page Losing control of your own brand name What an LLM consensus audit actually is Six months on Reddit, and how to lose the account The blocker is internal, not tactical Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Losing control of your own brand name Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how it actually you lose control over it because stuff starts ranking for your name and that is the most important search query, that’s your brand name, variations, brand name reviews and all of that. — Ann Smarty Which sets her sequencing: establish the organic footprint first, then go outbound. Outbound manufactures branded search, and branded search you have not prepared for is branded search someone else answers. Everyone is searching for brand names, including LLMs. Before they recommend a brand in an AI answer, they will do the branded search, they will find stuff about you that your customers may not want to know. — Ann Smarty That is the retrieval path, stated plainly. It is the mechanism behind the advice, heard elsewhere on this show, to go and fix the product. What an LLM consensus audit actually is You have to have I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess. — Ann Smarty The self-indictment is the useful part. Twenty years of bylines and dead project references produce an inconsistent record, and cleaning it is not a project with an end date. Don’t dismiss directory submissions that easily these days. They are being very well used by LLMs, which is like they made a very good comeback from I do...

August 10, 202643 min

You Rank Consensus, Not Pages: Malte Landwehr on LLMs

Your pricing page is not what the model is reading. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI wrote his bachelor thesis on PageRank, ran in-house SEO at Europe’s largest price comparison site, and now measures brand visibility inside answer engines for a living. His argument: LLMs resolve to consensus, so five stale Reddit threads and an old G2 profile will happily overrule the price you changed last week. Key takeaways One canonical page cannot create consensus. The same fact has to be findable in enough places that agreeing with you is the cheapest option. He is against a separate .md URL and for serving markdown by user agent. Same URL, different response. He also calls it cloaking, out loud, and says he would not do it to Google. Fan-out queries are a placement map, not a keyword list. Target the cited pages that already name several of your competitors. Watch the words the model adds that you never prompted. The pattern rotates; the method is to keep watching, not to memorise this month’s word. Two live manipulation surfaces, both already measurable. Hallucinated domains inside fan-outs, and paid advertorials being treated as grounding sources. On this page Why consensus beats your canonical page Against a second URL, for serving by user agent Fan-outs as a placement map Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Why consensus beats your canonical page If you only talk about your pricing on your pricing website and then you change your pricing and then there are five Reddit threads and two reviews on random blogs that still talk about your old pricing, ChatGPT will answer with your old pricing if a user asks about it. — Malte Landwehr The remedy is distribution of a single fact rather than optimisation of a single page. G2, Yelp, your own footer, social profiles, press release boilerplate, the help centre, the product docs. The goal is to make agreeing with you cheap to verify. LLMs are looking for fresh content. So refreshing content, updating it, and then also making sure there’s a machine readable last updated date. — Malte Landwehr Against a second URL, for serving by user agent I would not do that. As an SEO, I don’t want the same content on two different URLs. It wastes crawl resources. If humans land...

August 6, 202646 min

Chris Green: Patents, Bots & the Cannibalization Reversal

Fifteen years of SEO theory was built on Google’s patent literature. Chris Green of Torque Partnership takes the two load-bearing ones, PageRank and Reasonable Surfer, and asks what survives a web where most of the traffic hitting your pages was never a person. He is also the sceptic on markdown companion files, and the sceptic is the useful voice in that argument. Key takeaways Patents are principles to reason from, not rules to obey. Simulating link equity is a fine way to picture a change. Betting a rollout on the simulation is the risk. Agent traffic is polluting the analytics your budget rests on. Worst when the agent rides a real user’s browser, session and device, where the usual bot tells are absent. Markdown companions are near-free on a small site and a governance problem on a big one. The cost is not authoring. It is who owns the drift. Nothing on the internet will tell you your markdown is wrong. Search Console flags broken HTML. No equivalent exists for a companion file. An isolated client test found three to four selectable links to be a citation sweet spot. He labels it as isolated and does not oversell it. On this page Patents as principles, not blueprints What agent traffic does to your data The sceptic’s case on markdown companions The cannibalisation reversal, and access logs Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Patents as principles, not blueprints We know when the patent comes in, we know when it’s established. We don’t often have a consistent concrete understanding of for how long that mechanism is at work or what other systems intertwine with it... learn them, be aware of them, be conscious of them. — Chris Green The distinction he is drawing is between using a patent to picture a system and using one to justify a decision. You can move PageRank around a site convincingly in a simulation and change visibility by nothing at all. If you know how to test it and you know how to be skeptical then it’s still valuable, still highly valuable. — Chris Green What agent traffic does to your data User behavior collapses, like things like dwell time, click frustration points, call to actions, everything like that is turned on its head... it pollutes all of my other data, which then ruins decision making, which then eventually potentially ruins my budget and my remit. — Chris Green This is the part of the agentic shift that arrives before any of the interesting parts. Agents do not pogo-stick, do not hesitate, and do not read. Every behavioural metric you use to argue for investment quietly stops describing humans, and nothing in the...

August 3, 202643 min

Bots Are Just Another Customer - Dan Kurtz, Miss Pepper AI

Traditional Googlebot crawling is falling while AI retrieval bots climb. Dan Kurtz of Miss Pepper AI reads it off his own server logs, and his conclusion is not that SEO is over. It is that we have done this before. We have been multi-purposing content into infographics, reels and press releases for twenty years because humans have preferred content types. Bots have one too. Key takeaways Bots are a customer segment, not a technical problem. They have a format preference, and serving it is ordinary multi-purposing. The downside of publishing a machine-readable companion is bounded. Worst case, the crawler ignores it. Linking to the file is the mechanism. A companion file nobody links to is a file nobody fetches. Deliverable-count retainers are a symptom. Hitting a monthly quota is not the same as paying attention. An SSL certificate reissue may force AI recrawls. Offered as an untested hypothesis, with the caveat attached. On this page The argument: bots as a customer segment What the crawl data actually shows The agentic flywheel Why he refuses deliverable-based retainers Chapters and timestamps People, tools and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The argument: bots as a customer segment As SEOs and content marketers, we’ve been doing that for decades. We call it multi-purposing. Bots have a preferred content type. Technically, they’re just an additional customer. — Dan Kurtz, 37:42 The practical version is a plain-text or markdown file sitting alongside the HTML page. Dan’s case for doing it is that the risk is asymmetric: I would absolutely spend the time to go ahead and do that and invest in it, because the worst thing that can happen is they pass it. They fly over it. — Dan Kurtz, 37:42 Then the step almost everyone skips. “That’s just a matter of directing them to it next time they come to the website and saying, hey, this file exists.” We took that literally and published machine-readable companions across twelve episodes , linked from every post. One thing we found by accident: our own flagship site had been returning 429 to GPTBot on every page. Not everyone agrees. Malte Landwehr makes the opposite case, that a second URL carrying the same content is not cost-free, and would serve markdown by user agent at the same URL instead. Two practitioners, two defensible positions, which is usually the sign that the question is open rather than solved....

July 30, 202645 min

The Tail Can't Wag the Dog: Tom Malesic on Agency Culture

Tom Malesic started EZMarketing thirty-five seconds after quitting a boss who refused a client he disagreed with. He has spent the twenty-nine years since building the opposite kind of company. This is his second turn on the show , and it is the one about culture. Key takeaways Core values are the culture. Not a poster. The hire who said “I gotta cover my ass” is the story that proved it. The tail cannot wag the dog. The book is deliberately a large volume of small customers, so the top five could all leave tomorrow without a single redundancy. The customer who makes your team cry has to go. He coaches customers the way he coaches staff, and fires the ones who will not be coached. One toxic employee wrecks a culture and your public reviews with it. The cost is not the salary. Fully remote on an operating cadence. Three countries, and an eleven-thousand square foot office holding four people. One trained AI agent per client. Across roughly seventy models, so the machine knows the client’s voice better than any single team member. On this page Thirty-five seconds Core values are the culture The tail cannot wag the dog Firing the customer Remote, on a cadence One agent per client, and the demand letters People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Thirty-five seconds The 1996 origin story is short. His boss refused a client Tom thought was worth taking. Tom quit, and by his own account had his first customer thirty-five seconds later, because it was the client his boss had just turned away. Nearly three decades on, the whole company reads as an argument with that boss. Core values are the culture His position is that a company does not have a culture separate from what it actually rewards and tolerates. Values written on a wall and contradicted in a meeting are not values, they are decoration. The example he gives is a hire who said, out loud, that his priority was covering himself. It is a small sentence and it tells you everything about how that person will behave when a project goes wrong. The tail cannot wag the dog This is the structural decision underneath everything else. EZMarketing deliberately runs a large number of small customers rather than a handful of large ones. It is less efficient and it is the reason the company survives losing anybody. His test is blunt: if the top five clients all left tomorrow, would anyone lose their job? For most agencies the honest answer is yes, which means those five clients are quietly running the company. Firing the customer A customer once made an employee cry. That customer is no longer a customer, and Tom is clear that the maths on this is not close. The revenue is replaceable and the employee is not. He treats it as coaching first. Customers get told when their behaviour is a problem, the same as staff do, and most of them adjust. The ones who do not get to go and be someone else’s emergency. The mirror of that is the toxic employee, who costs more than a difficult client because they damage the people around them and then show up in your public reviews for years. Remote, on a cadence The team is fully remote across three countries, run on an