The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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 ta...

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 princi...

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...

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...

Jake Melendy called five roofers to get his mom a quote, then five law firms to get himself a lawyer. Over half never called back, and of the ones that did, only 2% followed up more than once. He turned that into a study across roofing, HVAC, accounting and dental in competitive metros and got the same answer every time. Jake is the founder of Ignitvio (lead generation for home service and profess...

Alyssa Evans  started school as an art major and finished with a science degree — and that creative-plus-analytical split is exactly how she runs  Grow Your Strategy . In this episode she makes the case that the funnel is the wrong mental model entirely, and that what replaces it is a  content ladder . Alyssa is a growth strategist working mostly with fintech, real estate tech, and SaaS companies...

Alex Zweydoff came up inside the property management industry before founding ClearLead Digital . The agency niched down from day one and measures success in doors added, not rankings. Fourteen months in, he has a specific complaint about how everyone else markets property managers. Jeremy's takeaway from this one: Doors, Not Dashboards on SEO Arcade. Key takeaways Doors added is the metric. A doo...

David Wilson has been doing this since AltaVista. The Zozimus executive vice president argues that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation : findability wherever a customer looks, rather than rankings for their own sake. Key takeaways Findability, not rankings. Social, models and Google are all places a decision gets made, and only one of them has a rank tracker pointe...

Sonia Urquilla watched her father’s local shop close because nobody could find it. No profile listing, no website. She now runs SEO by Sonia and teaches female founders and service providers a framework she calls brand optimisation: get found and mentioned everywhere your audience looks, rather than ranking one page. Key takeaways Brand optimisation is wider than SEO and narrower than marketing. I...

Unlock the secrets of effective branding with Benjamin Behrooz! In this episode, we dive deep into the importance of empathy in business and how it can transform your client relationships. Discover how to scale your business while maintaining authenticity and learn about innovative marketing strategies that work in today's competitive landscape. Key takeaways: The role of empathy in understanding...

Most SEOs treat link building like a chore.  Kristiyan Yankov  built a whole agency on it. He’s the founder of  Above Apex , a link-building agency niched hard on SaaS — and in this conversation with host  Jeremy Rivera  he lays out one of the sharpest, most practical models we’ve heard for building links (and brand mentions) in the AI era. Kristiyan freelanced since high school, went through “gen...

Most SEOs are defending a job that no longer exists. Zak Ali () — General Manager of Finder US ( and one of the rare practitioners who took SEO from the terminal to the executive suite — argues the discipline didn't shrink, it got absorbed. In this episode he and host Jeremy Rivera () get into "search everywhere optimization," why he dissolved Finder's dedicated SEO team, and why retention — not r...

Christopher Gimmer bootstrapped Snappa to ~$10K/month off the back of a single blog post — and now he's rebuilding it AI-first while launching GoodMetrics, a cookieless alternative to Google Analytics. In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Christopher and host Jeremy Rivera get honest about what actually still works for bootstrapped SaaS founders as AI Overviews and paid placements quietl...

You don't rank pages anymore — you rank entities. That single shift, Federico Fancinelli argues, is why AI search quietly favors established brands over the small players everyone hoped it would lift. Federico is the founder of GeoSonar, an AI-search visibility platform born from a two-year GEO research lab. In this episode he shares what the research actually found: entity strength lives across t...

AI didn't kill SEO — it raised the stakes on the fundamentals. Erika Braeger of Tenspeed on using AI to kill the pre-work (not the thinking), writing humans-first-but-machine-readable, and what AI actually cites at the B2B evaluation stage. Erika Braeger is Manager of Organic Growth Strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency (organic, AEO, digital PR, design). A former teacher, she leads by b...

Most agencies are still figuring out what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad from SEOM Interactive already has an answer — and it’s not what you’d expect. Robert is the Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, a Philadelphia-area digital marketing agency operating since 2008. He joined the team straight out of Temple University in 2015 and has grown into a leadership role running the SEO functi...

Jeremy Rivera sits down with Adrian Nikolov, founder of Haide Digital, for an unscripted conversation about what SEO becomes when AI stops being a threat and starts being the engine. "Haide" means "let's go" in Bulgarian — and Adrian's whole philosophy is built on it: publish, break stuff, read the data, feed it back, improve. With 18 years in SEO and digital marketing, Adrian breaks down "Organic...

Most founders become the bottleneck in their own business. Lloyd Thompson of Virtual DOO on the fractional "operator" who sits between you and your team — and gets you out of the day-to-day. Jeremy Rivera talks with Lloyd Thompson, founder of Virtual DOO, about fractional operations for busy online business owners: what a Director of Operations actually does, when you need one, how to make operati...

AI gets a "C+" in everything — but the last 20% is still the human job. Mike Montague (Avenue9) on marketing the Iron Man way: augment yourself, don't automate slop. Jeremy Rivera sits down with Mike Montague — founder of Avenue9 and host of the Human First AI Marketing Podcast (100k+ subscribers) — for a candid talk on using AI to distill your real story instead of manufacturing more noise. They...

About the guest Rob Bonham is an SEO with about two decades of experience spanning local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home-services clients. Today he advises several startups on SEO and works as a fractional SEO manager and director for a handful of agencies. You can reach him on LinkedIn . What we cover Why the “agentic age” feels like the pre-Panda/Penguin wild west — and what that means for strategy...

Patrick Stox's extensive background from developer to product manager at Ahrefs and now as a solo consultant. The evolution and influence of product development within SEO tools, including infrastructure changes and visualization tools. The competitive landscape of SEO tools, including the impact of industry giants like Ahrefs and emerging niche tools. The role and growth of AI in SEO, including i...

Semantic Links  with Bradley Benner Watch: https://youtu.be/AUf1U_klNCM Previous interview:  https://unscriptedseo.com/building-relevent-links-agencies-with-bradley-benner/ Unlocking the Power of Relevance in SEO and Link Building with Bradley Benner Discover how relevance outranks traditional metrics in modern SEO strategies, especially in the era of AI and large language models (LLMs). Bradley B...

Joel Miller is the co-founder of The SkyFloor , a digital agency he has run alongside his identical twin brother since 2008. The SkyFloor works across industries — churches, retail, education, and service organizations — with a philosophy centered on long-term partnerships and outcome-driven strategy rather than one-off deliverables. Joel writes regularly on digital strategy and business growth at...

Holly Homer runs organic and AI visibility at Digistore24 , the affiliate network and marketplace. She also accidentally started one of the first mom blogs twenty-odd years ago, and still runs kidsactivities.com . Both facts matter to this conversation. She tells Jeremy Rivera she has roughly 13,000 blog posts and four books behind her, and that the simplicity that made her site useful is exactly...

This episode features Jeremy Rivera and digital marketing expert Matthew Slaymaker discussing actionable strategies for small businesses, the evolving landscape of digital ads, and leveraging AI tools for marketing efficiency. Whether you're running ads, optimizing your website, or navigating new platforms, this conversation offers practical insights to boost your marketing ROI. Key Topics: The im...