The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Ask ChatGPT for the best coffee shop in any town and Starbucks never gets recommended, says Matt Goren, founder of RunOctopus - it points you to an actual local business. Matt explains why AI search recommends the expert instead of the biggest brand, and how a small business becomes the answer to the long, specific questions customers now ask. Read the full episode recap on Unscripted SEO , connec...

AI is now the recommendation layer between interest and purchase, and Ernesto Ortiz of Structural SEO says the product pages that get picked are the ones that spell out who a product is for and who it is not for. This is a Special Edition of Unscripted SEO: a 10-minute lightning round and a return visit. Ernesto already knows the show, so Jeremy Rivera skipped the origin story and asked what's cha...

Bridget Willard has marketed SaaS products on X and through blog posts for fifteen years, and her case for the platform is simple: "SEO is words, and words are SEO." A Twitter handle is a URL, Google shows tweets in its News tab, and LLMs only learn from what's public, so the conversations you have on X still feed Google and AI. Read the full recap of this episode , then see how Bridget Willard, L...

Claude found $1,500 of retargeting spend running inside a Mahjong game in the Philippines, from a setting buried deep in an ad account that three agencies missed over eight years. Keith Perhac , founder of SegMetrics , tells Jeremy Rivera how he caught it by asking Claude instead of logging in. Read the full episode recap . Keith ran a conversion rate optimization agency before SegMetrics became a...

"GEO is basically what the web is saying about you," says Lum Kamishi , the Kosovo-based SEO consultant behind LumKamishi LLC and founder of Assertio.ai . His take: GEO is SEO plus digital PR, and niche-relevant links matter more now than they did five years ago. Listen in, then read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks. Lum has been in SEO for 11+ years. His first project was a Penguin re...

Ann Carden is a business growth strategist and the CEO of Expert in You , a marketing and media agency. She works with professional service entrepreneurs who are excellent at what they do but whose pricing, positioning and brand don't show it. Her rule of thumb: most experts can charge three to ten times what they make per client. Ann and Jeremy Rivera get into why high-end clients are easier to w...

Erika Braeger , Director of Strategy at Ten Speed , is back on Unscripted SEO with a blunt answer to the question of what matters most in SEO right now: machine readability. If a machine can't easily parse and understand your site, it gets much harder to show up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, organic search and LLM search. For Erika, that starts with technical SEO. Erika and Jeremy Rivera dig into the...

Fill the profile, mirror it to your website and citations, then pictures, posts and praise, every month. That is the GBP loop, and Mike Martin , founder of GBPly , says staying on it beats 95% of Google Business Profiles because nobody else stays consistent. He joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why GBP work "doesn't have an end date." Mike started as a locksmith and built his own we...

"These are consensus engines. They're looking at what most people are saying." Josh Shankowsky of Snap SEO in Edmonton joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why generic AI content loses, and what he does instead. Read the full episode recap . Josh borrowed a method from Howard Bloom, the publicist behind Prince and AC/DC, and turned it into a "cultural onboarding" for every client: the...

Laura Iancu has watched listicle tricks move AI answers within the hour, and she thinks every one of those quick wins is a wave that is going to crash. The founder of Searchpedia joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to talk about honest AI search work while attribution is still "one more drip in a sea of dark clicks." Read the full episode recap . Laura went solo in January after years in-house f...

Laura Smith , Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital , has one rule for international work: localize the campaign, don't just translate it. She also walks through her team's white paper, The Human-Machine Memory Gap . Read the full episode recap . ICS-digital works in over 100 languages across digital and translation, and Laura leads strategy across SEO, digital PR, creative and translation. She h...

Ross Hudgens founded Siege Media , and his Wiley book Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO is out October 12, 2026. His sharpest finding: brands with versus articles were the most likely to get AI search traffic. Read the full episode recap . Siege Media started as a content marketing agency almost fifteen years ago, repositioned as an organic growth agency, and now calls...

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. The recovery from the inside: What an HCU Recovery Looks Like From the Inside on SEO Arcad...

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...

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 . Jeremy's read on the panel: Nobody Gets to Stay in Their Lan...

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-locat...

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 h...

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 seve...

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 buildin...

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." The other half of this conversation, on talking to the client: I Spent Half an Hour Talking About Precast Concre...

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 t...

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 d...

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 sourc...

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 peo...

Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership , runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures on repeat. This conversation first aired on Unscripted Small Business. We're sharing it on the Unscrip...