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, connect with Matt Goren on LinkedIn, and run the free website scan at RunOctopus.

Matt has worked in search since the mobile shift of the mid-2010s. The feeder-insect store for reptile owners he exited in April went from zero clicks in February to 7,800 clicks in 28 days on one formula: the subject, the situation and the question type, with an honest page for every cell worth answering. That process became RunOctopus.

Jeremy opens with Ben Wills' vector-embedding correlation study, part of the OppAlerts research on AI search ranking factors, which found topically relevant backlinks close to causative for AI visibility. Matt answers with the mechanics: pages are split into chunks, each chunk gets its own vector, and a chunk that answers one narrow question sits right next to that question. He also cites Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, where brand mentions tracked AI visibility far more strongly than backlinks.

Jeremy shares a client comparison where six SaaS tools with equal link profiles split in LLM visibility along their G2 ratings, and a point from Daniel Hebert of Oleno: AI adds a decision layer between the search and the buyer, a second surface you can push signals into.

Then Matt builds a live question map. Jeremy offers a concrete wall installer in Pensacola, Florida, the kind of business Permacast Walls runs, and Matt turns it into hurricane timing, seasonal cost and big-project questions - ten pages in two seconds. Jeremy adds his study of 42 Search Console profiles, where 64% of queries were anonymized, and Matt explains why those hidden, low-volume queries still hold real money.

Go deeper with Matt's Search Playbook, more than 1,200 articles on AI search, plus his free book, How the AI Picks.

This episode is supported by our sponsors: uSERP, Oleno, ClearLead Digital, OppAlerts, Assertio and Blawgy.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode lives at unscriptedseo.com.

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 changing in SEO right now. His answer starts with his mom and dad asking AI what to buy and ends with one action item you can start on today.

His first full interview was about why algorithm updates only hurt the incomplete. The full recap of this Special Edition has the whole conversation.

Ernesto adopted this about two years ago, and few people do it: "You need to grab all the features and attributes of the products and services that you sell and describe them really well and describe who they're for." And, "if it's clear, who they're not for."

Jeremy was a guest on Ernesto's own show too: The Podcast Link Building Strategy You Can't Fake or Buy.

SPONSORS: uSERP, the GEO agency; Oleno, shared marketing context for AI tools; and ClearLead Digital, property management SEO. uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at unscriptedseo.com.

Read the in-depth recap "Why 90% of Businesses Can't Convert Leads (And How to Fix It)"

Drewbie Wilson, the self-proclaimed "Meme Lord" and founder of Call the Damn Leads, joins Jeremy Rivera to discuss the massive disconnect between marketing and sales teams. From his tattooed knuckles to his no-nonsense approach to lead follow-up, Drewbie shares why 90% of business owners can't explain what happens to their leads and how to fix the broken system that's costing businesses millions.

Drewbie Wilson - Founder of Call the Damn Leads

"90 some percent of business owners can't give you a distinct answer" when asked what happens to their leads.

"Time, energy, and effort are the only resources we cannot get back."

"People don't want to be sold something. They want to make a decision to buy."

"If you're not problem aware you don't know what you don't know until you know."

"Did you talk to anybody? Did you talk to anybody?"

"Sales and marketing, they have to work in cohesion."

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, LLC helps B2B software companies explain why their products matter.

Bridget and Jeremy Rivera start with what changed after X changed hands - analytics that kept coming and going, and brands that left on principle - and why she stayed anyway. Her test for whether social counts as SEO: do you want to be found? Yes or no? If you doubt X still matters, set up Google Alerts for your name and watch the tweets that mention you arrive every day. She lays out more of the thinking in her post on why X belongs in your SEO strategy.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More conversations at unscriptedseo.com.

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 SaaS, and he has spent about 15 years putting a dollar value on every piece of the funnel. His first rule of attribution: it is not a panopticon. With five devices on every desk, every touch point influences everything, so split the problem into two questions. First touch tells you where people found you. Last touch tells you what made them convert. The messy middle still matters, but only when you have a decision to make about one channel or one blog post.

Then the talk turns to chat as the new user interface for data-led SaaS. SegMetrics runs an MCP server, and Keith now asks Claude how his webinar is doing rather than opening a dashboard. The tradeoff is trust, so every answer shows the report it worked from. Keith calls it trust but verify. The second risk is confirm fatigue, the habit of pressing enter on every suggestion until you stop thinking.

Keith spent most of his adult life working in Japan, and he compares how Japanese and American companies adopt AI. He also argues that AI is an average machine, and marketing only moves on the idea that is not average.

On search, Keith explains why AI tools now hide the referrer so visits look like direct traffic, one more way your analytics are lying to you. He agrees with Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad on zero-click marketing: the website is now the conversion end of the funnel, and awareness happens on social, ads, Reddit and in LLM answers. SparkToro digs into whether your website still matters in the zero-click era.

He also walks through 30 ads built in 50 to 60 sizes each, motion and static, in about 20 minutes with a contact sheet to approve them, and 150 programmatic integration-combo pages that rank because each one is worded differently. Next is SegMetrics.ai, the doing layer that launches ads and edits contacts instead of only answering questions. More interviews like this live at Unscripted SEO.

"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 recovery, he spent eight years in-house at marketplaces, and he started taking clients in 2025. He explains why LLMs are more primitive than Google and easier to manipulate, why ChatGPT pulled back on Reddit as a source, and why the citations that count are mentions from niche-relevant publications, not local directory listings. Jeremy brings in the Ben Wills backlink data: 20,000 positive matches and zero negative ones for links from sites in the same vector embedding space.

On content, Lum walks through what he calls topical proximity - the semantic distance between a blog post and the service page it supports. He builds mini clusters of two or three posts per service page and watches for topic cannibalization, where a blog post ranks for a money query the service page should own. For one home services client that meant killing 60% of the blog and promising at least 30 new articles. "I don't care about budgets, I care about results."

You'll also hear why the four-blogs-and-two-links agency retainer has stopped working outside low-competition local niches, why a topical map from Claude comes back as garbage, how the SEO community scattered across Slack, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, and what Jeremy found in his anchor text study: exact-match anchors did nothing, while token-match anchors showed a real effect.

Lum wants Google to stop lying, become a human-first search engine and stop picking fights with SEOs - and he admits that is wishful thinking. He closes with Assertio.ai, a multi-agent, answer-first content pipeline still in beta, built on featured-snippet formats like lists, tables and paragraphs. He runs it as a white-label service for marketplaces, e-commerce, local and SaaS sites.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

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 work with, how she moved an interior designer from bathroom remodels into six-figure commercial and luxury projects, and why paying for SEO and Google Ads can be the wrong play when your buyers only arrive through relationships. Read the full recap on Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

Quote

"If you can sell $20,000, $50,000 packages or clients, right? You've got a million dollar business. It's a lot easier to manage 20 clients than it would be to manage a million clients at a dollar." - Ann Carden

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Connect with Ann Carden

Recorded June 2025. Host: Jeremy Rivera.

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 two pitfalls she runs into most - page speed that clients keep kicking down the road, and tech debt that balloons when URLs change without redirects. One client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked all over the site it created a pile of 4xx errors. If you missed Erika's first episode, start there. Read the full recap of this one.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More conversations at unscriptedseo.com.

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 websites when paid ads got too expensive. At one point he ran around 3,000 lead-gen sites. They kept ranking while the leads kept falling, so this year he let 2,500 domain names go and moved his business into Google Business Profiles. Read the full episode recap.

On verification, Mike starts with the website and citations, not the profile. A service area business that shows its address breaks Google's guidelines for representing your business, and video verification from home becomes near impossible. He would rather have 10 verified, manually created citations than 100 from a mass citation tool, because Google can now apply a suggested edit to your profile within four days if you miss the notice. Jeremy explains what the five data aggregators actually do, and SEO Arcade has a guide to building local citations that covers the rest.

They also get into independent practitioner profiles (a clinic with five physios now runs six profiles, and a law firm with 15 lawyers could run 16), why Mike thinks mirroring and the website as an entity matter more than its link profile, how listing his books on Google Books and setting up an IMDb profile made his AI overview fill in within 24 hours, Google's new Ask Maps, and why Gemini gets Google's own Business Profile documentation wrong.

Jeremy shares his dark clicks study: across 38 sites and four million Search Console clicks, the average site saw 64% of its clicks arrive with no query attached. Mike's rule for AI-written GBP posts is simple. Let AI draft, have a human edit and approve, and skip AI-generated images. Find his books at mikemartin.uk, his videos on his YouTube channel, and try GBPly for 10 free Google Maps rank scans a month.

"These are consensus engines. They're looking at what most people are saying." Josh Shankowsky of Snap SEO, an Edmonton SEO company, 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 founder's story, the founding principles, the challenges and the communities growing around the business. That is his answer to the information gain problem and to the rabbit hole every LLM falls down.

He also shares how he builds local links by sponsoring nonprofits (one sponsorship turned into a Google Ads client), the Search Console "I am" filter that surfaces customers writing their life story into a query, and how he uses Bing results to find the directories and best-of lists ChatGPT cites. Jeremy adds how he triangulates Search Console, GA4, Microsoft Clarity and now Bing Webmaster Tools to separate people from bots.

Josh also answers the last guest's question on Google Discover from his northern lights forecast site, Aurora Admin: article start and end date schema, news-style titles, and putting the payoff mid-article so people keep reading.

More from the network: how Search Console compares to Clarity on 4 sites - Jeremy Rivera SEO - SEO Arcade.