The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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 for big brands. She calls herself a search activist, takes clients by referral only, and tells some of them they don't need SEO at all. She compared synthetic AI visibility data from Ahrefs Brand Radar with what Search Console's generative AI report and Microsoft Clarity show now, and the two are very different.

Jeremy argues LLMs pick up site changes in minutes while Google keeps SEOs in the dark like mushrooms, and that the real job now is surfacing the human details clients never write down. Laura draws the line between AI-generated content and AI slop: slop adds nothing and only wants to be seen.

They close on publishers and Google Discover, with pointers to Barry Adams, The Audience Club and Lily Ray.

Catch Laura at Search 'n Stuff in Antalya (October 1-4) and at BrightonSEO (talk October 8, panel October 9). Follow her on Bluesky and TikTok.

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

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 has spent 15+ years in marketing, starting in traditional PR with B2B work, press office and restaurant launches. She says she didn't know what a link was until she moved into digital PR in 2017. Her recent article, The New Shelf Space, carries the same thinking into retail visibility and AI retrieval.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.

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 itself a full-service GEO agency. It added affiliate partnerships and community management because third-party citations keep showing up in AI answers. Ross calls the change foundational. He and Jeremy get into what moves LLM visibility, and why so much of it looks like conversion work.

Ross is giving away copies of the book at Ahrefs Evolve on launch day.

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

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 Arcade.

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/

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.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera, with the full archive at unscriptedseo.com.

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is brought to you by Ignitvio. Ignitvio studied 1,824 businesses and found 68% never respond to an inbound lead within 24 hours. See the work at Ignitvio.

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.

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 Lane Anymore on SEO Arcade.

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.

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.

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.

Lisa posts as @lisarocksSEM and takes transition-planning work through Big Click Co.

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

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.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

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.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at UnscriptedSEO.com.