The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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 Concrete Walls on SEO Arcade.

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.

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI: Stephanie Long on Vetting Humans and Verifying Machines

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

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.

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.

The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.

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.

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.

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 pitfall he names is the opposite habit: taking a modest budget and pouring it into boosting social posts, which produces engagement metrics and very few patients.

On the website side, the pages that matter most are the ones tied to place, and most location pages are bad in exactly the same ways.

But I like to see AI as sort of additive. I don’t want to replace or automate all of our client work.

You would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered.

This is the part that makes the rest of the budget conversation slightly absurd. A clinic can rank, can advertise, can fill the calendar with enquiries, and then lose most of them to a phone nobody picks up between appointments.

He is interested in AI answering as a fix precisely because the problem is capacity rather than intent. The receptionist is not ignoring the phone. They are with a patient.

His one piece of advice on what to stop doing is more direct.

stop using generic Canva templates on your Instagram. Nobody likes them.

So it’s kind of moving from curation to selection, which I thought was a really interesting framework.

Curation gave you ten options and left the choosing to the searcher. Selection hands back one recommendation. For a clinic that is an enormous difference, because being the fourth good option in town stops being a position that earns anything.

The practical consequence is that the profile carries more weight than the website for discovery, while the website has to do the work of justifying the pick once it has been made.

Community building is his answer to how a single clinic wins that. Slow, unmeasurable in the first quarter, and the only thing a competitor cannot buy.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

PatientPartners offers a free clinic marketing blueprint and a website, SEO and AI-visibility audit.

Justesen, Isaac. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/isaac-justesen-on-local-seo-for-healthcare-clinics

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.

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.

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.

They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before — it was totally inaccessible to them at that price point.

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 so much time doing it anyway.

That line explains why the ninety-nine dollar ceiling held for so long. When the work took ten to twenty hours a week, a cheap tool was pointless for someone who did not have the hours. Compress the hours and the cheap tool suddenly has a customer.

Like, we’ll buy you all these backlinks to increase your domain rating. But is that going to get you any organic traffic?

Around fifty open issues and sixty open pull requests is where the community goodwill turned into a second full-time job. He stopped accepting external pull requests, published a roadmap, and asked contributors for well-written issues instead.

I could probably implement every feature in Semrush in three weeks with Claude Code, but they’d all be so slightly broken that it would just be impossible to fix.

That is the most useful warning in the episode for anyone building with agents. Generation is no longer the bottleneck. Maintaining sixty slightly-wrong implementations is.

I think that’s the biggest thing in the AI era — figuring out: I can do anything. What’s the one thing I should do?

The roadmap follows from it. Go horizontal first, covering local SEO, AI visibility and prompt tracking, and accept that each is shallower than a specialist tool. Depth is a later problem.

I want OpenSEO to always be the tool that people getting into SEO for the first time use.

Which is a positioning statement rather than a feature list, and probably the more durable of the two.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

He is on LinkedIn and X, and the project has a Discord. Good issues are more welcome than pull requests.

Senescu, Ben. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/ben-senescu-on-open-source-seo-and-the-99-ceiling

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don’t know, twenty years ago.

The work here is claiming profiles and keeping the details identical, not acquiring links. Yelp, Trustpilot and whatever is category-standard in your niche.

Our average is six months when the community starts really picking up and that subreddit starts ranking in Google, starts showing up in LLM citations... Once you start trying to do sneaky stuff, you can lose accounts.

Her agency runs clients’ official presence, which rules out the fast route entirely. The risk is not a slap. It is the loss of an account with a decade of history attached to a real brand.

Just because your thread is being cited in LLMs doesn’t mean you will be necessarily part of the answer... it can be citation, but who cares about citations? They don’t they are not even clicked. The goal is for the brand to be in the answer.

A correction worth pinning to any dashboard that counts citations as the outcome.

You would not believe how much of reputation problem is caused by discommunication between what the website says, what sales people promise, and that causes so much problem on Reddit.

She says she loses that argument roughly half the time. When she does, the strategy shifts to building authority elsewhere instead of fixing the thing, which is a worse plan and she says so.

We really cannot look at LLMs and figure out what people are even prompting. We don’t have that data. But if we look at search keywords, we may assume the prompts behind them in a much more educational way... SEO is still the most predictable path into LLMs. Not the only one.

Roughly 30% overlap on her estimate. Still better than any alternative, because organic is the only channel with first-party data behind it.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

smarty.marketing, plus her newsletter and weekly live stream at AnnSmarty.com.

Smarty, Ann. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “LLM Consensus, Reddit and Losing Control of Your Own Brand Name.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 12 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/ann-smarty-llm-consensus-reddit-brand-control/

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 Unscripted SEO feed because the part about AI slop is a search problem as much as a business one. Full recap: AI isn't taking your job, it's taking your tasks.

What we cover

If you're working out what still gets cited by AI search, Jeremy's notes on what actually works in LLM search pair well with this one.

Connect with Brett: brettschklar.com · Think BIGGER with AI on Substack

More from the network: Unscripted SEO · Unscripted Small Business

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.

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.

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.

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 on the .md version, there are no links to click. There’s nothing for them to do. It’s a horrible experience. What can make sense is that my server makes a decision. When a human comes, I serve them the HTML version. And when a LLM crawler comes, I serve them the markdown file under the same URL.

He does not pretend this is clean. He names it as a form of cloaking and says he would run it for LLM crawlers and not for Google. He also supplies the fix for the two-URL version if you insist on it: set the canonical in the HTTP header, because a text file has no HTML head to put one in.

They also inject ads specifically for the LLM. And that is again going very much in direction of cloaking.

I would look at the sources both on the URL and on the domain level and see for these existing URLs, can I get my brand mentioned there if I’m not mentioned yet? And the trick is often to look for the ones that have multiple of your competitors already mentioned because then it’s often reasonable to contact and say, hey, can I also be added?

The corollary saves you a quarter of wasted outreach: a page that is an interview with a competitor’s chief executive is unwinnable, so do not spend anything on it. Sort the cited sources by how many rivals they already list, and work down.

Especially terms that the LLMs are adding that were not part of the prompt... A few days ago, ChatGPT started adding the term official to a lot of fan out queries. So right now I recommend everybody to put the word official in the footer of their website.

Cheap, testable, and explicitly time-bound. He is clear these patterns rotate, which is the actual instruction: watch the added terms, do not enshrine one of them.

There are some prompts I’m tracking where it’s in the range of 2 or 3 % of the prompts have a hallucinated domain. In these cases, the domain is just parked. But if I was an evil person, I would now register this domain or buy it and put up some completely negative content about the brand that supposedly owns it.

He raises a second surface alongside it: in an insurance prompt set he monitors, roughly 2% of the sources an LLM leans on are paid advertorials. Humans skip advertorials. Models quote them.

If you can create it with a prompt, why would ChatGPT or OpenAI or Google crawl index and rank it and use it? They could just use that prompt on their own.

His acceptable cases are all data-backed: summarising real reviews on a product page, or writing up structured data nobody else holds. And if you want to know whether your own output is detectable, he names the four measures to run over it.

Perplexity... compression rate... jacquard and the other is cosine [similarity]. And if you use these four measures you will often find that there are many, many very easy to detect footprints in AI written content.

Benchmark all four on a corpus of your human-written text, run them again on the AI-written batch, and compare. He notes you can have Claude write the Python and that you do not need the maths to read the result.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

peec.ai, and he is most responsive on LinkedIn.

Landwehr, Malte. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Consensus, Query Fan-Outs and AI Content Guardrails.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 10 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/episode-recap-malte-landwehr-of-peec-ai-on-consensus-query-fan-outs-and-ai-content-guardrails/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 dashboard tells you when that happened.

The hardest case is not a declared crawler. It is an agent operating inside a real person’s browser, on their session and their device, where the ordinary detection signals simply are not present.

A relatively small static site... like a WordPress or something that’s fairly simple... it’s almost a non task, you can kind of do it automatically, never think about it again. And I think if that’s you and you can do it now, I can think of no reason why you wouldn’t... for a 50,000, 100,000, million page website that’s made with duct tape and sticky tape, it’s just not going to fly.

Note that this is not a no. It is a scale-dependent yes, which is the answer most of the argument has been missing. His actual worry is drift: what happens when the markdown and the HTML disagree, and which team is accountable when they do.

We end up at a route where a markdown file is serving different data. No one’s gonna tell you at the moment, there isn’t a single bot or service out there that will say, hey, your markdown files are wrong.

That is the missing feedback loop, and it is a real one. Every other publishing surface you own has something watching it.

If you had three to four links that were selectable, you were much more likely to get included in the citation than if you had under three or interestingly over that four or five mark.

One relatively isolated client test, presented as such. The operational consequence is heresy by the old rules: keep the subdomain page, add the main-domain page, and link them, rather than consolidating one into the other.

There is a possibility that we as an industry may have got a little oversensitive to cannibalization in a very kind of strict kind of way. There’s always the potential that it maybe wasn’t the biggest issue.

One of the other treasure troves of information is access logs. So if we can say these AI bots are visiting on these days, here’s your average count for the amount of times that a user driven bot has appeared versus a training bot versus a search bot... very few people are bringing that kind of value.

The split that matters is user-triggered against training crawler, because the first is a proxy for a real person being shown your page. He also warns to check the IP range before you trust the user agent, since a spoofed ChatGPT hit will happily contaminate the whole analysis.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

chris-green.net, his working notes on Substack, and LinkedIn.

Green, Chris. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Do Google’s Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 6 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Traditional Google bots down, I think something like sixty percent crawling sites, but AI bots are up eighty percent for doing the crawling and retrieval. It’s just looking at server logs and stuff like that, you know, got my own sites that I can see those kinds of tests on.

He frames it as his own telemetry rather than an industry benchmark, and that distinction matters. The independently verified figure is Cloudflare’s: automated traffic overtook human traffic on the web in June 2026.

None of this appears in Search Console. Bot requests are not impressions. If you want to know which crawlers actually reached you and what they got, the answer is in your access logs, and we wrote up the log-analysis method for auditing AI bot traffic as a standing SOP.

If you go ahead on your hosting provider and you go ahead and you reissue a new SSL certificate, it will force all of the AI bots to recrawl your stuff all over again... I don’t know what the cadence is, I don’t know what the frequency is.

Treat that as a hypothesis worth testing rather than a tactic. He says so himself.

Everything we do for SEO, I’ve got a dashboard that’s got an API. The thought leadership platform for the exec, that’s got an API. The call and appointment setting platform, that’s got an API. So now all of these all talk to each other and they’re all passing baton data between each other.

Sales talks to SEO talks to marketing talks to appointment setting. He expects to publish results on what that does to a business around Q1 2027.

One component is an A/B loop that hands Microsoft Clarity and SEO Gets data to Claude and lets it rewrite the page. Worth a warning before you build the same thing: Clarity’s regex filters silently return nothing, and Search Console and GA4 run a third engine again. Our pattern compatibility checker tells you which of the three will actually accept a given filter, and the regex library has the patterns themselves organised by the question they answer.

Deliverables in SEO means that you’re not paying attention. It’s you’re focused on making sure you hit that quota every month.

His alternative is an enablement layer: AI first, humans working on top of it, and no scope creep pushed down onto whoever is doing the work.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These three are the ones not already mentioned in the conversation above.

LinkedIn · misspepper.ai

Kurtz, Dan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Bots Are Just Another Customer.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 3 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The team is fully remote across three countries, run on an EOS cadence. Weekly rhythm, clear numbers, and accountability that does not require anyone to be watched.

The detail that makes the point is the office. Eleven thousand square feet with four people in it, kept because it exists, not because the work needs it.

The operational move is one trained agent per client, built on Hats.ai across roughly seventy models. The point is not speed. It is that the agent holds the client’s voice and history more completely than any individual account manager, and does not leave.

He also flags the compliance demand letters currently arriving at small businesses over session-recording and accessibility law. Most owners have never heard of either statute and the letters are not going away.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

EZMarketing is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and offers free website audits.

Malesic, Tom. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “The Tail Can’t Wag the Dog.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/the-tail-cant-wag-the-dog-tom-malesic-on-agency-culture