The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast episodes

  • Use AI to Kill the SEO agency Pre-Work, Not the Thinking | Erika Braeger, Tenspeed

    Erika Braeger is not trying to automate the analysis. She manages organic growth strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency, and the automation she builds is aimed squarely at the pre-work: pulling numbers out of four systems and lining them up in a spreadsheet before anybody is allowed to think.

    Jeremy wrote up what this conversation changed: The Faceless-Client Era Is Over on SEO Arcade.

    Key takeaways
    • Automate the pre-work, protect the thinking. The distinction is the whole interview, and it is a better rule than most published AI policies.
    • Her management job is confidence, not answers. A strategist who arrives for a gut check usually already knows, and she coaxes rather than signs off.
    • The brief is where the quality is decided. Subject matter expertise, product research and ideal customer profile go in before a word is written, whoever writes it.
    • Write for humans first, then make it machine readable. In that order, and for a reason she states plainly.
    • Never rush a website migration. Her one red line, and her first question is always what business goal the migration is for.
    • On this page
      • Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking
      • Coaching a team out of the gut check
      • Where the quality is actually decided
      • Never rush a website migration
      • Chapters and timestamps
      • People, ideas and sources mentioned
      • Questions this episode answers
      • Go deeper
      • Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking

        I don’t want to take away the thinking part. I want to allow the strategist to arrive at the thinking part with more ease, without burning energy, on grabbing data, organizing it out of multiple systems, organizing it in the spreadsheet.

        — Erika Braeger

        It is a narrow claim and a much more defensible one than most agencies are making. The analysis, the narrative, the relationship and the decision all stay with the person. What gets automated is the hour of assembly that happens before any of that can start.

        It’s the pre-work that can burn a lot of time, a lot of energy.

        — Erika Braeger

        Her example of a skill in use is deliberately mundane: gathering conversations scattered across several systems and summarising them, instead of a strategist opening four tabs to reconstruct where an account is.

        Coaching a team out of the gut check

        A big part of my role is helping people grow, helping them build confidence and trust their instincts.

        — Erika Braeger

        She was a teacher before this, and the method transfers directly. A strategist comes to her because a client is overhauling their navigation and they want a second opinion. They are plugged into the client and the industry. They usually already know.

        I don’t just sign off on the gut check. I keep asking curious questions to coax the answer out of them.

        — Erika Braeger

        The point is not the navigation. It is that the same person will not need to ask next time. She is honest that some of her own early gut checks were impostor syndrome rather than genuine uncertainty.

        Where the quality is actually decided

        Some clients get finished content, some get briefs, some take the brief and run an AI-assisted process themselves. She is relaxed about which, because in every case the leverage sits in the same place: the brief, and the expert review at the end.

        You need to write content for humans first. However, you need to keep in mind that in order to get the content in front of humans, it needs to be machine readable so that the bots that parsed the content can present it to the correct humans at the correct time.

        — Erika Braeger

        The ordering is the argument. Machine readability is a distribution requirement, not an audience.

        The friend test

        If I were to show this to a friend, would they understand?

        — Erika Braeger

        Her check against the occupational hazard of B2B SaaS writing, which is learning a product so thoroughly that you stop noticing how technical you have become.

        Never rush a website migration

        Don’t rush a website migration, I will say. Never rush a website migration.

        — Erika Braeger

        Asked for a red line, that is the only one she offers, and her follow-up is a better filter than any checklist. Before anything else she asks what business goal the migration is serving, which is often enough to reveal that somebody simply prefers a different platform.

        She has no preferred content management system and says so, which is a rarer answer than it should be. Knowing how each one behaves is what lets you make a sensible recommendation. The thing she is still working on is centralising visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube, which is the same pre-work problem in a new place.

        Chapters
        TimeWhat happens
        00:00Host intro and Erika’s background
        01:30Coaching the strategy team’s confidence
        03:58Pre-work eats the agency’s analysis time
        05:06What AI should not be handed
        05:45How the scope of SEO expanded after ChatGPT
        09:48Human input into client strategy
        14:16Building skills as the biggest win of the year
        16:44Learning SEO on the family food blog
        18:32Writing technical SaaS content for real humans
        22:13Never rush a website migration
        25:52Centralising visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube
        27:36Tenspeed’s first research report
        People, ideas and sources mentioned
        EntityWhat it is
        TenspeedB2B SaaS content agency covering organic, AEO, digital PR and design
        Pre-workPulling and organising data before the analysis can begin, the part she automates
        ICPIdeal customer profile, the thing every brief is built around
        Ethnic SpoonHer family’s food blog, where she learned SEO by executing somebody else’s audit
        Our longer write-up of this conversationOn SEO Arcade, with the strategy points expanded
        The first research reportTenspeed’s study of what AI actually cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts
        Questions this episode answers
        • What should an SEO agency automate and what should it protect?
        • How do you build confidence in a junior strategy team?
        • Does a content brief still matter if AI writes the draft?
        • Should I write for humans or for AI crawlers?
        • What is the biggest mistake in a website migration?
        • Which CMS is best for SEO?
        • How do I track brand visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube?
        • Go deeper

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

          • the superintelligence question she is answering, and the guest who asked it, from the episode recorded before hers.
          • the Topaz sales conversation Jeremy carries into this one, on what a transcript cannot tell you about a call.
          • the faceless client era, written up separately, following the same thread past the end of the interview.
          • Watch the interview
            Find Erika Braeger

            tenspeed.io, where the agency’s first research report is published. She is on LinkedIn under her own name.

            Cite this episode

            Braeger, Erika. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI to Kill the Pre-Work, Not the Thinking.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/erika-braeger-tenspeed-unscripted-seo/

            28 min
          • Robert Spinrad on why good SEO is good AI visibility

            Most agencies are still deciding what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad of SEOM Interactive already has an answer, and it is not the one being sold. He joined the Philadelphia agency straight out of Temple in 2015, when it was fifteen people, and now runs the SEO function across a team of about forty.

            Key takeaways
            • Do not optimise for the platforms. Improve the site so the platforms have a reason to trust it. Same work, completely different instruction.
            • Be wary of anyone calling themselves an AI expert. The whole thing is new and everyone is learning, including him.
            • Humble experts. His phrase for the honest posture: know what you know, admit what you do not.
            • Keep AI traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits against two hundred thousand from Google organic.
            • Report on data, focus on the money. The analytics are context. Leads and revenue are the conversation.
            • Their PR requires a real owner quote. No AI-generated response is accepted, on principle and for the outcome.
            • On this page
              • Do not optimise for the platforms
              • The fear of going backwards
              • Humble experts
              • Report the data, focus on the money
              • Digital PR with an actual human in it
              • People, ideas and sources mentioned
              • Questions this episode answers
              • Go deeper
              • Do not optimise for the platforms

                So don’t optimize for the platforms, but improve your site in a way that these platforms will actually trust you and use you in their results.

                — Robert Spinrad

                This is the internal argument SEOM keeps having, and it resolves a lot of the noise. The instruction to optimise for a model invites gaming, invites shortcuts, and invites a strategy that expires when the model updates.

                The instruction to be genuinely worth citing produces the same technical work and does not expire.

                The fear of going backwards

                I’m a little scared that we’re going to go backwards now.

                — Robert Spinrad

                The worry is reputational. SEO spent fifteen years living down its own spam era, and a flood of cheap generated content is the fastest available route back to being the thing marketers apologise for.

                The conversation includes Jeremy’s own confession from that era, which is the point. The people who lived through it are the ones most alert to the pattern repeating.

                Humble experts

                I think we encourage clients to be wary of people saying they are AI experts because this whole thing is brand new. We’re all learning.

                — Robert Spinrad

                I think a good term I want to use is we’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know we don’t know, and that’s OK.

                — Robert Spinrad

                It is a good phrase because it survives contact with a sales meeting. It is not false modesty, it is a claim about method, and a client can check whether you behave that way.

                It also comes with a specific instruction to clients: do not take SEO advice from a chatbot.

                Report the data, focus on the money

                So we report on data, but we focus on the money, the big ticket items at the end of the day.

                — Robert Spinrad

                Their positioning has said the same thing since before any of this: it is not about clicks, it is about results. The analytics go in the report because a client should be able to see them. The meeting is about leads and revenue.

                That is also how he keeps model traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits is real and worth understanding. It is not the two hundred thousand from Google organic, and pretending otherwise misallocates the budget.

                Digital PR with an actual human in it

                And you give a quote from the owner, no AI response accepted.

                — Robert Spinrad

                The rule is enforced internally. Mention and link opportunities require a genuine owner-written quote, which is slower and produces the one thing a generated paragraph cannot: something only that person could have said.

                The local checklist he actually gives
                • A fully built out profile listing, not a half-completed one.
                • Profile posts used for promotions and events with real start and end dates, not recycled social content.
                • Reviews earned naturally and consistently, because the citation sources models pull from are the ones people already trust.
                • Genuine community involvement, which is where the defensible links come from.
                • Show off your expertise, build your trust with your potential clients and focus on reviews in a natural and authentic way.

                  — Robert Spinrad
                  People, ideas and sources mentioned
                  EntityWhat it is
                  SEOM InteractivePhiladelphia-area agency, in business since 2008, around forty people
                  Humble expertsRobert’s phrase for knowing what you know and admitting what you do not
                  Owner-quote ruleTheir PR team will not accept an AI-written quote
                  Temple UniversityWhere he studied before joining the agency in 2015
                  Google Business Profile postsRepurposed for promotions and events with real dates
                  Questions this episode answers
                  • Should I optimise my site for AI platforms?
                  • How do I tell a real AI expert from a fake one?
                  • How much traffic is actually coming from LLMs?
                  • What should an SEO report focus on?
                  • Does digital PR still work?
                  • Why insist on a human-written quote for PR?
                  • What should a local business do first?
                  • Go deeper

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

                    • Mike Ginley on the same fundamentals from a consultant’s seat.
                    • Federico Fancinelli, for the research underneath the trust argument.
                    • Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
                    • Find Robert Spinrad

                      He is Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, and writes about not trusting AI for SEO advice.

                      Cite this episode

                      Spinrad, Robert. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/robert-spinrad-on-ai-seo-proper-targetting

                      36 min
                    • How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing | Adrian Nikolov, Haide Digital

                      Adrian Nikolov has eighteen years in SEO and started a new agency six months before this recording. Haide means let’s go in Bulgarian, and he founded it on an inversion of the usual fear. Rather than wait to find out whether AI takes the work, he decided to make it do the work better.

                      The essay written off this conversation: Owning Your Audience in the AI Era on SEO Arcade.

                      Key takeaways
                      • Authority is the new PageRank. His framing for what the trust layer now does, and why he is sceptical of the tools being sold around it.
                      • The unlock was becoming the developer. Building his own tools removed the dependency that had shaped his entire career.
                      • Topical authority is not a blog. His systems build a voice profile from everything a brand has published and everything said about it, then cover every funnel stage and feed the results back in.
                      • Prompt tracking is directional at best. He says so plainly about a service some of his peers are selling.
                      • SEO is the orchestrator. Not a channel beside the others. The layer every other channel now runs through.
                      • On this page
                        • Becoming the developer
                        • How the topical authority system is built
                        • Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing
                        • Authority is the new PageRank
                        • Chapters and timestamps
                        • People, ideas and sources mentioned
                        • Questions this episode answers
                        • Go deeper
                        • Becoming the developer

                          Asked what AI unlocked for him personally, he does not say content or speed.

                          Building my own tools, literally removing the developer issue and me becoming the actual developer.

                          — Adrian Nikolov

                          For anyone who spent a decade filing tickets and waiting, that is the whole answer. The manual labour he lists as gone is oddly specific and instantly recognisable: ticking boxes in Yoast, hand-adding schema, pushing internal links one page at a time.

                          He is careful to say the workload did not shrink. It grew, because the work became interesting.

                          I used to be a gamer back in the days, and I compare what I’m living through right now with my addiction to StarCraft 10 years ago.

                          — Adrian Nikolov
                          How the topical authority system is built

                          The pipeline is described in more detail than most agency owners will give you. An automated diagnostic running through MCP connections, a Screaming Frog crawl, keyword data pulled by API, and from that a profile of the brand. Then a voice profile built from everything the brand has published and everything said about it in public.

                          Only then does content start, across top, middle and bottom of funnel, with a dashboard tracking every page so the system can be corrected by data rather than opinion.

                          It means “let’s go.” It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.

                          — Adrian Nikolov
                          Signal interception

                          His news-jacking flow. Relevant signals come in, get filtered against the brand voice and the topical map, and go out as platform-specific pieces: a LinkedIn carousel, a short, a long-form post. He still hires editors, but only ones who use AI daily.

                          Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing

                          Jeremy’s framing is that the old strategy was to feed the ducks and hope, and that what is missing is a duck-catching system. Adrian’s response is the sharpest line in the middle of the episode.

                          Yeah, you just described the difference between an SEO and a great SEO.

                          — Adrian Nikolov

                          He is not against top of funnel. He wants impressions, especially for a new brand, on the theory that repeated exposure converts later as a direct search or a recommendation. What he objects to is a page with nowhere to go next.

                          His complaint about agencies is more pointed. They land an established brand and immediately start rewriting blog posts, because blogs are what they know how to sell.

                          Just optimize the bottom-funnel pages. Give them more content, or remove content. Analyze, study the engagement rate.

                          — Adrian Nikolov
                          Authority is the new PageRank

                          I’m a true believer that authority is the new PageRank, and the trust the brand builds is very important.

                          — Adrian Nikolov

                          From there he is openly critical of agencies selling prompt tracking as a product without being able to say what is being tracked. His alternative is to interview the client properly, build a prompt list that reflects what buyers actually ask, and then read who gets cited alongside you and why.

                          Nowadays, to get cited in AI, you don’t even need links.

                          — Adrian Nikolov

                          The measurement problem is the one both of them keep circling. Jeremy’s position is that the only honest count is referral traffic and what it did next, which is why he is glad the analytics platforms finally added a channel for it. If you are trying to read that data yourself, our complete Search Console resource guide covers the reporting side of it.

                          I do believe SEO is the orchestrator of everything else right now.

                          — Adrian Nikolov
                          Chapters
                          TimeWhat happens
                          00:00Jeremy introduces Adrian Nikolov and Haide Digital
                          00:24Eighteen years in SEO, and founding Haide
                          04:59The biggest unlock: building your own tools
                          12:06Owning an audience instead of renting Google
                          14:23Diagnostics, voice profiles, topical authority systems
                          20:27Rethinking top, middle and bottom of funnel
                          29:06Microsoft Clarity and watching real behaviour
                          31:21Why prompt tracking is only ever directional
                          35:23Sentiment analysis and brand authority
                          40:25Explaining SEO’s new value to a client
                          48:13SEO as the orchestrator of digital marketing
                          49:43Where to find Adrian and Haide Digital
                          People, ideas and sources mentioned
                          EntityWhat it is
                          Haide DigitalHis agency, six months old at recording, working with SaaS, e-commerce and fintech
                          Organic growth engineeringHaide’s name for SEO, GEO and AI automation run as one discipline
                          Search EngineeredHis LinkedIn newsletter, named for treating SEO as an engineering problem
                          Topical authority systemA brand voice profile, full-funnel content, and a dashboard that feeds results back in
                          Signal interceptionHis news-jacking flow, turning one relevant signal into platform-specific pieces
                          Microsoft ClarityThe behaviour tool both of them recommend for seeing what users actually do
                          Questions this episode answers
                          • What does an AI-first SEO agency actually build?
                          • Is prompt tracking worth paying for?
                          • How do I build topical authority beyond publishing blog posts?
                          • Should I optimise top of funnel or bottom of funnel first?
                          • How do I get cited in AI answers without links?
                          • What can Microsoft Clarity show me that analytics cannot?
                          • How do I explain the value of SEO to a client who thinks AI replaced it?
                          • Go deeper

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

                            • Paul Baterina on the hundred thousand AI visitors that would not convert, the story Jeremy tells him about measurement.
                            • Jason Wade on what AI visibility actually means, a second read on the same reporting problem.
                            • Paul Pape, the guest whose wild west line Jeremy borrows here, on getting owners to engage with their own numbers.
                            • Watch the interview
                              Find Adrian Nikolov

                              haide.digital, which carries the tools his team built, and Adrian Nikolov on LinkedIn, where the newsletter runs.

                              Cite this episode

                              Nikolov, Adrian. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/adrian-nikolov-organic-growth-engineering/

                              51 min
                            • Lloyd Thompson: Get Out of the Day-to-Day Without Blowing Up Your Team

                              Most founders become the bottleneck in their own business. Lloyd Thompson founded Virtual DOO after running global engineering teams and then real-time trading systems for banks. He now places fractional operators between busy owners and their teams, which is a less glamorous job than it sounds and a more valuable one.

                              Key takeaways
                              • Fractional is a fancy word for part time. He says so himself, which is a good sign about the rest of the conversation.
                              • The operator sits between the founder and the team. Not above them, not beside them. In the gap where decisions currently queue.
                              • Operations has to be measurable or it will be cut. The question owners ask is fair and most operations people cannot answer it.
                              • Businesses measure nothing or everything. Both produce the same result, which is nobody acting on anything.
                              • Death by tools. His diagnosis of the AI era. The problem is noise, not capability, so the fix is subtraction.
                              • Measure the wrong thing and you incentivise the wrong thing. Which is worse than not measuring.
                              • On this page
                                • What a fractional operator actually does
                                • The return-to-office counter-take
                                • Proving operations pays
                                • Death by tools
                                • Operations at ecommerce scale
                                • Chapters and timestamps
                                • People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                • Questions this episode answers
                                • Go deeper
                                • What a fractional operator actually does

                                  A fractional retainer, it’s basically an exotic word for part-time, right?

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  the operator is that person who sits between the founder and the team.

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  The distinction he draws is between an operator and an integrator, and it is mostly about company size. A team of five or six needs someone to unblock the daily queue. A team of twenty-five needs someone running the system.

                                  The entry product is a one-off assessment completed inside a month, with the output ranked by effort against impact. That is a deliberately small commitment for a service that is otherwise hard to buy on trust.

                                  Virtual DOO is about four and a half years old and grew entirely by referral, with operators each carrying between one and three clients. Three was his own ceiling before he started hiring.

                                  The return-to-office counter-take

                                  He is not a remote absolutist. His position is that face to face genuinely helps with onboarding and with building shared standards, and that an office is an expensive thing to keep for a feeling.

                                  So the test is whether the building is doing work. If it is there because it has always been there, that is a cost with no return attached to it.

                                  Proving operations pays

                                  If I’m paying for operations, how can I tangibly measure the ROI?

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  He asks the question on the owner’s behalf because most operations people cannot answer it, which is why the function gets cut first when things get tight.

                                  His answers are concrete. Leads leaking out of the pipeline between marketing and sales. Business cards from an event that never reach the system. A checkout that takes seven minutes when it should take one. All of those are operations problems with a currency attached.

                                  Death by tools

                                  I see, we go into businesses quite a lot and they’re either measuring nothing or measuring everything.

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  It might be, it’s death by tools.

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  His read on AI adoption is unfashionably flat: he has not yet seen it change a client business in a way that shows up in the numbers. What he has seen is more dashboards, more add-ons and more places for a decision to get lost.

                                  Because if you measure the wrong thing, you can incentivize the wrong thing.

                                  — Lloyd Thompson

                                  The prescription is subtraction. Fewer channels, fewer tools, fewer measurements that anybody actually acts on.

                                  Operations at ecommerce scale

                                  For larger operations he describes a cut-down agile approach: campaign templates, short feedback loops, and treating influencer and affiliate relationships as a pipeline in the customer system rather than a spreadsheet somebody owns.

                                  None of it is exotic. It is the same argument as the rest of the episode, which is that most businesses do not need a new capability. They need the one they have to stop leaking.

                                  Chapters
                                  TimeWhat happens
                                  0:00From corporate engineering to Virtual DOO
                                  8:06What a fractional operator actually does
                                  12:47The return-to-office counter-take
                                  16:41Operations ROI, and what agencies miss
                                  23:51The AI tool trap: simplify the noise
                                  29:20Ecommerce operations at scale
                                  33:01Where to find Lloyd
                                  People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                  EntityWhat it is
                                  Virtual DOOLloyd’s fractional operations firm, about four and a half years old
                                  Operator vs integratorThe distinction that turns on team size, roughly five people against twenty-five
                                  The one-month assessmentHis entry product, output ranked by effort against impact
                                  Death by toolsHis name for the real AI-era problem
                                  Nine Ways to Leave the Day-to-Day OperationsHis book
                                  Questions this episode answers
                                  • What does a fractional Director of Operations actually do?
                                  • When does a business need an operator?
                                  • How do I measure the return on operations spending?
                                  • Is returning to the office worth the cost?
                                  • Why has AI not changed my business yet?
                                  • How many tools should a small team run?
                                  • What breaks first when an ecommerce operation scales?
                                  • Go deeper

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

                                    • Unscripted Small Business, where more of these conversations live.
                                    • Jared Harman on where AI actually adds value, which is operations rather than creative.
                                    • Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Produced alongside Human Certified Content and The SEO Advisory.
                                    • Find Lloyd Thompson

                                      Virtual DOO is at virtualdoo.com, where the book and the free assessment both live. He is on LinkedIn.

                                      Cite this episode

                                      Thompson, Lloyd. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Get Out of the Day-to-Day Without Blowing Up Your Team.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/lloyd-jeremy-magic-episode-nov-03-2025

                                      30 min
                                    • Mike Montague: Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator

                                      There are two ways to point AI at a market, and Mike Montague only likes one of them. The Terminator approach builds agents that go out and hunt your leads. The Iron Man approach wraps a human in the technology and sends the human. Avenue9 is built entirely on the second one, and this conversation is mostly an argument for why the first one loses.

                                      Mentioned in this episode: oxygen monitoring manufacturer PureAire — Jeremy’s worked example for marketing an industrial product nobody searches for by name.

                                      Key takeaways
                                      • AI reliably earns a C plus. Genuinely useful, and not the part you were ever paid for. The hard twenty per cent is still human work.
                                      • Bad strategy plus AI is faster failure. It amplifies whatever you were already doing, in both directions.
                                      • Your online reputation should mirror your real work exactly. Not an outsized rank. The rank you can evidence.
                                      • He turns down volume work. His argument is a question: why would a model cite a version of an answer it can already write?
                                      • Degenerative engineering. His name for using AI to distil what a business already is, instead of generating more of what it is not.
                                      • On this page
                                        • The C plus problem
                                        • A reputation that mirrors real life
                                        • Degenerative engineering
                                        • Old school, on purpose
                                        • Chapters and timestamps
                                        • People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                        • Questions this episode answers
                                        • Go deeper
                                        • The C plus problem

                                          A C plus is a really good grade. The problem is that other 20% is the hard part. That’s what we needed humans always to do.

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          His explanation for why smart clients get fooled is the sharpest thing in the episode. If you ask a model about a subject you would fail an exam in, it looks like a genius. The grade has not changed. Your ability to mark it has.

                                          Which is what he sells: not the output, but the person who can tell a C plus from an A. He is candid that the C plus is worth having. It is a good afternoon’s work. It is not a strategy.

                                          If you have bad SEO strategy or bad marketing strategy, it’s going to allow you to do it faster, which is just gonna get you to fail faster.

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          Jeremy contributes a name for the failure mode on the client side: Claude hopping, where a client arrives with twenty documents of forty pages each and the announcement that they have solved it.

                                          A reputation that mirrors real life

                                          I think the goal should be that your online reputation exactly 100% mirrors your in real life work.

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          This is a quiet rebuke of most of the industry. He thinks SEO has spent two decades trying to win a rank the business had not earned, and that the machinery on the other side is now far too good for that to keep working.

                                          The practical instruction is unglamorous and much harder than it sounds. Document every job. Capture real quotes from real customers. One representative case study used to be enough and no longer is, because a single example is now a drop in an ocean.

                                          It will give you the rating that you deserve.

                                          — Mike Montague
                                          Degenerative engineering

                                          I call it degenerative engineering. How can I take AI and use it to distill down what I’m really about?

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          His metaphor is concentrated orange juice. Take everything already happening around the business, the interviews, the jobs, the founder’s actual opinions, and reduce it rather than inflate it. He thinks most people are working the wrong end of the problem entirely.

                                          Which is also his answer to a client who insists on publishing at volume. He does not talk them out of it. He declines the work, and then explains why.

                                          Why would it cite your version if it can already write one that doesn’t need to be cited?

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          He is not against a thousand posts. He is against a thousand posts that add nothing a model does not already hold, which is a different and much harder brief.

                                          Old school, on purpose

                                          Both of them land in the same place: the tactics that got drowned out are now the ones with room. Jeremy’s example is ten handwritten letters sent from Raven Tools that earned ten links. Mike’s is printing ten copies of your own book and mailing one to a prospect with a sticky note pointing at chapter three.

                                          Nobody gets a printed book in the mail, nobody gets a handwritten note, and nobody understands their business well enough.

                                          — Mike Montague

                                          The same instinct drives the cross-pollination section: seminars, trash cleanups, sponsoring the thing in the park, and then making sure any of it is visible online. PureAire Monitoring comes up as Jeremy’s worked example, an oxygen-monitor manufacturer whose customers span a dozen industries that would each happily be amplified.

                                          Chapters
                                          TimeWhat happens
                                          00:00The Batman opener and the Iron Man analogy
                                          01:28Avenue9, and the small business AI problem
                                          03:35Why AI only ever earns a C plus
                                          05:52Publishing at scale versus offshore writers
                                          07:15Making a boring niche like garage doors interesting
                                          10:28Traffic losses and AI Overview click-through
                                          13:10Reviews, case studies and documenting every job
                                          16:37In-real-life marketing and cross-pollination
                                          23:49Degenerative engineering instead of more slop
                                          26:41Direct mail and handwritten letters that earn links
                                          35:26Superintelligence, science fiction and automation
                                          44:31What Avenue9 actually sells
                                          People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                          EntityWhat it is
                                          Avenue9His company: AI strategy, systems, and what he calls scalable stories
                                          Iron Man versus TerminatorAugmenting a human with AI against automating the human out of the loop
                                          Degenerative engineeringUsing AI to distil an existing story rather than generate new volume
                                          Claude hoppingJeremy’s coinage for the client who arrives with twenty AI documents and a solved problem
                                          PureAire MonitoringThe oxygen-monitor manufacturer behind Jeremy’s B2B cross-pollination example, linked above
                                          KalicubeJason Barnard’s entity-first practice, one of the names Jeremy reels off in the entity riff
                                          Human First AI MarketingHis own podcast, past a hundred episodes and a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube
                                          Questions this episode answers
                                          • Should I use AI to automate marketing or to augment my own team?
                                          • How good is AI-generated marketing content, really?
                                          • Why would an AI model cite my article instead of writing its own answer?
                                          • How do I make a boring niche interesting?
                                          • What should a small business document online to earn a better reputation?
                                          • Does direct mail still work as a link building and outreach channel?
                                          • Is publishing AI content at scale a viable SEO strategy?
                                          • Go deeper

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

                                            • Patrick Stox on fixing the thing people are actually complaining about, the conversation Jeremy quotes back at him mid-episode.
                                            • Grant Simmons on the entity work Jeremy invokes by name, from someone who has been at it for decades.
                                            • the tactic library where plays like these get written down, if you would rather have the checklist than the argument.
                                            • Watch the interview
                                              Find Mike Montague

                                              avenue9.com, or Mike Montague on LinkedIn, which he says is where he actually talks to people.

                                              Cite this episode

                                              Montague, Mike. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/mike-montague-ai-iron-man-not-terminator/

                                              49 min
                                            • Rob Bonham on SEO in the Agentic Age

                                              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
                                              • Why publishing AI content at volume backfires on user signals, rankings, and client trust
                                              • Measuring SEO in a post-attribution world where GSC and LLM data are unreliable
                                              • Link building reborn: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and partner links
                                              • Going independent: contracts, pricing, and filtering out tire-kickers
                                              • Episode highlights

                                                Rob's throughline is that SEOs are now “stewards of the AI.” On the Unscripted SEO Podcast, he and Jeremy Rivera trace how AI has automated the low-level work — title tags, meta descriptions, on-page fixes — so the real job shifts to strategy and judgment. The freedom is real; so is the responsibility.

                                                Which is why volume is not a strategy. Just because you can publish 100 city-specific pages for a concrete contractor doesn't mean you should. When the user signals aren't there, Google devalues the content — a reality Jeremy underscores with his own post on why Google Search Console data isn't reliable. Look like a hero for a few months, then watch the site dive.

                                                In a post-attribution world, Rob argues you win by telling the right story with the data you do have — branded-search lift, conversion correlation, the “game of sums.” And he makes the case that link building is an easier sell than ever when reframed as footprint: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and legitimate partner and supplier links.

                                                The back half gets practical. Rob and Jeremy Rivera dig into going independent — setting expectations to avoid scope creep, pricing with conviction (a higher price can itself signal quality), filtering tire-kickers with a small paid audit, and surviving enterprise red tape and net-60 terms.

                                                Connect with Rob Bonham

                                                LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbonham

                                                (Rob points people to LinkedIn — he's “tied at the hip” with it — rather than a website.)

                                                About the show

                                                The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

                                                56 min
                                              • Unscripted SEO with Patrick Stox

                                                Patrick Stox spent six and a half years inside Ahrefs before going independent, and his position on GEO is not the one the acronym wars want. SEO is a subset of it, not a synonym for it, because the fastest way to change what a machine says about your company is to fix the thing people are complaining about. The rest of the conversation is what an operator does once that is true.

                                                Key takeaways
                                                • Influencing AI answers is a product problem first. If the internet is complaining, the model repeats the complaint.
                                                • Retrieved and cited are two separate contests. Being pulled into the candidate set is table stakes; getting quoted is a second bar you have to clear.
                                                • The frontier past AI content at scale is information gain. His method is to interview the experts already on your payroll, two or three times a week.
                                                • Do not run a programmatic project without unique data. A derived metric nobody else has computed, not a bigger pile of the same rows.
                                                • AI search systems have not decided to forgive anything yet. Google chose to forgive link spam. That was policy, not physics, and nobody has made that call for the answer engines.
                                                • On this page
                                                  • Why SEO is a subset of GEO
                                                  • The forgiveness nobody has granted yet
                                                  • Retrieved is not cited
                                                  • Information gain, and the experts you already employ
                                                  • Chapters and timestamps
                                                  • People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                                  • Questions this episode answers
                                                  • Go deeper
                                                  • Why SEO is a subset of GEO

                                                    If you’ve got a problem with your product, the easiest way to get the LLM or the AI search system to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining on the internet, that’s what it’s gonna say. So it’s business, it’s branding, it’s so much more.

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    The claim is not that on-page work stopped mattering. It is that the ceiling on it is lower than the industry admits, because the systems are summarising a reputation you do not own. Stox draws a scale line through the middle of that: a local business can put an SEO on sentiment and move it. A large company cannot staff its way to changing the opinion of the internet.

                                                    Which makes GEO a business, brand and product remit that happens to include search work, rather than a rebrand of the search work.

                                                    The forgiveness nobody has granted yet

                                                    SEOs got lucky with Google. We got Penguin, and for a few years that was really painful — and then they’re like, yeah, we forgive all your bad links. These AI search systems may make a different decision. How long will they hold a grudge against you?

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    Google decided, around 2016, to stop holding historic link spam against sites. That decision could have gone the other way and stayed that way for another decade. Nobody at OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity has made the equivalent call, publicly or otherwise.

                                                    The practical reading: tactics that work today carry an unpriced liability. That is not an argument against moving fast. It is an argument for knowing which of your tactics you would be embarrassed to have logged.

                                                    Retrieved is not cited

                                                    You get a bunch of pages, might be 90 pages retrieved, and then 13 of them get cited... Well, why were some retrieved but not cited? That’s a really good question to look into. And it’s usually like, you were relevant enough, but you didn’t quite say the right thing, or in the right way.

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    The sharpest operational idea in the episode, and the one most reporting misses entirely. A page that gets retrieved and dropped is already close enough to win. Stox calls that gap the low-hanging fruit of the AI era, because you are not fighting for relevance any more, you are fighting over phrasing and specificity.

                                                    How Google finds things at all

                                                    Most people will tell you sitemaps, or crawling. Well, there’s more. RSS feeds are a thing. Pinging the sites — the WebSub, PubSubHubbub, whatever... Submissions in GSC, the indexing API.

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    Worth keeping when you are diagnosing a discovery problem, because most audits check exactly two of those inputs and stop.

                                                    Information gain, and the experts you already employ

                                                    Anyone can put out any number of pages. But if you’re just using it for content — just the content — you’re not providing resources, you’re not sourcing where you got something. So anyone can do it, but it’s a matter of: can you do it well?

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    His alternative is unglamorous and almost nobody runs it. Message five genuine experts inside your own company, two or three times a week, over Slack or email or an AI-run interview, and build from what they say. The raw material is already on the payroll.

                                                    Generally I wouldn’t even recommend a programmatic project unless you’ve got something unique, different... Everyone’s got reviews, but what if you did scoring? What if you did a market analysis? What’s the sentiment? What is the brand search volume for each of these companies?

                                                    — Patrick Stox

                                                    And on the Helpful Content Update, he is blunt that prose is not the moat:

                                                    I don’t think writing will get you but so far. Part of the thing they mentioned with that update was images — images and videos that show you’ve got hands-on with the product you’re talking about... Not you pulled the stock photo offline from the manufacturer and then wrote a bunch of stuff.

                                                    — Patrick Stox
                                                    Chapters
                                                    TimeWhat happens
                                                    00:00Introduction and guest background
                                                    00:49From developer to SEO, and six years inside Ahrefs
                                                    02:27Dream tools and infrastructure projects
                                                    09:30Tech SEO Connect, and what a conference is actually for
                                                    11:21Content at scale, and what comes after it
                                                    14:01Leveraging unique data instead of volume
                                                    15:00The hot take: SEO is part of GEO
                                                    17:48Past algorithm changes, and the risk nobody has priced
                                                    29:00Backlinks, and their changing role under AI
                                                    33:05Google's infrastructure, data sources and internal systems
                                                    35:00Retrieval, ranking and citation
                                                    36:36Expertise and content-quality cues
                                                    People, ideas and sources mentioned
                                                    EntityWhat it is
                                                    Patrick StoxIndependent SEO consultant. Six and a half years at Ahrefs, four at IBM, started as a developer
                                                    Tech SEO ConnectThe technical SEO conference he co-runs, in Durham, North Carolina
                                                    AhrefsWhere he worked on Page Inspect, site structure, Site Audit and the v2 to v3 infrastructure change
                                                    Helpful Content UpdateThe Google update discussed at length, including the added Experience in E-E-A-T
                                                    Cats.comHis standard for hands-on expertise: a site that sends pet food out for laboratory testing
                                                    Information gainThe through-line: content that adds something the corpus does not already contain
                                                    Questions this episode answers
                                                    • Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
                                                    • Why do some pages get retrieved by an AI search system but never cited?
                                                    • Will AI search systems forgive spam the way Google forgave link spam?
                                                    • What comes after publishing AI-generated content at scale?
                                                    • When is a programmatic SEO project actually justified?
                                                    • How does Google discover content beyond sitemaps and crawling?
                                                    • What did the Helpful Content Update actually reward?
                                                    • Go deeper

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

                                                      • the consensus machinery underneath that retrieval gap, where Malte Landwehr shows how answer engines resolve a question before they pick who to quote.
                                                      • how a complaint reaches the answer before you do, which is Ann Smarty tracing the retrieval path Stox is telling you to cut off at the source.
                                                      • this episode as a plain-text file for AI assistants, carrying the full cleaned transcript with a speaker label on every turn. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude and interrogate it directly.
                                                      • Watch the interview
                                                        Find Patrick Stox

                                                        patrickstox.com, and Tech SEO Connect at techseoconnect.com.

                                                        Cite this episode

                                                        Stox, Patrick. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 26 June 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/

                                                        45 min
                                                      • Unlocking the Power of Relevance in SEO and Link Building with Bradley Benner

                                                        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 Benner shares deep insights into relevance-driven link building, AI-driven process automation, and the evolving landscape of search engine optimization.In this episode:

                                                        • The importance of relevance over metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and Trust Flow in link building
                                                        • How AI models interpret links and mentions for search visibility
                                                        • Strategies for creating strong entity associations through contextual links
                                                        • The role of structured and unstructured citations in AI search algorithms
                                                        • The impact of AI tools on SEO workflows and systems development
                                                        • Best practices for optimizing on-page elements for both algorithms and human visitors
                                                        • The shift from spammy SEO tactics to more sustainable, human-focused copywriting
                                                        • Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Bradley Benner and his background in local SEO and AI applications 00:30 - Bradley’s evolution from contractor to SEO entrepreneur 01:01 - The growth of Semantic Mastery and Semantic Links 01:31 - The significance of relevance in link building and SEO 02:51 - How AI models interpret links and mentions 03:37 - Automating processes with AI and the importance of well-defined workflows 04:58 - The role of relevance in today's link-building strategies 06:28 - Using transcripts and AI for process mapping and SOP development 07:55 - Flexing AI to optimize workflows instead of rigid processes 09:28 - The shift in local SEO and the importance of relevance over traditional metrics 10:23 - The changing landscape of AI dominance in search and its implications 11:14 - Relevance as the cornerstone of off-page SEO in AI-driven search engines 12:07 - Moving beyond thousands of backlink metrics to focus on relevance 13:40 - Ethical considerations and outdated SEO practices 14:42 - The importance of creating and reinforcing entity associations 15:54 - Optimizing page elements using semantic triples for better relevance 17:33 - The significance of contextual relevance in link placement 18:32 - The three layers of relevance in backlink profiles 19:24 - How large language models leverage mentions and relevance over traditional link equity 20:48 - Using citations and mentions as signals for search algorithms 22:02 - The influence of high authority and localized mentions for AI visibility 23:16 - The future of link building and relevance in the AI era 24:21 - The positive impact of LLMs on justify investments in link building 25:08 - Traditional marketing techniques meet AI-driven SEO 26:03 - Practical tips for human-centered optimization and content structureResources & Links:

                                                          • Semantic Mastery
                                                          • Semantic Links
                                                          • Cursor AI Platform
                                                          • Claude AI
                                                          • Google Search Traffic & AI Insights
                                                          • Book: "Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies" by Bruce Clay
                                                          • Connect with Bradley Benner:

                                                            • LinkedIn
                                                            • Twitter
                                                            • 27 min
                                                            • Why Human Judgment Still Scales: Joel Miller on AI, SEO, and Owned Audiences

                                                              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 theskyfloor.com/ideas.

                                                              What We Cover
                                                              • Why the highest-value work any agency or consultant does is enabling clients to become who they want to be — and why AI can't replicate that
                                                              • A real-world custom GPT case study: how 30–40 hours of human listening made AI call analysis actually work
                                                              • What AI Overviews are doing to organic click-through rates, ad keyword availability, and SERP composition
                                                              • Why owned audience channels — especially email — are now the most durable marketing asset in a Google-disrupted world
                                                              • The AI slop problem and why authentic human presence is becoming the scarcest commodity online
                                                              • Episode Highlights

                                                                Joel opens by reframing what The SkyFloor actually sells: not services, but outcomes. He describes their team as problem solvers who work backward from what a client wants to become — whether that's a more efficient church, a retail brand competing online, or an education company ready to grow beyond referrals. That outcome-first philosophy maps onto what Jeremy calls the pyramid of value: executing a tactic at the base, saving time in the middle, and enabling the client to become who they want to be at the top. As Joel puts it, the human ingenuity required to genuinely partner with a client is still a distinctly human task — one AI cannot replicate at the top of that pyramid.

                                                                The conversation gets practical fast with Joel's sales call analysis case study. A client had lead conversion problems, and rather than feeding transcripts into a model, Joel listened to 30–40 hours of incoming calls himself — catching tone, the weight of a specific pause, the difference between enthusiasm and polite deflection. Once he'd mapped those human-observed patterns, he built a custom GPT framework and connected it to CallRail for automatic call scoring. The human defines the problem; AI scales the execution. Joel was equally candid about LLM limitations: ask an LLM for an answer and you've already biased the output. It is an answer engine, not an objective analyst — and the good prompt engineers know how to work around that tendency.

                                                                "An audience can't just be taken away if it's your audience, no matter what Google does next."

                                                                Joel is watching AI Overview impact in real time across his client accounts: impressions holding or growing, clicks down ~40%, and SERP layouts restructured so that for many queries, organic results appear nowhere above the fold. The composition is now AI Overview, then local pack, then sponsored results — organic is buried or absent. On the paid side, keyword categories that used to reliably trigger ad placements have been absorbed by overview content. His adaptation: heavier investment in high-intent near-me queries that still trigger standard ad slots, and a shift away from treating search volume as the primary planning input toward full SERP composition audits.

                                                                The most durable advice from the episode is Joel's audience ownership argument. He's actively steering clients toward email lists and direct subscriber relationships — assets that travel with them regardless of what Google decides to change next. The catch he acknowledges freely: building that owned audience requires personality. LinkedIn personal pages outperform business pages by roughly 8x on reach. His team at The SkyFloor is doing the quiet coaching work of helping reluctant clients become more personally visible. He closes with an observation that stuck with me: even as AI democratizes production, the question marketing has always had to answer — why does anyone care, and who is behind this — remains the only one that truly matters.

                                                                Connect with Joel Miller

                                                                Website: theskyfloor.com

                                                                Blog: theskyfloor.com/ideas

                                                                LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joelelliottmiller

                                                                About the Show

                                                                The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

                                                                32 min
                                                              • Holly Homer on Affiliate Marketing, AI Slop, and Being Replaced by Your Own Words

                                                                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 what made it easy to scrape.

                                                                “I was literally replaced by my own words in the search results and the AI results.” — Holly Homer

                                                                In this episode
                                                                • Comment sections were the first social network. Holly would get 300 readers and 150 comments. Her argument: WordPress never solved comment spam, and that unsolved problem is part of why the conversation moved to social platforms.
                                                                • The pajama jeans masterclass. She bought a pair off an infomercial so she could write it off, wrote an honest and unflattering review, and ranked number one just as the company launched a national radio campaign. Traffic went from a few thousand a week to 100,000. The brand could never outrank her.
                                                                • Why affiliate is a real channel. Pay-for-performance means the brand carries no risk, and the affiliate has every reason to keep the page current.
                                                                • Being scraped, then using the tool anyway. Holly was bitter for a while. She now runs a content system trained on her own writing and her own recorded voice.
                                                                • Feedback loops beat first drafts. Her favourite move is asking the model what feedback she is about to give it, so it critiques itself first. She once fed it a real spreadsheet and got back invented numbers it had quietly “estimated”.
                                                                • The full written recap, with the four-conversation content strategy and the keyword map she built at Digistore24, is here: Holly Homer on affiliate marketing, AI slop, and being replaced by your own words.

                                                                  “I sold a boatload of pajama jeans for them in a way that they had no risk.” — Holly Homer

                                                                  “It's our own damn fault if we don't let people know what we do.” — Holly Homer

                                                                  Related episodes

                                                                  Holly's Digistore24 colleague Nick Eubanks on distribution as the only remaining moat is the natural companion to this one. Ameera Virani on habits, visibility and wealth came through the same door. And for the other side of Holly's argument about people, Joel Miller on why human judgment still scales.

                                                                  More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

                                                                  47 min

                                                                About The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

                                                                From the publisher's feed

                                                                Hosted by Jeremy Rivera: A 17 year career expert in the SEO industry and his cohost Keith Bresee. Get insights, action items and anecdotes from experts like Lilyray, Kevin Indig, Rand Fishkin, Matt…