The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

AI is now the recommendation layer between interest and purchase, and Ernesto Ortiz of Structural SEO says the product pages that get picked are the ones that spell out who a product is for and who it is not for. This is a Special Edition of Unscripted SEO: a 10-minute lightning round and a return visit. Ernesto already knows the show, so Jeremy Rivera skipped the origin story and asked what's changing in SEO right now. His answer starts with his mom and dad asking AI what to buy and ends with one action item you can start on today. His first full interview was about why algorithm updates only hurt the incomplete. The full recap of this Special Edition has the whole conversation. In this Special Edition AI is the new recommendation layer - "There's a new recommendation intermediary between interest and purchase, and it's driving people's decision." It's not sending the traffic, so people think it doesn't matter. "But it's really influencing decisions." How he picked a dishwasher - furnishing a new apartment, "I ask it for the recommendation and I sort of go with what it tells me." Then he checks Google for availability, pricing and reviews. Who it's for, who it's not for - Jeremy says there's no excuse for thin product pages, even with a thousand products. Ernesto went through most of the product pages for a couple of clients: "Who's it for? Who's it not for? What does it include? What doesn't it include?" In his words, "we've just had great results with that." Can you trust rank tools? - "It seems we can't trust tools as much as we could a couple of weeks ago." Ernesto hasn't made up his mind whether the poisoned results are a bug or intentional. His question: "how are you gonna trust results that are thirty percent off?" Dark queries - Jeremy's dark-click study of 38 Search Console sites found the mean site gets no query data for 63.6% of its clicks, and the median site 72%. Jeremy says John Mueller confirmed in a search community Slack that these are anonymized queries, ones searched fewer than a couple dozen times a month, and that the anonymization isn't going away. The long tail keeps growing - hidden queries aren't new to Ernesto. What's new: "the long tail is now becoming more and more big because people are able to do just more niche questions to their specific situation because AI is able to resolve them." Think a shampoo question with your age, climate and hair type. Small brands above the giants - "If you don't provide very specific content in the very specific places you need to provide it in a very clear way, you're not getting picked up." That's why small niche brands that "actually defined it" show up above industry giants. The action item Ernesto adopted this about two years ago, and few people do it: "You need to grab all the features and attributes of the products and services that you sell and describe them really well and describe who they're for." And, "if it's clear, who they're not for." Jeremy was a guest on Ernesto's own show too: The Podcast Link Building Strategy You Can't Fake or Buy. Chapters (00:00) Ernesto's back for a lightning round(00:59) AI is the new recommendation layer(01:50) How Ernesto picked a dishwasher(02:25) Product pages: who it's for and who it's not for(03:35) Can yo...

Bridget Willard has marketed SaaS products on X and through blog posts for fifteen years, and her case for the platform is simple: "SEO is words, and words are SEO." A Twitter handle is a URL, Google shows tweets in its News tab, and LLMs only learn from what's public, so the conversations you have on X still feed Google and AI. Read the full recap of this episode, then see how Bridget Willard, LLC helps B2B software companies explain why their products matter. Bridget and Jeremy Rivera start with what changed after X changed hands - analytics that kept coming and going, and brands that left on principle - and why she stayed anyway. Her test for whether social counts as SEO: do you want to be found? Yes or no? If you doubt X still matters, set up Google Alerts for your name and watch the tweets that mention you arrive every day. She lays out more of the thinking in her post on why X belongs in your SEO strategy. In this episode A Twitter handle is a URL. Why Bridget says B2B brands can't skip LinkedIn and X, should claim their profiles everywhere else, and should add YouTube if they can. Tweets as news. Searching her own name for her media kit turned up tweets in Google's News tab. Transcripts are gold. She sends her hot takes, PDFs and posts back into ChatGPT, then checks Google AI Overviews in incognito, because the machines only learn if we give them words. Related: how to get recommended by an LLM before you're in the training data. Public conversation before DMs. X as a think tank where side conversations turn into meetings, the same way they do when someone overhears you at a Chamber of Commerce event. Trust comes from vulnerability. Being public about something beyond your work - golf, homeschooling, the game last night - is why business relationships are built on small talk. No post and ghost. The day a PHP vulnerability leaked, Bridget stayed on X until eleven at night for her client Rocket.net, answering replies and celebrating the WordPress community's wins. Industry culture beats platform. Why a financial compliance panel was scripted, even though, as Bridget reads the FINRA rule on social media, it just has to be monitored. Attribution is kind of a lie. Sales and marketing are siblings, lurkers don't show up in analytics, and last-touch reports miss the years of trust behind a sale. Jeremy brings in Keith Perhac's take on first touch vs. last touch attribution. Saturday morning cartoons. A GiveWP team waving GIF sent to WordCamp hashtags, later run as a PPC campaign, lined up with two straight weeks of higher sales in those areas. Chapters (00:00) Why should we trust Bridget Willard? (00:56) What changed on X after the ownership change (03:22) A Twitter handle is a URL - SEO is words (04:19) Google Alerts and tweets in the Google News tab (07:04) X plus blog posts, and why transcripts are gold (09:11) Feeding ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews (11:53) AI agents, compliance and regulated industries (12:44) Public conversation before DMs (15:07) Trust comes from vulnerability (17:00) Small talk is the social glue (17:53) Town square vs. soapbox (20:4...

Claude found $1,500 of retargeting spend running inside a Mahjong game in the Philippines, from a setting buried deep in an ad account that three agencies missed over eight years. Keith Perhac, founder of SegMetrics, tells Jeremy Rivera how he caught it by asking Claude instead of logging in. Read the full episode recap. Keith ran a conversion rate optimization agency before SegMetrics became a SaaS, and he has spent about 15 years putting a dollar value on every piece of the funnel. His first rule of attribution: it is not a panopticon. With five devices on every desk, every touch point influences everything, so split the problem into two questions. First touch tells you where people found you. Last touch tells you what made them convert. The messy middle still matters, but only when you have a decision to make about one channel or one blog post. Then the talk turns to chat as the new user interface for data-led SaaS. SegMetrics runs an MCP server, and Keith now asks Claude how his webinar is doing rather than opening a dashboard. The tradeoff is trust, so every answer shows the report it worked from. Keith calls it trust but verify. The second risk is confirm fatigue, the habit of pressing enter on every suggestion until you stop thinking. Keith spent most of his adult life working in Japan, and he compares how Japanese and American companies adopt AI. He also argues that AI is an average machine, and marketing only moves on the idea that is not average. On search, Keith explains why AI tools now hide the referrer so visits look like direct traffic, one more way your analytics are lying to you. He agrees with Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad on zero-click marketing: the website is now the conversion end of the funnel, and awareness happens on social, ads, Reddit and in LLM answers. SparkToro digs into whether your website still matters in the zero-click era. He also walks through 30 ads built in 50 to 60 sizes each, motion and static, in about 20 minutes with a contact sheet to approve them, and 150 programmatic integration-combo pages that rank because each one is worded differently. Next is SegMetrics.ai, the doing layer that launches ads and edits contacts instead of only answering questions. More interviews like this live at Unscripted SEO.

"GEO is basically what the web is saying about you," says Lum Kamishi, the Kosovo-based SEO consultant behind LumKamishi LLC and founder of Assertio.ai. His take: GEO is SEO plus digital PR, and niche-relevant links matter more now than they did five years ago. Listen in, then read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks. Lum has been in SEO for 11+ years. His first project was a Penguin recovery, he spent eight years in-house at marketplaces, and he started taking clients in 2025. He explains why LLMs are more primitive than Google and easier to manipulate, why ChatGPT pulled back on Reddit as a source, and why the citations that count are mentions from niche-relevant publications, not local directory listings. Jeremy brings in the Ben Wills backlink data: 20,000 positive matches and zero negative ones for links from sites in the same vector embedding space. On content, Lum walks through what he calls topical proximity - the semantic distance between a blog post and the service page it supports. He builds mini clusters of two or three posts per service page and watches for topic cannibalization, where a blog post ranks for a money query the service page should own. For one home services client that meant killing 60% of the blog and promising at least 30 new articles. "I don't care about budgets, I care about results." You'll also hear why the four-blogs-and-two-links agency retainer has stopped working outside low-competition local niches, why a topical map from Claude comes back as garbage, how the SEO community scattered across Slack, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, and what Jeremy found in his anchor text study: exact-match anchors did nothing, while token-match anchors showed a real effect. Lum wants Google to stop lying, become a human-first search engine and stop picking fights with SEOs - and he admits that is wishful thinking. He closes with Assertio.ai, a multi-agent, answer-first content pipeline still in beta, built on featured-snippet formats like lists, tables and paragraphs. He runs it as a white-label service for marketplaces, e-commerce, local and SaaS sites. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Ann Carden is a business growth strategist and the CEO of Expert in You, a marketing and media agency. She works with professional service entrepreneurs who are excellent at what they do but whose pricing, positioning and brand don't show it. Her rule of thumb: most experts can charge three to ten times what they make per client. Ann and Jeremy Rivera get into why high-end clients are easier to work with, how she moved an interior designer from bathroom remodels into six-figure commercial and luxury projects, and why paying for SEO and Google Ads can be the wrong play when your buyers only arrive through relationships. Read the full recap on Unscripted SEO. In this episode The stumbling block for experts: they get better at the work but never change the business model Moving from B2C to B2B, and why the buyer has to see the investment and the value Why clients who value time over money are less stress, not more Company brand vs personal brand, and what you can actually sell one day Credibility is not identity: "we've been in business 45 years" is not why anyone buys When SEO is the wrong channel: buyers who never search for a business coach Specializing in a commoditized market Premium as your first scale strategy, before new cities or new markets Quote "If you can sell $20,000, $50,000 packages or clients, right? You've got a million dollar business. It's a lot easier to manage 20 clients than it would be to manage a million clients at a dollar." - Ann Carden Read more When SEO is the wrong channel on SEO Arcade You're undercharging: the premium pricing case on Jeremy Rivera SEO Connect with Ann Carden The Expert in You podcast Ann's books YouTube Recorded June 2025. Host: Jeremy Rivera.

Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, is back on Unscripted SEO with a blunt answer to the question of what matters most in SEO right now: machine readability. If a machine can't easily parse and understand your site, it gets much harder to show up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, organic search and LLM search. For Erika, that starts with technical SEO. Erika and Jeremy Rivera dig into the two pitfalls she runs into most - page speed that clients keep kicking down the road, and tech debt that balloons when URLs change without redirects. One client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked all over the site it created a pile of 4xx errors. If you missed Erika's first episode, start there. Read the full recap of this one. In this episode Competitor page-speed comparisons against the two or three sites that pulled ahead, and the usual slowdowns: images sized wrong, third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content, and autoplaying video. Ten Speed's list of common technical SEO issues and how to fix them covers more. Lazy loading only below the fold - a lazy-loaded hero image scrambles things. Two megabytes or less, ideally a lot less, and a replace, modify or remove decision tree for whatever is inflating the page. Redirect debt from sunset and updated URLs, and how to properly redirect pages with 301 redirects. Enterprise buy-in: ship the big global fixes first, then take each win to every team it touched. One client is cleaning up two years of tech debt in 90 days. Claude as a second set of eyes on chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl, and for charts clients can actually read. EEAT and schema for LLM visibility: real customer stories, and review schema that connects your site to G2 and Trustpilot. See Ten Speed's 12-week generative engine optimization rollout plan and its research on what AI cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts. Backlinks and AI visibility: Jeremy walks through Ben Wills' AI ranking factor research, and Erika ties it to showing up the same way across the web. Chapters (00:00) Erika's intro: Director of Strategy at Ten Speed (00:39) Machine readability, the most consequential facet of SEO (01:46) The top pitfalls: page speed and URL tech debt (03:34) Proving page speed matters: competitor comparisons and the Walmart study (07:26) Images, third-party JavaScript, video and lazy loading (10:28) Page weight and the two-megabyte line (11:58) PDFs and bottom-of-funnel content (13:02) Two years of tech debt in 90 days (13:55) Winning enterprise buy-in with global fixes first (15:35) Claude, Screaming Frog crawls and the future of SEO SaaS (20:03) Lower barriers and the learning-curve worry (24:01) EEAT and schema for LLM visibility (26:48) Ben Wills' research on backlinks and AI visibility (30:17) Telling a consistent story across the web (32:26) Key takeaway: sample page speed across your site (33:11) Where to find Erika and Ten Speed Notable quotes "So it's not enough to say that we...

Fill the profile, mirror it to your website and citations, then pictures, posts and praise, every month. That is the GBP loop, and Mike Martin, founder of GBPly, says staying on it beats 95% of Google Business Profiles because nobody else stays consistent. He joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why GBP work "doesn't have an end date." Mike started as a locksmith and built his own websites when paid ads got too expensive. At one point he ran around 3,000 lead-gen sites. They kept ranking while the leads kept falling, so this year he let 2,500 domain names go and moved his business into Google Business Profiles. Read the full episode recap. On verification, Mike starts with the website and citations, not the profile. A service area business that shows its address breaks Google's guidelines for representing your business, and video verification from home becomes near impossible. He would rather have 10 verified, manually created citations than 100 from a mass citation tool, because Google can now apply a suggested edit to your profile within four days if you miss the notice. Jeremy explains what the five data aggregators actually do, and SEO Arcade has a guide to building local citations that covers the rest. They also get into independent practitioner profiles (a clinic with five physios now runs six profiles, and a law firm with 15 lawyers could run 16), why Mike thinks mirroring and the website as an entity matter more than its link profile, how listing his books on Google Books and setting up an IMDb profile made his AI overview fill in within 24 hours, Google's new Ask Maps, and why Gemini gets Google's own Business Profile documentation wrong. Jeremy shares his dark clicks study: across 38 sites and four million Search Console clicks, the average site saw 64% of its clicks arrive with no query attached. Mike's rule for AI-written GBP posts is simple. Let AI draft, have a human edit and approve, and skip AI-generated images. Find his books at mikemartin.uk, his videos on his YouTube channel, and try GBPly for 10 free Google Maps rank scans a month.

"These are consensus engines. They're looking at what most people are saying." Josh Shankowsky of Snap SEO, an Edmonton SEO company, joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why generic AI content loses, and what he does instead. Read the full episode recap. Josh borrowed a method from Howard Bloom, the publicist behind Prince and AC/DC, and turned it into a "cultural onboarding" for every client: the founder's story, the founding principles, the challenges and the communities growing around the business. That is his answer to the information gain problem and to the rabbit hole every LLM falls down. He also shares how he builds local links by sponsoring nonprofits (one sponsorship turned into a Google Ads client), the Search Console "I am" filter that surfaces customers writing their life story into a query, and how he uses Bing results to find the directories and best-of lists ChatGPT cites. Jeremy adds how he triangulates Search Console, GA4, Microsoft Clarity and now Bing Webmaster Tools to separate people from bots. Josh also answers the last guest's question on Google Discover from his northern lights forecast site, Aurora Admin: article start and end date schema, news-style titles, and putting the payoff mid-article so people keep reading. More from the network: how Search Console compares to Clarity on 4 sites - Jeremy Rivera SEO - SEO Arcade.

Laura Iancu has watched listicle tricks move AI answers within the hour, and she thinks every one of those quick wins is a wave that is going to crash. The founder of Searchpedia joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to talk about honest AI search work while attribution is still "one more drip in a sea of dark clicks." Read the full episode recap. Laura went solo in January after years in-house for big brands. She calls herself a search activist, takes clients by referral only, and tells some of them they don't need SEO at all. She compared synthetic AI visibility data from Ahrefs Brand Radar with what Search Console's generative AI report and Microsoft Clarity show now, and the two are very different. Jeremy argues LLMs pick up site changes in minutes while Google keeps SEOs in the dark like mushrooms, and that the real job now is surfacing the human details clients never write down. Laura draws the line between AI-generated content and AI slop: slop adds nothing and only wants to be seen. They close on publishers and Google Discover, with pointers to Barry Adams, The Audience Club and Lily Ray. Catch Laura at Search 'n Stuff in Antalya (October 1-4) and at BrightonSEO (talk October 8, panel October 9). Follow her on Bluesky and TikTok. More from the network: how Search Console compares to Clarity on 4 sites - Jeremy Rivera SEO - SEO Arcade.

Laura Smith, Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital, has one rule for international work: localize the campaign, don't just translate it. She also walks through her team's white paper, The Human-Machine Memory Gap. Read the full episode recap. ICS-digital works in over 100 languages across digital and translation, and Laura leads strategy across SEO, digital PR, creative and translation. She has spent 15+ years in marketing, starting in traditional PR with B2B work, press office and restaurant launches. She says she didn't know what a link was until she moved into digital PR in 2017. Her recent article, The New Shelf Space, carries the same thinking into retail visibility and AI retrieval. In this episode Translate vs. localize: why a campaign that lands in the UK won't land the same way in the US, Europe or Asia. The German Twitter lesson: experts in that market told her the words were literally too long for the character limit. Reporting and red tape: focused reporting frameworks, fractured local teams, and getting ahead of red tape in months one to six. Expat audiences: going back to basics with GWI audience analysis when you target UK people living in Paris. AI search across markets: long-term strategy over hacky tricks, even where ChatGPT or AI Overviews aren't available. The top technical pitfall: hreflang that exists but isn't configured for the best outcome. Authenticity takes reps: why she started a TikTok this year to get comfortable hearing her own voice. Digital PR's moment: brand entity, citations and brand mentions in AI search. For more on brand distinctiveness, hear Ross Hudgens on GEO. Chapters (00:00) Why trust an international marketing expert (01:17) Translating a campaign vs. localizing it (02:46) The German Twitter lesson (03:53) Reporting frameworks and fractured teams (05:55) Red tape in multi-market enterprises (08:32) Reaching expat audiences (10:44) AI search when markets move at different speeds (13:40) The most common international SEO pitfalls (16:42) The cobbler's children: agency marketing (17:41) The press release that got deleted (19:49) Is meme culture global, and is it cringe? (22:33) Authenticity at scale and getting the reps in (26:08) Her first podcast (28:07) Digital PR's moment with SEOs (31:08) The Human-Machine Memory Gap white paper Notable quotes "The biggest pitfall is thinking, I've done this before, so I'll just do it the way I've always done it and not digging into the market." - Laura Smith "I think you have to be very honest with yourself when you don't know if you're trying to make things work internationally." - Laura Smith "...why a human is going to choose your brand, which is, you know, especially important when an AI might only recommend three brands compared to previously having the whole of the Google search to look through." - Laura Smith ...