The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Chris Green of Torque Partnership has spent fifteen years watching SEO theory get built on Google's patent literature. In this episode he takes the two load-bearing ones, PageRank and Reasonable Surfer, and asks what survives a web where most of the traffic arriving on your pages was never a person.

Chris started in technical and content, moved through running and managing teams, then into data and analytics. Today he runs global programmes for SEO, GEO, measurement and AI search for Fortune 500 brands, a job he describes as trying to wrangle this stuff and make it understandable and accessible to as much of the org as possible. As he puts it, that is a very different skill set to being an agency SEO. He is based in the UK and publishes his working notes in public on Substack.

In this episode

PageRank as a principle, not a blueprint. Simulating equity flow is a good way to visualise a linking change. Hedging a rollout decision on that simulation is the risk, because nobody outside Google can tell you what the mechanism now intersects with.

Reasonable Surfer when the surfer is a bot. Agents arrive directly, never pogo back, and collapse dwell time, click patterns and frustration signals. Chris has watched the analytics and says the behaviour is frankly totally different.

Bot traffic pollutes the data that pays your salary. Polluted analytics ruins decision making, which eventually ruins the budget and the remit. The hardest case is an agent riding the user's own user agent, session and device.

Markdown companion files: trivial on a simple site, a nightmare on a monolith. On a clean WordPress install it is almost a non-task. On a million-page stack held together with duct tape, the cost is consistency and ownership across markdown, HTML and feeds, and nothing on the internet will tell you when they drift apart.

Which agentic standard to back. No protocol has won. The current strategy is to do as much of it as you can and hope you backed the right horse.

The RAG layer is where the gaming is. Training data moves slowly and is hard to value. Retrieval moves fast, and old link building techniques can still be far more effective there.

The cannibalization reversal. An isolated client test found three to four selectable links got cited more often than fewer than three, or more than four or five. The operational instruction is keep one and the other, not move one.

Access logs as the measurement layer nobody is selling. Segment your content, split-test bot hits, classify each hit as training, search or user-triggered, and check the IP range before you trust the user agent.

Chapters

(00:00) Fifteen years, and the seats Chris has sat in

(01:18) Do Google's old patents still describe live systems?

(04:50) Test it and stay skeptical, the SEO's actual core skill

(05:10) Reasonable Surfer when most of the web is bots

(07:19) Polluted analytics, ruined decisions, ruined budgets

(08:17) Markdown companion files and Google's position on them

(11:01) The trust problem, and the maintenance overhead on enterprise stacks

(14:28) Bots with wallets, and which standard to hedge

(17:29) Link placement, link building, and whether the watershed has come

(20:13) The RAG layer is more ripe for gaming than training data

(22:57) The tactical win that has always worked: be explicit

(25:07) The cannibalization reversal, and the three to four link sweet spot

(26:46) Keep one and the other, not move one

(29:19) When GEO and SEO pull against...

Traditional Googlebot crawling is falling while AI retrieval bots climb — and in June, Cloudflare confirmed bot traffic has overtaken human traffic on the web. Dan Kurtz of Miss Pepper AI thinks SEOs already know what to do about it: we have multi-purposed content into infographics, reels and press releases for decades because humans have preferred content types — and bots have one too. Technically, he argues, they are just another customer.
Dan walks Jeremy through publishing data straight to the LLMs, the agentic flywheel he has wired across SEO, paid ads and appointment setting, an A/B testing loop that hands Microsoft Clarity and SEO Gets data to Claude and lets it rewrite the page, and a secret-squirrel trick for forcing AI crawlers to re-crawl a site. He also draws a hard line on retainers: “deliverables in SEO means that you are not paying attention.”
A practical companion to SEO in the agentic age, and one more reason the Unscripted SEO Podcast keeps asking working practitioners what is actually moving the needle. More on Dan’s approach at Miss Pepper’s AI optimization practice.
In this episode
Bots are a customer segment, not an exception — Cloudflare's June finding that bot traffic passed human traffic, and what Dan sees in his own logs
Googlebot down ~60%, AI bots up ~80% for crawling and retrieval — the crawl profile behind the whole conversation
Multi-purposing, extended one step: we've turned blog posts into infographics, reels, shorts and press releases for decades because humans have preferred content types — so serve the bots theirs
AI slop isn't new, only the scale is — keyword stuffing and the "rhinoplasty Plano" Lorem Ipsum test were slop too, and a "scaled content abuse" rollout is coming
Reissue your SSL certificate to force AI bots to re-crawl — the secret-squirrel tip, with a table-saw warning attached
"Deliverables in SEO means that you're not paying attention" — why Dan won't sell a retainer measured in blog posts and guest posts
The ecosystem flywheel: SEO, paid ads, appointment setting and exec thought leadership wired together by APIs, passing the baton
A Claude-based personal operating system that boots at 7 a.m. and is fed DISC and Myers-Briggs so it knows when he's deflecting
Letting the AI run the A/B test — Microsoft Clarity plus SEO Gets data in, a rewritten landing page out
AI prompting AI: Claude Cowork drafting the prompt for GoHighLevel's AI, which ships the variant page in minutes
$50 a week in AI credits to scrape the top 100 accounts across ten platforms, with Gemini watching how the hooks land
B2B by law — TCPA, GDPR, and why handing a roofer a list of homeowners in a ten-mile radius is "kind of yucky"
Does the TLD still matter? .com, .ai, the extensions that got torched, and what happens when everything gets ingested by AI engines
Q1 2027: the agentic-flywheel data Dan plans to publish once the last component is connected across his client base
Connect with Dan Kurtz
Website: misspepper.ai
LinkedIn: linkedin.c...

Tom Malesic started EZMarketing thirty-five seconds after quitting a boss who refused a client he disagreed with — and he has spent the twenty-nine years since building the opposite kind of company. In his second turn on the Unscripted SEO Podcast he makes the case that core values are your culture, not a poster: why his book is a large volume of small customers so his top five could leave tomorrow without a single layoff, why the customer who yells at your team has to go, and how an EOS cadence keeps a fully remote team accountable across three countries.
He also gets practical: training a per-client AI agent on Hats.ai so the machine knows the client’s voice better than any single team member, the CIPA and ADA compliance demand letters now landing in small-business inboxes, and the unglamorous truth that most marketing budgets are wasted on leads nobody calls back.
In this episode
The 1996 origin story — how one boss’s refusal handed Tom his first customer
Why core values ARE your culture, and the “I gotta cover my ass” hire who proved it
“The tail can’t wag the dog” — surviving the loss of your top five clients
Firing the customer who made an employee cry, and coaching customers like you coach staff
How one toxic employee wrecks a culture — and your Glassdoor
Running fully remote on EOS, with an 11,000 sq ft office holding four people
One trained AI agent per client across ~70 models
CIPA and ADA compliance demand letters — landing right now
Be open to being lucky, and never be the smartest person in the room
Read the full recap: The Tail Can’t Wag the Dog
Tom’s first interview: The Website Is the Center of Everything

Alyssa Evans started school as an art major and finished with a science degree — and that creative-plus-analytical split is exactly how she runs Grow Your Strategy. In this episode she makes the case that the funnel is the wrong mental model entirely, and that what replaces it is a content ladder.

Alyssa is a growth strategist working mostly with fintech, real estate tech, and SaaS companies — including investors raising money for syndications and adjacent plays like storage units and ATM investing. Her first month with any client is spent auditing rather than executing, because until you know a founder's archetype and comfort level, you're guessing. She's blunt about what's failing right now: the last eight months of her work have included cleaning up websites wrecked by auto-generated content.

In this episode

Why the first month of any engagement should be auditing, not acting — and how client archetypes change the plan

The content ladder — showing up at the most basic question in your niche and every rung of complexity above it

Auto-blogging is a liability: what Alyssa is seeing as she repairs AI-content damage

Why LLMs favor content updated in the last three months — and what that means for your archive

Cross-team collaboration as a speed advantage — what product and sales know that marketing doesn't

Building feedback loops that don't backfire — where Slack and Reddit communities burn brands, and what works instead

Community as its own marketing channel — word of mouth 2.0, and "growing in public"

Why link building is becoming networking — non-competitor partnerships, cross-promotion, and podcasts as an authority engine

Chapters

[MM:SS] — Meet Alyssa Evans: continuous improvement as a operating principle

[MM:SS] — From art major to growth strategist

[MM:SS] — The power of cross-team collaboration

[MM:SS] — First-month friction: auditing before acting

[MM:SS] — Finding the niche: fintech, real estate tech & SaaS

[MM:SS] — SaaS's moving target: the release/marketing/satisfaction cycle

[MM:SS] — Customer feedback loops that actually work

[MM:SS] — Community as a marketing channel

[MM:SS] — AI, GEO, and the content ladder

[MM:SS] — Top of funnel is dead; go deeper

[MM:SS] — Link building in the age of AI

[MM:SS] — Where to find Alyssa

Notable quotes

"You need to make sure that you're found at that base level and working their way up — think of it as a content ladder."
— Alyssa Evans"If you really start to talk to your customer like they're building the product with you, you will just be much more successful."
— Alyssa Evans"Everyone will have an opinion, and they are valid in their world — but you have to stand your ground, and then the data will come later."
— Alyssa Evans

Resources & links

Grow Your Strategy — Alyssa's strategy and content company

Alyssa Evans on LinkedIn · @growyourstrategy on Instagram

On repairing AI-generated content damage — human-certified, expert-sourced content

On earning authority off-site — the

Alex Zweydoff came up in the property management industry before founding ClearLead Digital, an agency that niched down to do SEO right for property managers — measuring success in doors added, not vanity metrics. We get into why you target owner-intent keywords instead of tenant traffic, how hyperlocal city and sub-community pages win the highest-intent owners, speed-to-lead, and why property managers who don’t adapt to AI search now could vanish in 12–24 months. Alex also breaks down custom client dashboards and the local-SEO plays most PM agencies get wrong. More interviews + free SEO SOPs at Unscripted SEO.