The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Ask ChatGPT for the best coffee shop in any town and Starbucks never gets recommended, says Matt Goren, founder of RunOctopus - it points you to an actual local business. Matt explains why AI search recommends the expert instead of the biggest brand, and how a small business becomes the answer to the long, specific questions customers now ask.

Read the full episode recap on Unscripted SEO, connect with Matt Goren on LinkedIn, and run the free website scan at RunOctopus.

Matt has worked in search since the mobile shift of the mid-2010s. The feeder-insect store for reptile owners he exited in April went from zero clicks in February to 7,800 clicks in 28 days on one formula: the subject, the situation and the question type, with an honest page for every cell worth answering. That process became RunOctopus.

Jeremy opens with Ben Wills' vector-embedding correlation study, part of the OppAlerts research on AI search ranking factors, which found topically relevant backlinks close to causative for AI visibility. Matt answers with the mechanics: pages are split into chunks, each chunk gets its own vector, and a chunk that answers one narrow question sits right next to that question. He also cites Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, where brand mentions tracked AI visibility far more strongly than backlinks.

Jeremy shares a client comparison where six SaaS tools with equal link profiles split in LLM visibility along their G2 ratings, and a point from Daniel Hebert of Oleno: AI adds a decision layer between the search and the buyer, a second surface you can push signals into.

Then Matt builds a live question map. Jeremy offers a concrete wall installer in Pensacola, Florida, the kind of business Permacast Walls runs, and Matt turns it into hurricane timing, seasonal cost and big-project questions - ten pages in two seconds. Jeremy adds his study of 42 Search Console profiles, where 64% of queries were anonymized, and Matt explains why those hidden, low-volume queries still hold real money.

In this episode

Why Starbucks never gets recommended for "best coffee shop nearby" - and why Domino's loses pizza the same way

Vector embeddings in plain terms: meaning becomes coordinates, and the nearest chunk wins

Why long, precise questions are winnable for small sites while head terms stay crowded

Why 500 to 1,000 word articles no longer cut it, and encyclopedia-level content does

Subject, situation, question type - the formula behind a map of hundreds of pages

AI recommendations work like a friend's referral - secondhand praise loses to firsthand proof

The one takeaway: your customers talk to technology before they reach you

Notable quotes

"Your customers, before they come to you, are having a conversation with technology before they get to you." - Matt Goren
"I think that authority and encyclopedia level content is completely necessary now" - Matt Goren
Go deeper with Matt's Search Playbook, more than 1,200 articles on AI search, plus his free book, How the A...

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...

Show Notes: Call the Damn Leads with Drewbie Wilson

Unscripted SEO Podcast Episode

Read the in-depth recap "Why 90% of Businesses Can't Convert Leads (And How to Fix It)"

Episode Description

Drewbie Wilson, the self-proclaimed "Meme Lord" and founder of Call the Damn Leads, joins Jeremy Rivera to discuss the massive disconnect between marketing and sales teams. From his tattooed knuckles to his no-nonsense approach to lead follow-up, Drewbie shares why 90% of business owners can't explain what happens to their leads and how to fix the broken system that's costing businesses millions.

Guest Bio

Drewbie Wilson - Founder of Call the Damn Leads

Self-proclaimed "Meme Lord" (literally tattooed on his knuckles)

Sales and marketing expert with street-smart background

E-commerce business owner selling sales motivation apparel

Sales coach and mentor specializing in lead conversion

Author of sales training courses including "Closing the Loop"

Key Topics Covered

The Lead Follow-Up Crisis (5:30)

Why only 1% of businesses call leads back same day

The shocking reality: only 10% ever call back at all

Case study: Real estate leads sitting untouched for weeks

The $1 trillion cost of sales and marketing misalignment

⚡ Speed-to-Lead Statistics (12:45)

80% of people buy from the first person they contact

391% higher conversion rates when calling within 1 minute

Why most sales reps quit after 2-3 calls

The psychology behind immediate response

The 30-Day Follow-Up System (18:20)

Drewbie's proven touch-point sequence

Day 1: Call + Text

Strategic follow-ups on days 8, 10, 15, 21, 28, 31

Why persistence beats perfection

Sales & Marketing Alignment (25:15)

Why 90% of business owners can't explain their lead process<...

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.