The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Three founders building SEO software sat down for the first Unscripted SEO panel. Patrick Stox (ex-Ahrefs, ex-IBM, now independent), Ben Wills (OppAlerts) and Ben Senescu (OpenSEO) on what actually changed about building tools, and how to get recommended by an LLM before you are anywhere near the training data. Read the full recap here.

The build constraint is gone. Patrick Stox could not have built most of this before and now can, with about a hundred and four free tools live at patrickstox.com. Ben Senescu ships features that work ninety-five percent of the time while running OpenSEO as a team of one. Ben Wills had to run a full database refactor because the LLMs made architectural decisions he had told them not to make.

Taste is the new bottleneck. Ben Wills: "AI can produce stuff, but it doesn't have the taste to decide, do we use a B-tree, or do we use binary search on a sorted list. That curation is your taste." Patrick's version from inside Ahrefs: if they had listened to customers, they would still be a low-cost link tool.

How to get recommended before you are in the training data. Patrick splits it into two surfaces on two clocks. The training data is slow and largely passive. The retrieved pages are workable this week, so get a call-out onto the lists that already rank. Ben Wills adds the GitHub awesome lists and the free-tool directories that AI tools query when they go shopping for data. Both halves are written up on OpenSEO's blog: Two Surfaces, Two Timelines and What Broke the $99 Ceiling.

One tiny word changes the answer. Ben Wills's own test: name a Corolla instead of a BMW when you ask about a trip, and the hotel recommendation changes. ChatGPT memory then carries that context into a completely different chat days later.

What they want SEOs to stop doing. Patrick Stox: "Any tactic that is abused will be shut down... they might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past." Ben Wills: if you are going to be a sushi chef, the first year you just make rice. Ben Senescu: give Claude Code or Codex a real afternoon before you write it off.

The panelists and their solo episodes: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era, Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing, and Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling. More episodes at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Everyone on LinkedIn says SEO is dead. Laura Hoot has been doing it for close to twenty years and sees the exact opposite happening: hiring, not mass firings. She joins Jeremy Rivera to argue that the SEO expert just became the Claude expert, the ChatGPT expert and the Gemini expert without needing a new degree, because the foundation transferred intact.

Laura runs SEO for big national multi-location brands at GPO, where the team calls the work "discoverability" - a word she argues was always the accurate one. She started in 2007 writing keyword-dense copy in college, took an SEO-slash-customer-support job at Vrbo when HomeAway was the flagship, and has since worked H-E-B, vet clinics and national retail. Half her career was spent running paid search and organic at the same time, which is why she is blunt about the cost of the silo between them: the algorithms differ, but the intent and the volume data are identical. Jeremy ties it straight back to Lisa Raehsler's episode on Google's AI Max, which now scans a site for its own landing pages instead of requiring purpose-built ones - which is exactly the argument for getting PPC and SEO budget approved in the same meeting.

Her strongest claim is that keyword research matters more now, not less. The historical question data sitting in Search Console, Semrush and Ahrefs is the closest available proxy for how people actually prompt an LLM, and she treats it as the predecessor signal rather than a legacy report. She also flags JavaScript as a re-emerging blocker, since AI crawlers are far less patient with heavy front-ends than Googlebot learned to be, and notes that AI-assisted traffic is still a very small share of GA4 across every client she works on - for now.

Jeremy pushes on the local-versus-national divide, which Laura calls the single biggest strategic differentiator in her career, and tells the story of a counseling client whose article went three to four times up in organic traffic while the client was simultaneously reporting lost rankings - and none of it converted, because a liver-detox page had started surfacing for cod liver oil and colon cleanses. They get into why WordPress tags poisoned a genuinely good idea, why the four-blog-posts-and-four-links-for-5k agency model is gone and never should have existed, and the "it's goog enough" problem AJ Kohn named years ago about trusting third-party search volume.

Laura's advice for the moment: stop optimizing for the surface and start asking where your audience already is. Read the full recap and transcript, and find more interviews at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Google's AI Max does not just pick your keywords anymore - it picks the landing page it sends paid traffic to, off your own site. Lisa Raehsler, founder and principal SEM strategist at Big Click Co, has the spreadsheet of what you can still opt out of and what turns mandatory in February. Her verdict on the rollout: another Tuesday of Google taking control away from advertisers.

Lisa has spent her career in paid search and paid social, contributes to Search Engine Journal, and writes The Paid Media Mix. She came back on Unscripted SEO the same day a batch of AI Max features flipped live in her own accounts, and what she describes is the shift SEO is already living through, arriving on the paid side. Nobody types "project management software" anymore. They type what kind of project management software works with Slack for a small team working internationally. Keywords cannot hold that. Intent can. The full written recap of the conversation is here.

In this episode

Keywords triggering ads gives way to intent triggering ads - and the old ad-group buckets are what breaks first.

AI Max reads the intent, writes the ad, and picks the page on your site to answer the query. That third step is the one nobody budgeted for.

Site quality just became a paid media problem. If Google chooses the page, thin and generic pages spend your ad budget, which is exactly when the paid team and an SEO advisory conversation stop being separate meetings.

It works beautifully for e-commerce, movies and theaters. It falls apart for B2B, for thin sites, and for anyone running priced landing-page variants.

Third-party landing page tools now need an explicit opt-out if you do not want Google routing around them.

The window is shorter than it looks - some features already flipped and can still be opted out of, a bigger batch goes mandatory in February.

Local Service Ads are migrating into Google Ads, and Google Guaranteed still means background checks plus industry-specific licensure.

ChatGPT ads are low converting and only loosely matched, served against the whole topic rather than the actual question.

The automation is really imperfect, which is where humans stay in the loop - the exclusions, the ad copy and the page all still need human-certified, expert-sourced content behind them.

Chapters

(00:00) Keywords stop triggering ads, intent starts

(01:36) The query that broke the keyword bucket

(03:12) What AI Max actually does on your behalf

(04:30) Google's motivation, and the February deadline

(06:24) Another Tuesday of taking control from advertisers

(08:25) When automatic landing pages help, and when they hurt

(10:42) Local Service Ads move into Google Ads

(13:45) What Google Guaranteed vetting actually requires

(15:56) Are ads coming inside AI Overviews?

(18:07) ChatGPT ads: low converting, loosely matched

(19:45) What happens to third-party landing pages

(20:18) Build the six-month plan before February

(24:18) Why SEO and PPC should pool the budget

(25:52) What clients are actually asking about

(28:18) Where to find Lisa

Notable quotes

"I think it's another Tuesday of them making decisions and trying to take...

Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten.
Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.
In this episode

Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business, a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win.

Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies, crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters.

The speed-to-lead flowchart, call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate.

Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year, on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now.

ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal, and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews.

Read the SERP before you promise the keyword, “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that.

Where your impressions actually go, ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions.

Publish the pricing, a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size.

Honesty as a sales strategy, six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest.

Notable quotes
“A five percent increase in close rate can actually net you more revenue than a twenty percent increase in leads year over year with the same close rate.”
, Alex Radetic“I looked at last year, and the entirety of last year they only got sixty-seven leads directly attributable to ChatGPT. And I'm like, okay, well that's worthless.”
, Alex Radetic“It doesn't matter how small a company you are. If you're willing to publish price range information for specific types of jobs, Google loves that stuff.”
, Alex RadeticResources & links

Nuvo Agency, Alex's subscription-model home services and B2B websites

Alex Radetic on LinkedIn, where he does his organic posting

Alex on swaying the LLMs: get branded, get into news stories, get talked about on Reddit. That is a complete guide to link building & authori...

Ben Wills ran the same hotel-recommendation prompt over and over and changed exactly one word in it: the car he was flying to Los Angeles to pick up. Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari. The hotels moved with the car, and they moved across every ChatGPT model and every level of thinking he tried.

Ben started in SEO in 2001 at KeywordRanking alongside Andy Beal and Garrett French, co-founded the link building company ontolo with Garrett, then disappeared into 13 or 14 years of pure engineering. Large-scale crawlers and scrapers written in C by hand. Embedded firmware for an ESP32 inside high-end audio equipment. He is back in marketing now, building AI search visibility tooling at OppAlerts, and his argument is that LLMs finally hand SEOs the thing search engines never did: a fast, direct, testable feedback loop.

In this episode

The one-word experiment: hold the prompt constant, swap the car, and watch the hotel tier move with it

Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine: no waiting for the index, no personalization to strip out

The persona is a ranking factor: 100 industries, 10 personas each, 1,100 personas across the July analysis

Backlinks, ranking strength and LLM visibility: a decent correlation, with a full page of caveats in front of it

How Ben actually uses a correlation: as the anecdotal evidence that tells you which experiment to run

Isolating the model: thinking off, fan-out off, then turn each one up a step at a time

AI slop as an accountability question: producer standards versus consumer appetite, and whether his own reports qualify

Inside OppAlerts: historical PageRank from Common Crawl, news-specific link gap analysis, 20,000+ taxonomy categories

The Yandex source leak: a week in a Slack channel with Mike King and Russ Jones, and what the category vectors showed

Chapters

(00:00) Getting back into the industry after 13 years of engineering

(01:32) AI is taking your tasks, not your job

(02:58) The one-word experiment: Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari

(05:42) Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine

(06:39) Twiddlers, patents and the black box

(08:22) Ann Smarty, fan-out queries and the return of search principles

(10:23) 100 industries and 1,100 personas: the July correlation study

(12:45) Correlation is not causation, and Ben's own asterisks

(14:29) Isolating the model: thinking levels off, fan-out off

(16:25) Engineer brain vs. marketer brain vs. business brain

(20:49) AI slop and where the accountability sits

(25:03) KeywordRanking, ontolo, pure C crawlers and ESP32 firmware

(27:46) news.oppalerts.com and building marketing tools

(29:32) Historical PageRank, contact data and campaign personas

(31:30) News link gap analysis and 20,000 taxonomy categories

(33:36) Vectors, the Yandex leak and CatBoost

(37:01) Homework: go build a search engine

(38:46) Where to find Ben Wills

Notable quotes

"One of the most important things for people to understand about the prompts is how one word can completely change the results, the response that you get back."
- Ben Wills

"The search principles are gonna come right back. You gotta have good quality content. There's gotta be a lot of it distributed across the web. You gotta have backlinks."
- Ben Wills

"Ann Smarty said ... the fastest way to get into the LLM responses is via SEO. And that's the high...