The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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
...

Ross Hudgens founded Siege Media, and his Wiley book Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO is out October 12, 2026. His sharpest finding: brands with versus articles were the most likely to get AI search traffic. Read the full episode recap.

Siege Media started as a content marketing agency almost fifteen years ago, repositioned as an organic growth agency, and now calls itself a full-service GEO agency. It added affiliate partnerships and community management because third-party citations keep showing up in AI answers. Ross calls the change foundational. He and Jeremy get into what moves LLM visibility, and why so much of it looks like conversion work.

In this episode

Versus articles as a signal. A correlation study Siege ran with Claude across its clients' transactional URLs found a 0.56 Spearman correlation between having versus articles and getting AI search traffic.

CRO is GEO. The reframe came from a talk with Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media. Case studies, data points and reviews up front help buyers and LLMs alike. Jeremy adds how Matt Brooks at SEOteric puts it: train your off-site customer service representatives.

Long-tail use case pages built from the words customers already use in reviews, to educate the robot buyer.

Tracking AI traffic. How Eric Wu at Ramp treats non-branded URLs that arrive as direct traffic as likely AI visits, and how Jeremy cross-checks direct traffic against Microsoft Clarity's bot flags.

"Best overall" loses. A client listed across page one of a best-X search still missed the AI Overview. Ross's thesis: claim a specific "best for" and let other sites cast the co-citation vote.

From network to service. Doing Reddit really means community and reputation management. Jeremy compares it to how Gisele Navarro rebuilt HouseFresh on Reddit and YouTube.

SEO meets PPC. Lisa Raehsler, host of AI, Ads & Beyond, flagged that Google's AI Max picks landing pages from your site, so organic page work now reaches the PPC budget.

Affiliate, measured like SEO. Ross checks traffic to a page before chasing a placement on it.

Chapters

(00:00) Siege Media is now a full-service GEO agency

(03:07) SEO inside the AI bubble

(06:21) The correlation study: versus articles

(07:54) CRO is GEO

(09:46) Bots with wallets and long-tail use case pages

(11:22) Tracking AI traffic the way Ramp does

(14:25) Restructuring the agency around AI search

(16:32) AI-written pushback and bad work to clean up

(24:50) Best overall versus best for

(26:52) Community and reputation management

(30:24) From network to service

(36:56) The launch with no links

(40:25) Attribution, AI Max and the PPC budget

(44:31) Affiliate, a pillar of the book

(46:15) What's next: Ahrefs Evolve

Notable quotes

"Those with versus articles were the most likely to have AI search traffic." - Ross Hudgens
"Be humble about who you actually are and you'll get those great customers and you won't get the ones you won't, and people who land on that will trust you a little bit more." - Ross Hudgens