The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for more than twenty years, and she has stopped getting the one request that used to define the job. Her leads no longer ask to rank on Google. They ask to show up in ChatGPT.

She joins Jeremy Rivera to unpack what she calls LLM consensus: AI answers only trust a brand when many independent sources say a consistent thing about it. That is why Reddit presence, claimed directory profiles and a genuinely detailed about page all matter again, and why Ann is candid that her own twenty-year footprint is "a mess" of stale bylines she is still cleaning up.

She is equally blunt about the cost of getting it wrong. Going promotional gets even ten-year-old Reddit accounts suspended. The gap between what your website says, what sales promises and what support actually delivers ends up on Reddit first and in the AI answer second. And roughly half the time, she cannot win that argument with executives.

Her verdict after two decades: SEO is still the most predictable path into LLM visibility. Not the only one, and nowhere near a full overlap, but the one backed by real data. More from Ann at AnnSmarty.com, where her newsletter and weekly live stream live. Full episode and recap on Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

LLM consensus - AI answers trust you when many independent sources tell the same story about you, and Ann is first to admit her own footprint does not.

Reddit takes six months, not six days. A transparent branded presence is the play; the subreddit starts ranking and getting cited around month six.

How to crash and burn fast - she has watched almost ten-year-old accounts get suspended the moment they turned promotional.

Directory submissions came back from the dead, because LLMs read them. Claim the profiles, keep the name consistent, recycle one asset across ten listings.

You lose control of your brand as you grow - once people search your name, other people's pages rank for it. Do that homework before you go outbound.

SEO is not an island anymore - Ann now sits with sales and support, because the gap between what those three say is what Reddit and the AI answer repeat back.

AI inside a real agency is far more manual than the pitch decks suggest: analytics and ideation get help, the writing and the Reddit posting stay human.

Thirty percent overlap beats no overlap - why she still opens every LLM visibility audit with plain organic search data.

Chapters

(00:31) Twenty years in SEO, and why audits and GEO stopped being separate services

(01:47) What Reddit work actually looks like, and the six-month curve

(03:14) The fastest way to crash and burn on Reddit

(05:25) Your homepage is no longer your whole entity

(06:24) LLM consensus, and Ann's own messy footprint

(08:30) Grant Simmons, the entity home, and the about page nobody writes

(10:39) Directory submissions are back: the top five for a brand-new business

(12:26) You lose control of your brand the moment you start growing

(15:53) Jon Henshaw's version: sometimes the SEO fix is fixing the product

(16:50) SEO is not an island - website, sales and support saying three different things

(19:45) AI as headache removal, not worker replacement, and the $2,000 meta titles...

Your pricing page is not what the LLM is reading. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI explains why answer engines resolve to consensus — and why five stale Reddit threads and an out-of-date G2 profile will happily overrule the price you changed last week.

Malte has been doing SEO for more than twenty years. He started as a teenager after noticing strangers landing on his website, studied computer science, and wrote his bachelor thesis on PageRank — applying it to a graph of scientists to work out which ones were successful. He co-founded an SEO agency, led the product team at Searchmetrics, then spent five years doing in-house SEO for the largest price comparison website in Europe. He now runs product and research at Peec AI, a software platform that measures and improves brand visibility inside LLM-based answer engines. His stated bias: he does not like being bullshitted by fluffy statistics, so he tests what actually works.

In this episode

PageRank almost certainly still runs inside Google — maybe not the exact random surfer paper, but the core principle of graphing the whole internet and scoring nodes by their links is, in Malte's words, surely still being used.

Bot crawling is not the reasonable surfer — a crawler refreshing a competitor's ten product prices every five minutes follows no links at all, and many crawlers now log in. High-PageRank pages get crawled more, but that is correlation, not the same behaviour.

Serving Markdown to LLM crawlers — deciding server-side to hand HTML to humans and Markdown to an LLM crawler at the same URL can work. Publishing a parallel /test.md copy should not: it duplicates content, wastes crawl budget, and gives any human who lands there nothing to click.

The Time magazine move — injecting ads that only the LLM sees is currently the one way to monetise bot traffic, and Malte thinks a product manager at OpenAI or Anthropic eventually kills it.

Hallucinated domains in ChatGPT fan-outs — on some prompt sets Malte tracks, 2–3% of prompts contain a site: search against a domain that does not exist. Those domains are parked today; anyone could register one and rewrite what the model says about a brand.

Advertorials are being used as grounding — in an insurance prompt set he monitors, roughly 2% of the sources cited by LLMs are paid advertorials. Humans skip them. Models quote them.

A five-step method for query fan-outs — run the prompts repeatedly, study which brands are winning, mine the cited sources at both URL and domain level, get added to the pages that already list several competitors, and harvest the words the LLM appends on its own. Right now that word is "official."

Publish date vs. updated date — the transparent answer and the maximum-short-term-SEO answer are not the same answer, and Malte says so out loud.

Cannibalisation has loosened — multiple pages on one topic now help LLMs reach consensus, as long as each has a genuinely different intent at the title level.

Detecting AI slop with four measures — perplexity, compression rate, Jaccard similarity and cosine similarity. Benchmark them on human-written text, run the same tests on the AI-written batch, and the footprints show up. Claude will write the Python for you.

The briefing chain — brief, sanity-check the brief, one prompt per paragraph, a fact-checking pass, then structural checks. About €5–7.50 of tokens per article, and genuinely good output.

Put the human at the BRIEF step — not at the end moving four sentences around, which Jer...

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