The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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...

Stephanie Long, founder and CEO of Mrs. SEO, has been doing SEO for almost two decades, and her verdict on AI is blunt: it did not replace the fundamentals, it raised the price of skipping them. "SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together or you're going to fail."

She joins Jeremy Rivera to explain why she built Junction Jack, a human-vetted SEO marketplace aimed squarely at the gig platforms whose "vetted" section turns out to mean vetted by AI. "None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them."

Along the way: the broken links AI cites that were never real, the freelancer-versus-agency shift and why clients now want to talk to the owner, a San Francisco IVF clinic that took a year to earn the machines' trust, link building you can actually explain to a nervous client, and whether Google's Helpful Content Update was ever really about helping readers.

More episodes at Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

Why a $20/mo chatbot is not an SEO strategy, and why owners keep believing it is, because they cannot "see" SEO the way they can see an ad.

Freelancer vs. agency vs. in-house. Stephanie's newest client had never spoken to anyone but an account executive who could not read the reports either.

LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie. Not hallucination. Choosing to lie, unless a second model is set up to watch.

Trust but verify. She clicked every link in one AI answer and every one was broken. Then mine your own 404s for the pages ChatGPT invented and build them.

"SEO is the batter to your AI." The traditional fundamentals are the base layer, and entry-level on its own no longer clears the bar.

Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now. Twenty city pages for a realtor then, hundreds of thousands of pages today. Same move, expanded.

Getting niche enough to earn trust. A San Francisco IVF clinic took over a year to surface in the chat tools, fixed with real success-rate data and hyper-local FAQs.

Link building you can explain in one sentence. Two-way Q&As instead of guest-post begging, roundup quotes turned into graphics, and asking for "attribution" instead of a "link."

New scams to sift through. An agency that bought bad backlinks and, it turned out, bought fake traffic on top of them.

Junction Jack. Fiverr and Upwork's fine print says "vetted by AI." Hers says vetted by a human.

Chapters

(00:00) Meet Stephanie Long, and why SEO is a black hole

(04:10) Why owners still think $20 a month will do their SEO

(05:53) Freelancer, agency, or in-house: who actually talks to the client

(09:18) LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie

(10:51) Trust but verify: broken links and imagineered 404s

(13:52) "SEO is the batter to your AI"

(14:18) Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now

(17:01) Is Google intentionally killing the publisher deal?

(22:42) The IVF clinic: getting niche enough to earn AI's trust

(25:51) You have to actually talk to your client now

(27:35) Why clients are finally interested in SEO

(31:14) Link building you can explain in one sentence

(36:07) Bought backlinks, bought traffic, and who gets hurt

(37:15) Junction Jac...

Gert Mellak has been doing SEO for 20 years from Madrid, and he came on to tell Jeremy that the number at the bottom of every SEO spreadsheet is fiction. Search Console impressions? "Lots of bots produce impressions. All crap." Search volume as a metric on its own? Close to worthless. And the ROI on SEO, he argues, is not measurable unless you stack a hundred and fifty assumptions on top of data that is flawed at every source.

Jeremy brought him a live case - a query showing 10 searches a month in the tools and 1,100 impressions in Search Console - and Gert's answer explains it. It is the same problem Jeremy documented in Google Search Console data is not accurate, arriving from the other direction.

Gert also walks through his Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid from Search Engine Land, the "do SEO but search engines don't exist" thought experiment behind it, the high-intent metric he uses instead of rankings, and the client who deleted 80% of their content and started ranking again. More of his writing is at gertmellak.com, and his consulting work is at AI SEO consulting.

Read the full recap and transcript on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Isaac Justesen founded PatientPartners to work with one kind of client: physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and counselling clinics. Coming up on five years in, his blunt read is that the mechanics of ranking a clinic and ranking a plumber are almost the same. What differs is the copywriting and the advertising rules, which change state by state.

Key takeaways

The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim.

Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all.

The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names.

Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it.

Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds.

Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do.

On this page

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

What you are allowed to say

The first two things he fixes

The leak behind the marketing

From curation to selection

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.
— Isaac Justesen

It is a deliberately deflating opening. Healthcare marketing is sold as a specialism, and the technical work underneath it mostly is not. It is still the profile, still the map pack, still proximity and relevance and prominence.

But for local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options.
— Isaac Justesen

Which is a useful thing for a clinic owner to hear before paying a premium for healthcare expertise that turns out to be the same checklist with a stethoscope on the invoice.

What you are allowed to say

The genuine specialism sits in the copy. Advertising rules for clinical services vary more between states and provinces than most marketers expect, and the platforms enforce their own layer on top. Some treatments are a flat refusal in ads regardless of what your local regulator permits.

So the skill is writing something persuasive inside a box that changes shape depending on where the clinic is. Physiotherapy and counselling are comparatively safe ground. Anything speculative is not.

The first two things he fixes

A Google Business Profile audit. Primary category, secondary categories and the services list are wrong on nearly every clinic he sees, and they are free to fix.

Conversion tracking. Not analytics for its own sake. Knowing which enquiries came from where, so the next thousand pounds goes somewhere de...

Ben Senescu is a software engineer who backed into SEO. He wanted to market his own open source projects, found every tool bloated and priced past what a solo builder would pay, and noticed people on r/TechSEO quietly building their own dashboards on top of DataForSEO. He asked whether they wanted an open source starting point, got a yes, and shipped OpenSEO a week later.

Key takeaways

Open source does not mean free. Ten dollars a month, or bring your own data key, because the data genuinely costs money. That is the objection every professional raises first.

The customers are not professional SEOs. They are people who never used the incumbent tools at all, because the price was never reachable.

The old ceiling was time as much as money. SEO used to demand ten to twenty hours a week, so a cheap tool would not have helped anyway.

He declared bankruptcy on sixty open pull requests. Published a roadmap, stopped taking external PRs, and asked for good issues instead.

Horizontal, not deep. Local SEO, AI visibility and prompt tracking before any single feature gets polished.

The defining constraint of the era is choice, not capability. Everything is buildable, which makes deciding the whole job.

On this page

A week from Reddit post to product

Why open source still costs ten dollars

Who actually pays

Declaring bankruptcy on the pull requests

I can do anything. What is the one thing?

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

A week from Reddit post to product

The origin is unusually honest about validation. Ben did not have a thesis about the SEO tool market. He wanted to market his own projects, hit the price wall, and then noticed other people quietly solving it for themselves in public.

So he asked the subreddit whether an open source starting point would be useful, got a yes, and had a first version out in a week. Five months of real engineering followed, which is the part that separates this from a weekend demo.

Why open source still costs ten dollars

The objection lands immediately when you say open source and then show a price. His answer is the API bill. The rankings and backlink data underneath the product is bought, and that cost does not disappear because the code is public.

So there are two doors. Bring your own key and pay the provider directly, or pay him ten dollars a month and let him handle it. Most people never go past the ten.

Who actually pays

They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before — it was totally inaccessible to them at that price point.
— Ben Senescu

This is the strategically interesting part of the episode. He is not taking share from Semrush. He is selling to people who were never in that market at all, which is a different business with different competition and a much larger top of funnel.

So an affordable SEO tool didn’t make any sense before, because you were going to spend...