The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Isaac Justesen is the founder and CEO of PatientPartners, an agency built exclusively for physiotherapy, chiropractic and counseling clinics. His blunt take: the mechanics of local SEO for a clinic are nearly identical to ranking a plumber — what actually changes is the copywriting and the advertising regulations, which vary more from state to state than most marketers expect.

He argues the Google Business Profile is quietly taking weight away from the website, that conversion tracking is almost never set up correctly, and that community building is the single most underrated channel a local clinic has. He also shares the framework that changed how he thinks about search: Google is moving from curation to selection — from ten blue links to "here is the best clinic for you" — which changes what your location pages have to accomplish.

Isaac offers a free clinic marketing blueprint and a website/SEO/AI-visibility audit at patientpartners.co. More conversations with practitioners at Unscripted SEO.

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 solopreneur would pay, and noticed people on r/TechSEO quietly vibe-coding 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.

Open source does not mean free — it is $10 a month, or bring your own data key — and the reason is the objection every professional SEO raises first: the data genuinely costs money. But the customers who actually pay are not professional SEOs. They are people who never used Semrush at all, because $99 a month was never reachable, and because doing SEO used to demand ten to twenty hours a week.

Ben also explains why he declared bankruptcy on sixty open pull requests, why he is going horizontal instead of deep, and the sentence that defines the AI era for builders: I can do anything — what's the one thing I should do? More conversations with practitioners at Unscripted SEO.

Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for over twenty years and has stopped getting the request that used to define the job. Nobody asks to rank on Google any more. They ask to show up in ChatGPT. Her answer starts somewhere uncomfortable: the query set that matters most is your own brand name, and it is the one you control least.

Key takeaways

Growth is what costs you control of your name. The moment people search for you, other people’s pages start ranking for you.

LLMs run a branded search before they recommend you. Whatever that search surfaces is what ends up in the answer.

LLM consensus means every source saying a consistent thing. She is candid that her own twenty-year footprint fails this test.

Reddit takes about six months and punishes promotion. She has watched accounts nearly a decade old get suspended for turning promotional.

Citations are not the win condition. Being inside the answer is. Citations mostly do not get clicked.

On this page

Losing control of your own brand name

What an LLM consensus audit actually is

Six months on Reddit, and how to lose the account

The blocker is internal, not tactical

Chapters and timestamps

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

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Losing control of your own brand name

Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how it actually you lose control over it because stuff starts ranking for your name and that is the most important search query, that’s your brand name, variations, brand name reviews and all of that.
— Ann Smarty

Which sets her sequencing: establish the organic footprint first, then go outbound. Outbound manufactures branded search, and branded search you have not prepared for is branded search someone else answers.

Everyone is searching for brand names, including LLMs. Before they recommend a brand in an AI answer, they will do the branded search, they will find stuff about you that your customers may not want to know.
— Ann Smarty

That is the retrieval path, stated plainly. It is the mechanism behind the advice, heard elsewhere on this show, to go and fix the product.

What an LLM consensus audit actually is

You have to have I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess.
— Ann Smarty

The self-indictment is the useful part. Twenty years of bylines and dead project references produce an inconsistent record, and cleaning it is not a project with an end date.

Don’t dismiss directory submissions that easily these days. They are being very well used by LLMs, which is like they made a very good comeback from I do...

Your pricing page is not what the model is reading. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI wrote his bachelor thesis on PageRank, ran in-house SEO at Europe’s largest price comparison site, and now measures brand visibility inside answer engines for a living. His argument: LLMs resolve to consensus, so five stale Reddit threads and an old G2 profile will happily overrule the price you changed last week.

Key takeaways

One canonical page cannot create consensus. The same fact has to be findable in enough places that agreeing with you is the cheapest option.

He is against a separate .md URL and for serving markdown by user agent. Same URL, different response. He also calls it cloaking, out loud, and says he would not do it to Google.

Fan-out queries are a placement map, not a keyword list. Target the cited pages that already name several of your competitors.

Watch the words the model adds that you never prompted. The pattern rotates; the method is to keep watching, not to memorise this month’s word.

Two live manipulation surfaces, both already measurable. Hallucinated domains inside fan-outs, and paid advertorials being treated as grounding sources.

On this page

Why consensus beats your canonical page

Against a second URL, for serving by user agent

Fan-outs as a placement map

Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails

Chapters and timestamps

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

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Why consensus beats your canonical page

If you only talk about your pricing on your pricing website and then you change your pricing and then there are five Reddit threads and two reviews on random blogs that still talk about your old pricing, ChatGPT will answer with your old pricing if a user asks about it.
— Malte Landwehr

The remedy is distribution of a single fact rather than optimisation of a single page. G2, Yelp, your own footer, social profiles, press release boilerplate, the help centre, the product docs. The goal is to make agreeing with you cheap to verify.

LLMs are looking for fresh content. So refreshing content, updating it, and then also making sure there’s a machine readable last updated date.
— Malte Landwehr

Against a second URL, for serving by user agent

I would not do that. As an SEO, I don’t want the same content on two different URLs. It wastes crawl resources. If humans land...

Fifteen years of SEO theory was built on Google’s patent literature. Chris Green of Torque Partnership takes the two load-bearing ones, PageRank and Reasonable Surfer, and asks what survives a web where most of the traffic hitting your pages was never a person. He is also the sceptic on markdown companion files, and the sceptic is the useful voice in that argument.

Key takeaways

Patents are principles to reason from, not rules to obey. Simulating link equity is a fine way to picture a change. Betting a rollout on the simulation is the risk.

Agent traffic is polluting the analytics your budget rests on. Worst when the agent rides a real user’s browser, session and device, where the usual bot tells are absent.

Markdown companions are near-free on a small site and a governance problem on a big one. The cost is not authoring. It is who owns the drift.

Nothing on the internet will tell you your markdown is wrong. Search Console flags broken HTML. No equivalent exists for a companion file.

An isolated client test found three to four selectable links to be a citation sweet spot. He labels it as isolated and does not oversell it.

On this page

Patents as principles, not blueprints

What agent traffic does to your data

The sceptic’s case on markdown companions

The cannibalisation reversal, and access logs

Chapters and timestamps

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Patents as principles, not blueprints

We know when the patent comes in, we know when it’s established. We don’t often have a consistent concrete understanding of for how long that mechanism is at work or what other systems intertwine with it... learn them, be aware of them, be conscious of them.
— Chris Green

The distinction he is drawing is between using a patent to picture a system and using one to justify a decision. You can move PageRank around a site convincingly in a simulation and change visibility by nothing at all.

If you know how to test it and you know how to be skeptical then it’s still valuable, still highly valuable.
— Chris Green

What agent traffic does to your data

User behavior collapses, like things like dwell time, click frustration points, call to actions, everything like that is turned on its head... it pollutes all of my other data, which then ruins decision making, which then eventually potentially ruins my budget and my remit.
— Chris Green

This is the part of the agentic shift that arrives before any of the interesting parts. Agents do not pogo-stick, do not hesitate, and do not read. Every behavioural metric you use to argue for investment quietly stops describing humans, and nothing in the...