The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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

Gisele Navarro is the managing editor of HouseFresh, an independent air-quality review site that buys every unit it tests, runs no ads and takes no sponsorships. In September 2023 Google started taking their traffic away. By March 2024 it was nearly all gone. This is what happened next, told from inside it.
The recovery from the inside: What an HCU Recovery Looks Like From the Inside on SEO Arcade.

HouseFresh started publishing properly in 2021 and had three good years. Then the late-2023 updates landed, and Gisele found herself comparing notes with independent publishers from every other niche who were all losing to the same handful of huge sites. The February 2024 article her team wrote about it got Nieman Lab's attention, and Nieman Lab got Google's. Her own writing on the whole run sits on her HouseFresh author page. Full transcript and recap: https://unscriptedseo.com/gisele-navarro-housefresh-ai-traffic/

In this episode

Why they buy every unit they review, and what they do when a US-only product cannot be bought from the UK.

The article, Nieman Lab, and the day at Google's HQ with 19 other publishers and a room of engineers.

What actually changed in August 2024 and March 2025, and why Gisele stopped opening analytics entirely.

The great decoupling in her own numbers: impressions through the roof, clicks falling, positions holding.

Two minutes from ChatGPT, six to eight from Reddit. Her on-site data contradicts the "AI traffic is more engaged" claim outright, and it rebuilt how every page and every HouseFresh video is structured.

Why they have not blocked the AI bots, and the wildfire story behind that call.

How the community got built: opening r/HouseFresh because the site could not rank, posting the critical reviews nobody else would run, the manufacturer that tried to sue them, and the Linus Tech Tips video that reached millions.

What is next: new product categories, an app, and getting air-quality workshops into schools.

Jeremy and Gisele also get into the AI slop narrative and what the pace of it did to reader trust, which is exactly why an audience that wants human, expert-sourced content turned out to be the asset worth protecting. Gisele posts the data side of the work on X.

Chapters

(01:38) No ads, no sponsorships, every unit bought

(03:39) The 2023 collapse, and competing with Forbes

(05:09) The article that called it out

(07:24) The call with Google, then the Googleplex

(08:43) August 2024, site reputation abuse, March 2025

(13:28) AI Overviews and the great decoupling

(19:16) Two minutes from AI, six to eight from Reddit

(23:38) When the AI Overview sells the product for you

(26:49) Walled gardens, and why the subreddit exists

(31:11) The lawsuit and the Linus Tech Tips video

(35:24) "We are the human LLMs"

(37:47) New categories, an app, and air quality in schools

Notable quotes

"How can it be that I'm reviewing an air purifier, and you are reviewing a pair of trainers, and you are reviewing a Star Trek show, and we are all co...

Nick LeRoy has been an SEO for sixteen years and now runs SEOjobs.com, the job board he built because searching "SEO" on LinkedIn still returns a Java developer role with "SEO knowledge, nice to have" buried in the bullets.

His read on the hiring market is one word: ugly. For the first time, the supply of SEO talent outstrips demand, which is how, in his words, "a lot of C-plus SEOs were getting six-figure A-plus salaries." AI removed the entry-level rung, and the people most exposed are the ones who built a career on executing the checklist rather than explaining the reasoning.

The line that should worry you: "If you can summarize what you're doing in bullet points, you're replaceable."

Nick argues for what he calls human-led AI, and asks the question nobody in the C-suite wants: when did 25% efficiency stop being good enough? He has been pulled into meetings about who to cut and refuses them, countering with a better question - instead of halving the team, why not stop hiring until the same team's output doubles?

He also thinks Google's results are the best they have been, because a good business should now be reflected by good rankings. He talks through the client who insisted a technical silver bullet explained his fall from #1, until Nick opened an incognito window and showed him competitors who were cheaper, shipped free and had no restocking fee. He writes weekly at SEO for Lunch.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Watch the full interview on YouTube: Nick Leroy: SEO Job Market in one word? Ugly.

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.
Jeremy's read on the panel: Nobody Gets to Stay in Their Lane Anymore on SEO Arcade.

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.