May 2026

Joe Zeplin — “The Corporate Guy Turned YouTuber” — on leaving a 104-plant corporate career to go full-time on YouTube, and the AI playbook behind the jump.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Justin Oberman — fourth-generation salesman, former big-agency copywriter, COVID layoff survivor who built a 7-figure agency through LinkedIn, and self-described publicist. His thesis: all advertising is showmanship, and the person who puts on the best show wins. By that frame, the best SEO strategy for AI search is the same as the best publicity strategy — do things that get talked about.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Brittany Trafis, founder of Saurian Digital — an AI-native agency she built from scratch around AI search rather than retrofitting AI onto existing SEO workflows. The conversation covers why AI search and SEO are fundamentally different channels, why monitoring data is directional not definitive, and why small businesses are genuinely ahead of large competitors in AI visibility right now.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Julia Bocchese of Julia Renee Consulting — an SEO and Pinterest strategist who teaches college SEO without textbooks because anything printed a year ago is already out of date. The conversation covers why Pinterest is a search engine not a social platform, why pins from 2009 still drive traffic, and the single mistake Julia sees more than any other: writing copy for the bots instead of the humans who will actually pay you.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Ernesto Ortiz of Structural SEO — a test-driven practitioner who runs month-to-month contracts because he has to perform or lose the client. The conversation covers algorithm updates as dial adjustments, why traffic is a proxy not a goal, and why the scariest thing in SEO right now is LinkedIn gurus selling AI systems to people who ranked their first site three weeks ago.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Stephan Bajayo, co-founder of Vibe Logic and one of the people who helped build the enterprise SEO industry. The conversation is a wide-ranging diagnosis of why SEOs have failed to define themselves, why “rank in an LLM” is the wrong question entirely, and why the interview is still the most underused research tool in the business.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Tom Malesic, founder of EZMarketing, for a practical playbook on small business SEO — from town page strategy and client voice extraction, to why H2s should be questions and how every marketing channel you add compounds the value of the ones you already have.

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Robert Spinrad, Associate SEO Director at SEO Interactive, to talk about the shift from learning about AI to earning AI trust — and why the agencies that stay transparent, report on revenue, and build real-world signals will come out ahead.

Greg Digneo of Content Guppy joins Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk brand visibility, the Gmail personalization signal, links vs. mentions in LLMs, and the budget flip that’s changing how SEO agencies operate.