Recent Episodes

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Aug 19, 2026

One Word Changed the Answer: Ben Wills on Unscripted SEO

Ben Wills ran one hotel-recommendation prompt over and over and changed a single word in it: the car he was flying to Los Angeles to pick up. Civic, BMW, Ferrari. The hotels moved with the car, across every ChatGPT model and every level of thinking. Twenty-six years between marketing and engineering, 13 of them writing crawlers in pure C, and he came back with the one thing SEO never had: a feedback loop you can actually test.

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Aug 17, 2026

Gert Mellak: Your Search Console Impressions Are Bots

Jeremy brought Gert Mellak a query showing 10 searches a month in the keyword tools and 1,100 impressions in Search Console for the same month. Gert's answer was bots, and he had already stopped reporting impressions to clients because of it. The rest of the episode takes apart search volume, SEO ROI math, and what to track instead.

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Aug 6, 2026

Do Google’s Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?

Chris Green of Torque Partnership on whether Google's old patents still describe anything live, Reasonable Surfer when most traffic is bots, markdown companion files, access logs as the measurement layer, and the client test that reverses the cannibalization rule.

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Jun 26, 2026

Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era

Home›Podcast Topics›AI & The Future of Search›Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era🎧 Listen to this episodeOn this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down...

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Jun 22, 2026

Bradley Benner on Relevance, Entity Associations & the Future of Link Building

Bradley Benner of Semantic Mastery and Semantic Links explains why relevance — not DA, DR, or Trust Flow — decides whether a link is worth building, how the SEO's real job is creating entity associations, and why press releases and unstructured citations are the fastest lever for AI search visibility. Plus a free relevance link-building ebook and full episode transcript.

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May 28, 2026

Justin Oberman: All Marketing Is Showmanship and AI Search Is a Consensus Engine — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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May 28, 2026

Brittany Trafis: AI Search Is Not SEO 2.0 — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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May 28, 2026

Chris Garrett: The Myth of the Pure SEO and Why Bing Matters More Than Ever — Unscripted SEO Podcast

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Chris Garrett — a digital marketing veteran who connected a 2,000-student college to the internet in 1994. The conversation draws on 30 years of watching what changes and what doesn't: why pure SEO is a fiction, why Bing now feeds multiple major LLMs and can't be ignored, what the Helpful Content Update actually did, and why human creativity still beats AI on one specific quality.

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May 28, 2026

Julia Bocchese: Pinterest Is a Search Engine and Small Businesses Are Sleeping on It — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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May 28, 2026

Ernesto Ortiz: Algorithm Updates Only Hurt the Incomplete — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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May 28, 2026

Stephan Bajayo: There Is No Rank in an LLM — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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May 28, 2026

Robert Spinrad: Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility — Unscripted SEO Podcast

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.

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Feb 27, 2026

Timothy Malmros on Black Hat SEO, Drop Domains & the Canonical Trick

Timothy Malmros spent nearly two decades in gambling affiliate SEO before retiring to do one thing: investigate and document how black hat SEO actually works. In this episode, we get into drop domains, the canonical trick, Trust Rank theory, and what Google's anti-spam collapse means for the future of search.

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Feb 6, 2026

Jeremy Yang on Paid Ads Strategy and the SEO-SEM Divide

Jeremy Yang manages $450K/month in ad spend from Sydney, Australia. In this episode, he and Jeremy Rivera dig into the SEO-SEM divide, why exact match is dead, how platform selection depends on your content fuel supply, and what AI search means for the future of paid advertising.

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Sep 10, 2025

Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard

Home›Podcast Topics›Brand, Entity & Visibility›Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard 🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard The Brand SERP Guy on the...

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