On this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, I sat down with Erika Braeger, Manager of Organic Growth Strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency. We got into the human layer AI can’t replace — from building team confidence to what actually earns a citation in an LLM. Here’s the recap.
Confidence Is the Real Deliverable
A former teacher, Erika Braeger manages her strategy team by building confidence. When a strategist comes to her for a gut check — on a client’s navigation overhaul, say — she doesn’t just sign off. She asks curious questions to coax the answer out, because they only come to her when unsure.
Ultimately I want to show them that they did know the answer, and then they can reapply this confidence the next time. — Erika Braeger
Kill the Pre-Work, Not the Thinking
Her main innovation is removing the pre-work: grabbing data from multiple systems and organizing spreadsheets before any analysis can begin. She builds Claude skills to take that away — but the thinking stays human.
It’s the pre-work that can burn a lot of time, a lot of energy. And if someone else is helping you with pre-work, you get the time back to invest into running your analysis, crafting the narrative. — Erika Braeger
The LLM Layer Sits Over Everything
Ask Erika what SEO is worth now and she’ll say it expanded. After ChatGPT’s rise, digital PR, design, and video moved from nice-to-have to must-have. My own framing: I slide the LLM window over the top of SEO — there’s nothing we do in SEO you couldn’t also view through the lens of LLM optimization.
Write for Humans First — Machine-Readable Second
So are we writing for people or bots? Both, she says — humans first, but machine-readable. That’s why SME input is built into every brief, and an expert-review layer applies whether a human or an AI wrote the draft.
You need to write content for humans first. However, in order to get the content in front of humans, it needs to be machine-readable — so the bots that parse the content can present it to the correct humans at the correct time. — Erika Braeger
Never Rush a Website Migration
Her one hard red line: never rush a website migration. Rushed migrations forget redirects and drop whole sections — and often shouldn’t have happened at all. Her first question is always the business goal behind the move, not which CMS someone prefers.
One of the first questions I ask is: what are the business goals behind this migration? — Erika Braeger
What AI Actually Cites
Tenspeed just published its first research report, What AI Actually Cites for B2B Evaluation-Stage Prompts, and the finding is encouraging: the content you control can dominate AI citations at the consideration stage — a reason not to throw up your hands and pump out a thousand listicles.
Connect with Erika Braeger
- Company: tenspeed.io
- LinkedIn: Erika Braeger
- Research: What AI Actually Cites for B2B Evaluation-Stage Prompts
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.
