From the Host: Jeremy Rivera on AI & The Future of Search
I’ve been in SEO for nearly two decades. I’ve watched every major shift — PageRank manipulation, Penguin, Panda, RankBrain, mobile-first indexing. But what’s happening with AI right now is different in a specific way: it’s not changing what works, it’s changing where you apply it. The practitioners I keep bringing onto this podcast — the ones who are actually winning in AI search — aren’t panicking. They’re building authority the same way they always did. Third-party mentions. Documented expertise. Genuinely useful content. The surface where that authority gets surfaced is just different now.
“I was posting daily AI news. I was getting traffic. My own AI told me to stop — because I was training every engine on the internet that I was an AI news commentator, not an AI authority. I was actively destroying the signal I was trying to build.”
— Jason Wade, Ninja AI
Why This Topic Matters Right Now
AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — don’t rank pages the way Google does. They synthesize. They pull from patterns of third-party mentions, documented expertise, and entity signals across the web. If you’ve been optimizing purely for Google’s ranking factors, AI visibility requires a fundamentally different approach layered on top of it.
Across more than a dozen episodes on this topic, the guests who’ve shaped how I think about AI search share a common thread: the fundamentals are the same, but the execution is different. Helpful content still wins. Authority still wins. But how you build and signal that authority — and how fast you need to act — has changed significantly.
Episodes on AI & The Future of Search
Grant Simmons on Entity SEO, LLMs, and the Future of Search Visibility
Grant Simmons — Head of SEO & GEO, Fiat Growth | 30+ years in search; former VP Performance Marketing, Homes.com; QueryDrift & EntityMap.org contributor
Grant has been practicing entity SEO since before Google named it, and this is one of the most technically grounded conversations I’ve had on LLM visibility. His core argument: LLMs ground through the same indexes Google does — so what helps Google helps AI. He introduces EntityMap.org as a new meaning-layer spec designed to reduce hallucinations, explains why query drift is the measurable sign your pages need to be split, and makes the case that we are all currently beta testing the beta testers.
“We are beta testing the beta testers to make it work better based on our experience and our ability to confront LLMs with what we know as obvious ambiguity or obvious hallucinations.” — Grant Simmons
Brittany Trafis: AI Search Is Not SEO 2.0 — Unscripted SEO Podcast
Brittany Trafis — Founder, Saurian Digital | AI-native agency built from scratch around AI search visibility
Brittany didn’t retrofit AI onto an existing agency — she built Saurian Digital from the ground up around AI-first workflows. Her core argument: treating AI search like SEO 2.0 is the most expensive mistake agencies are making right now. Different channel, different strategy, different technical priorities. Her observation that AI agents crawl new content within hours while Google still takes 6–8 weeks to index has direct strategic implications for how you sequence content publishing.
“AI search is not SEO 2.0. If you keep treating it like just keywords and rankings, you’ll get keywords and rankings — in Google. If you’re trying to show up in ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity, you’re not going to see it.” — Brittany Trafis
Stephan Bajayo: There Is No Rank in an LLM — Unscripted SEO Podcast
Stephan Bajayo — CEO & Co-Founder, Vibe Logic | Co-founded Conductor, one of the first large enterprise SEO platforms
Stephan co-built the enterprise SEO industry and now runs Vibe Logic. His central provocation for this episode: every practitioner asking “how do I rank in ChatGPT?” is asking the wrong question. LLMs synthesize; they don’t rank. The correct frame — what are you giving them to interpret? — changes everything about how you structure content, build authority, and measure success in AI search. His interview-based keyword research framework is also one of the most practical research approaches in the library.
“There is no rank in an LLM. You’ve been trained to believe that ranks. That’s because you’ve been trained in the wrong things. The real question is: what are you giving them to interpret?” — Stephan Bajayo
Robert Spinrad: Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility — Unscripted SEO Podcast
Robert Spinrad — Associate SEO Director, SEO Interactive | Philadelphia-area agency serving home services and legal clients since 2008
Robert’s blanket statement — good SEO results in good AI visibility — is the clearest synthesis of where the disciplines converge. His agency’s internal conversation shifted from “what is AI” to “how do we earn AI trust for our clients,” and his framework for building that trust through genuine expertise signals, multi-platform reviews, and community involvement is grounded in real client outcomes. His transparency-first approach to the AI conversation with clients is also one of the best agency positioning frameworks I’ve featured.
“We encourage clients to be wary of people saying they are AI experts — because this whole thing is brand new. We’re all learning.” — Robert Spinrad
Greg Digneo: Visibility Is the New SEO — Unscripted SEO Podcast
Greg Digneo — Founder, Content Guppy | B2B SaaS SEO agency
Greg makes the case that the fundamental shift in search isn’t about which platform wins — it’s that the concept of visibility has replaced the concept of ranking. His visibility-first model for B2B SaaS SEO, built from years of client work in a category where results are increasingly fragmented across Google, AI assistants, and community platforms, is one of the clearest articulations of where the discipline is heading for competitive categories.
What AI Visibility Really Means — And Why It’s Not a Buzzword
Jason Wade — Ninja AI | AI visibility and entity engineering consultant
Jason makes the clearest case I’ve heard for why AI visibility is a fundamentally different discipline than traditional SEO. His core framework: authority is what third parties say about you, not what you publish about yourself. He also walks through his own mistake — posting daily AI news that was actively eroding his expert authority signal.
“Authority is what third parties say about you — not what you say about yourself. You can publish all the content you want, but if no one else is talking about you, the AI doesn’t care.” — Jason Wade
Nick Eubanks on SEO, Digistore24, and the Moats That Still Matter
Nick Eubanks — Global CMO, Digistore24 | Sold Traffic Think Tank to SEMrush; built their media program to 8-figures
Nick has watched SEO “die” five times in 17 years and argues this iteration is the genuine conceptual shift. His most actionable insight: most agencies are using AI in their content workflows completely backwards — automating briefs when they should be automating drafts. His “brand brain” pipeline concept is the most practical AI content system I’ve heard described.
“Distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite.” — Nick Eubanks
Erica D’Arcangelo on Hybrid Teams, Human Content, and the Icarus Effect
Erica D’Arcangelo — CEO, Love Content Development | 14 years, 800+ companies served, $300M generated for clients
Erica named the pattern every content team needs to understand: the Icarus Effect. AI-generated content often earns initial rankings, then drops. Human content builds slower but holds. Her philosophy — “how can this content benefit the reader?” rather than “how many posts can we publish?” — is a north star worth returning to constantly.
“I really lead with how can this content benefit the reader and how can we be creative with it? Not like how can we publish a million posts this month?” — Erica D’Arcangelo
13 Years at REVOLVE: Paul Baterina on Long-Tail Pages, Link Building & LLM Visibility
Paul Baterina — Solo SEO, REVOLVE | 13 years as the sole SEO at a 260,000-product fashion brand
Paul’s decade-plus at REVOLVE produced a master class in proving SEO value without a team and building long-tail category strategies at genuine enterprise scale. His practical take on LLM visibility — grounded in the realities of a massive product catalog — is unlike anything you’ll hear from a consultant.
Benas Leonavicius on Freelancing, AI Search, and Building an SEO Agency
Benas Leonavicius — SEO Freelancer & Agency Builder
Benas brings a practitioner-first view on how to actually appear in ChatGPT, why SaaS clients can’t scale their SEO the way service businesses can, and what the entity-centric shift means for the day-to-day work of organic search. One of the most direct, no-fluff takes on AI search visibility I’ve featured.
Brandon Leibowitz on Schema, AI Overviews, and Playing the Long Game in SEO
Brandon Leibowitz — SEO Specialist | 18 years of experience
Brandon’s thesis: schema markup is the highest-leverage tactic available for AI visibility right now. After 18 years watching tactics rise and fall, his case for structured data as the bridge between traditional SEO and AI search is one of the most technically grounded and practically actionable takes I’ve recorded.
Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs
Claude Zdanow & Chris Becker — CEO & President, Onar
Two senior operators make the case that the Google-only SEO era is definitively over and walk through how they track brand visibility in LLM responses at scale. Their multi-channel strategy framework — built from real client data — is the most operationally concrete AI visibility approach I’ve featured on the show.
Lorrie Thomas Ross on Marketing in the AI Era
Lorrie Thomas Ross — Veteran Marketer & Author
Lorrie has been in marketing long enough to have survived every major disruption cycle. Her perspective on what changes and what doesn’t as AI takes over execution is grounding: the human-centered principles that built lasting brands don’t expire. They survive every algorithm shift, and they’ll survive this one too.
AI, Automation & the Future of SEO Work with Danny Richman
Danny Richman — Digital Strategist & Educator
Danny brings a nuanced take on how AI is reshaping the practical day-to-day of SEO work, and which human skills will compound in value as automation handles the rest. His framework for identifying what to automate vs. what to protect is essential reading for anyone building or managing an SEO team in 2025.
GROAS Autonomous Google Ads: What Full AI Management Actually Looks Like
David Pourquery — Founder, GROAS
What does it actually look like when an AI manages Google Ads campaigns end-to-end without human hands on the dials? David built it. This is the most concrete look at AI-driven paid search automation I’ve featured — and the implications for agencies and the future of paid search are significant.
AI-Powered Lead Qualification: Insights from Bryan Shankman of Lead Truffle
Bryan Shankman — Founder, Lead Truffle
If AI search changes how people find you, AI lead qualification changes what happens after they do. Bryan’s work on transforming lead capture and qualification for home service businesses is a crucial downstream piece of the AI visibility conversation that most SEOs miss entirely.
Katie Wagner: SEO & Journalism Are the Answer to LLMs AND Google Too
Katie Wagner — Founder, KWSM Digital Marketing | Former CNN journalist
Katie’s CNN background is her secret weapon: journalistic rigor applied to content strategy produces something AI can’t replicate at scale — original, reported, human-authored content that both Google and LLMs have to cite. Her case for journalism as the most durable content moat is one of my favorites from this entire season.
SEO in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Jason Berkowitz
Jason Berkowitz — SEO Agency Veteran
Jason brings 15+ years of agency-side perspective to the AI transition, making the case that the skills which will matter most over the next five years are the ones most agencies are currently underinvesting in. A grounded, practitioner-level view on a topic that too easily becomes speculative.
Jeremy’s Key Takeaways: AI & The Future of Search
- Authority is third-party, not self-declared. AI engines synthesize what the broader web says about you. Build external citations, earn mentions, guest on podcasts — those are entity signals that move the needle.
- AI search is a separate channel, not SEO 2.0. Schema, entity signals, FAQ-formatted content, and structured definitions are now first-class SEO considerations distinct from traditional on-page optimization.
- There is no rank in an LLM. The right question isn’t “how do I rank?” — it’s “what am I giving the model to interpret?” Structure, authority, and cited sources determine whether you get surfaced.
- The Icarus Effect is real. AI content can spike in rankings, then fall hard. Human voice, expert judgment, and original research hold longer and compound over time.
- Brief = human. Draft = AI. Edit = human. The agencies winning right now have this workflow right. Automating briefs while keeping humans on drafts is the most common and most expensive mistake.
- Small businesses have a real window right now. The AI search playing field isn’t tilted toward big-budget brands the way Google’s was. Speed and strategy beat spending — but that window won’t stay open indefinitely.
- Distribution is the last remaining moat. When execution becomes commoditized by AI, the advantage belongs to whoever has already built the audience, channel, and trust. Start building distribution now.
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