By Jeremy Rivera | Unscripted SEO Podcast
Lisa Raehsler is the first guest I have had back on Unscripted SEO for a second round, and it is because she keeps showing up with the thing that is about to happen rather than the thing that already did. Her first episode covered what PPC can see that SEO can't. This one is about Google's AI Max, and it is the rare paid search topic that should have every organic person in the room paying attention — because the feature reaches past the ad account and into your website. Lisa runs Big Click Co, contributes to Search Engine Journal, writes The Paid Media Mix, and hosts AI Ads & Beyond. Here is what we covered.
Lisa’s strongest play from this episode is written up as a runnable procedure: SEO SOP: Control Which Pages Google Sends Your Paid Clicks To — eight steps to audit which of your pages can take a paid click, decide what to exclude, and opt out where you run third-party or unindexed landing pages. The one-page PDF is free inside The Vault.
Intent Replaced the Keyword Bucket
Lisa's opening framing is that paid is going through the same thing organic is: a shift from keywords triggering ads to intent triggering ads, because the queries got more complicated and demand more detailed answers.
The example is worth memorizing. Not “project management software,” which would have been a clean keyword to bid on, but what kind of project management software will work with Slack for a small team that's working internationally.
Under the old model that is three or four ad groups and a match-type matrix. Lisa's answer to how many buckets you need now is that in theory you do not need them — you are not linking an ad group to a group of keywords anymore, because Google is analyzing the intent directly.
What AI Max Does On Your Behalf
The mechanic, straight from the episode. You give Google your URL. It pulls keywords off the site. It writes the ad to match the intent it read. Then it picks a page on your site to answer the question.
“They're able to then create an ad to match the intent, and then they're able to locate a landing page on your website to answer the question. That's what the whole AI Max thing is.”
— Lisa Raehsler
Lisa had run the flow herself the day we recorded. Suggested keywords: more generic. Ad copy: definitely more generic. Not completely keywordless, but blunted.
“It was frustrating for me to know what they were doing wrong.”
— Lisa Raehsler
She also gave the fair counterargument. For a small business that needs to get running and cannot hire a professional, this is the easiest way to get going. Lowering that barrier is exactly Google's aim, because as Lisa put it, the ads are not keeping up with AI searches and that ultimately costs Google money. Asked whether this was an escalation or business as usual, her answer became one of our title candidates.
“I think it's another Tuesday of them making decisions and trying to take control away from advertisers.”
— Lisa Raehsler
Great for Ecommerce, Rough for B2B
The automatic landing page selection is the fault line. Lisa's split:
• Works well: ecommerce with a genuinely good, SEO-optimized site and clear product and category pages. She had also heard it working beautifully for movie and theater sites.
• Breaks down: companies without resources or without a great site to begin with, which is the same population the low barrier to entry is attracting.
• Not applicable: a lot of other businesses, and especially B2B.
I brought up the salon clients where getting five words onto a page was a fight. Lisa agreed that under-built sites are the big issue she and others are seeing. You can uncheck the box to opt out, and you can set exclusions — avoid the privacy page, avoid the about page — but deciding what to exclude takes a human sitting down and thinking it through. The automation hands the work back in a different shape.
If you run third-party landing pages, or deliberately unindexed pages, or multiple priced variants of the same offer, that is an opt-out decision you have to make on purpose. On the pricing conflicts specifically: you can do it, but you will have to manually override.
LSAs, AI Overviews and ChatGPT Ads
A few quick boundaries from the back half of the episode:
• AI Max is search only. It replaces traditional keyword search in the search engine; other formats live in their own campaign types.
• Local Service Ads are migrating out of their separate login and into Google Ads. Getting Google Guaranteed still means background checks plus industry-specific certificates or licensure — HVAC, carpenters and lawyers are all on the list.
• Ads and AI Overviews are still served separately: ads above, overview below, ads on the side. Lisa does not expect paid links inside the overview text, since ads have to be labeled as such.
• ChatGPT ads have lowered their requirements and opened to smaller advertisers. Lisa's read is that they are low converting, and as a user she finds them matched to the whole topic or something that just brushes against it rather than the actual question.
She also flagged where client anxiety actually sits right now: they are asking how to get into the chatbots and be discoverable there, with no idea what that means for PPC. They do not even know it is an issue yet. They are not afraid.
The Six-Month Plan, Compressed
Some features flipped over already and can still be opted out of. A bigger batch becomes mandatory in February, which makes the real window a lot shorter than six months. Lisa's plan is to sort the features into the ones you are fine with, the ones you want to experiment with, and the ones that need a real human hand — landing pages above all.
“You definitely don't want to do nothing.”
— Lisa Raehsler
And the takeaway I keep coming back to: page quality is now a paid media variable. If Google picks the landing page, a thin page burns a paid click, not just a ranking. That is the first argument in years that gives your PPC counterpart a reason to co-sign the SEO team's budget request. Lisa's view is that increasing the optimization on those pages can only help, that there is always opportunity to improve websites, and that more problem-solution language on the page serves both channels at once.
Listen to the Full Episode
The full conversation with Lisa Raehsler is on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen so the next one lands automatically, and if this one was useful, leave a comment on the episode — that is the signal that decides which topics we chase next. Lisa's first appearance is here: What PPC Can See That SEO Can't.
Find Lisa at bigclickco.com, on LinkedIn, at Search Engine Journal, on her newsletter The Paid Media Mix, and on her podcast AI Ads & Beyond.
