# Chris Green: Do Google's Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?

> Machine-readable companion to one episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below names the speaker who said it.

| | |
|---|---|
| **Guest** | Chris Green — Senior consultant, Torque Partnership |
| **Host** | Jeremy Rivera |
| **Show** | The Unscripted SEO Podcast |
| **Published** | 2026-08-06 |
| **Duration** | 46:08 |
| **Episode page** | https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/ |
| **Watch** | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhXPG3eZtnk |
| **Listen** | https://676ae6156fe309-82456168.castos.com/player/2562690 |
| **Contents** | Abstract, attributed key claims, key moments, entities, questions. Verbatim excerpts, not a full transcript. |

## Abstract

Chris Green treats the old Google patents as principles to reason from rather than rules to obey, and applies that scepticism to the agentic web. He is the sceptical counterweight on markdown companions: near-free on a simple site, a governance problem at enterprise scale, and unverifiable by anyone today. He argues agent traffic is actively polluting the analytics that decision-making and budgets rest on, reports an early finding that three to four selectable links appears to be a citation sweet spot, and describes access logs as the most under-used evidence an SEO can bring to a leadership conversation.

## Key claims

Each claim names a speaker and carries a verbatim quotation. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse.

### 1. Patents are principles to reason from, not rules to obey

**Chris Green** (2:17):

> We know when the patent comes in, we know when it's established. We don't often have a consistent concrete understanding of for how long that mechanism is at work or what other systems intertwine with it... learn them, be aware of them, be conscious of them.

His warning is against hedging a rollout decision on a patent simulation, because you can change PageRank flow without changing visibility at all.

### 2. Markdown companions are cheap on simple sites and a governance problem at scale

**Chris Green** (11:1):

> A relatively small static site... like a WordPress or something that's fairly simple... it's almost a non task, you can kind of do it automatically, never think about it again. And I think if that's you and you can do it now, I can think of no reason why you wouldn't... for a 50,000, 100,000, million page website that's made with duct tape and sticky tape, it's just not going to fly.

The third position between Dan Kurtz and Malte Landwehr in the related episodes below. His specific worry is drift: what happens when the markdown and the HTML disagree, and which team owns that.

### 3. Nothing verifies that your markdown matches your HTML

**Chris Green** (12:50):

> We end up at a route where a markdown file is serving different data. No one's gonna tell you at the moment, there isn't a single bot or service out there that will say, hey, your markdown files are wrong.

The missing feedback loop. Search Console tells you when your HTML has problems; nothing does that for a companion file.

### 4. Agent traffic is polluting the data budgets are built on

**Chris Green** (6:7):

> User behavior collapses, like things like dwell time, click frustration points, call to actions, everything like that is turned on its head... it pollutes all of my other data, which then ruins decision making, which then eventually potentially ruins my budget and my remit.

Hardest for agents operating through a real user's own browser and session, where the usual bot-detection signals are absent.

### 5. Three to four selectable links looks like a citation sweet spot

**Chris Green** (25:36):

> If you had three to four links that were selectable, you were much more likely to get included in the citation than if you had under three or interestingly over that four or five mark.

He labels it a relatively isolated client test and does not oversell it. The operational consequence is anti-cannibalisation heresy: keep the subdomain page and add the main-domain page, then link them, rather than consolidating.

### 6. The SEO industry may have been overzealous about cannibalisation

**Chris Green** (28:1):

> There is a possibility that we as an industry may have got a little oversensitive to cannibalization in a very kind of strict kind of way. There's always the potential that it maybe wasn't the biggest issue.

Compare Malte Landwehr, who softens the same rule but still insists on differing intent.

### 7. Access logs are the most under-used evidence in the room

**Chris Green** (33:56):

> One of the other treasure troves of information is access logs. So if we can say these AI bots are visiting on these days, here's your average count for the amount of times that a user driven bot has appeared versus a training bot versus a search bot... very few people are bringing that kind of value.

The distinction that matters is user-triggered versus training crawlers: the former is a proxy for being surfaced to an actual person.

### 8. Being explicit is the tactic that has never stopped working

**Chris Green** (23:11):

> Being explicit about what you provide and why it's valuable, it has always been super effective... abandon fluffy kind of rhetoric, be distinct, make actual statements and avoid over use of metaphor or superlatives.

His example is a client whose service was only ever implied on the page, and whose fix was to state it plainly and add a call to action.

## Key moments

Further verbatim excerpts, in the order they occur.

- **Chris Green** (0:29): “I've been doing SEO for about 15 years... today you're more likely to see me helping run global programs for SEO, geo, measurement, AI search.”
- **Chris Green** (4:50): “If you know how to test it and you know how to be skeptical then it's still valuable, still highly valuable.”
- **Chris Green** (11:31): “Frankly they have no reason to believe SEOs at large because if I'm being also honest, the industry on the whole is not giving them a reason to trust too much broadly.”
- **Chris Green** (13:39): “You could deploy that via the edge. So if you use a CDN like Akamai or Fastly or Cloudflare, maybe that network will automatically mark down your website... but even those automated processes are not foolproof.”
- **Chris Green** (14:8): “It's at that time where more people need to test it. They need to be bold, but then they also need to be confident enough to share the answers as well.”
- **Chris Green** (16:11): “If you're a website owner right now that has a very online, very technical audience, early adopters, and then you decide to host your own markdown version of all your content, I absolutely would.”
- **Chris Green** (21:3): “The AI side of the search equation has not got a proper handle on quality yet. What is ChatGPT's equivalent to reasonable surfer?”
- **Chris Green** (29:19): “We've made the initial content more fit for AI... it's definitely driven stronger visibility... But early signs are from an impressions point of view via Google, it's not tracking in the same direction.”
- **Chris Green** (30:39): “We don't have an operation model when GEO and AEO work at a different focus to SEO.”
- **Chris Green** (36:16): “Anyone can pick keywords, but who can pick the right keywords with the right intent and understand it. That's still where SEOs have the biggest cause.”
- **Chris Green** (41:1): “If you kind of know how you would do it without Claude, you can get Claude to do it much more effectively for you, because you know what to ask and what to look out for.”
- **Chris Green** (41:28): “Is it a valid ChatGPT hit or is it someone that's spoofing it? Without telling Claude to check the IP range and the other network conditions, you may start analyzing bot activity on the wrong bot.”

## Entities mentioned

| Entity | What it is | Links |
|---|---|---|
| **Chris Green** | Fifteen-plus years in SEO, from technical and content into team leadership and data analytics. Senior consultant running global programmes for large brands. | Chris Green SEO on LinkedIn, Substack, Bluesky |
| **Torque Partnership** | Consulting business specialising in technical SEO, CDN work and global programmes. |  |
| **Reasonable Surfer** | The Google patent on valuing link placement, used through the episode as a lens on agent behaviour. |  |
| **Bill Slawski** | Referenced as the person whose patent analysis anchored the industry. |  |
| **Access logs** | His preferred evidence base, split by user-triggered versus training crawlers. |  |
| **Splunk / BigQuery / Data Studio** | The stack he suggests for log analysis at volume. |  |

## Questions this episode answers

- Do Google's old patents still apply to how search works today?
- Does the reasonable surfer patent apply to bots and agents?
- Should I publish markdown versions of my pages?
- What breaks when agents browse my site on a user's behalf?
- How is agent traffic distorting my analytics?
- How many links should a page have to maximise its chance of being cited?
- Was the SEO industry too strict about keyword cannibalisation?
- How do I analyse access logs to prove AI search visibility?
- How do I tell a real ChatGPT crawler from a spoofed one?
- How do I prove SEO value to a C-suite when clicks are not attributable?

## Related episodes

- [Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era](https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/) — SEO is a subset of GEO: the fastest way to change what an AI says about you is to fix the product people are complaining about.
- [Dan Kurtz on Bots as a Customer Segment, Markdown, and the Agentic Flywheel](https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/) — Argues for the markdown companion: bots are another audience and the downside is bounded.
- [Malte Landwehr of Peec AI on Consensus, Query Fan-Outs and AI Content Guardrails](https://unscriptedseo.com/episode-recap-malte-landwehr-of-peec-ai-on-consensus-query-fan-outs-and-ai-content-guardrails/) — Argues against a separate markdown URL, and for serving markdown by user agent at the same URL.
- [Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit, and Losing Control of Your Own Brand Name](https://unscriptedseo.com/ann-smarty-llm-consensus-reddit-brand-control/) — LLM consensus and branded search: why the model finds the complaint before it recommends you.
- [Drew Dorenfest On Getting Verified By Crawlers](https://unscriptedseo.com/drew-dorenfest-on-getting-verified-by-crawlers/) — Citing your sources as the mechanism for being cited yourself.

## How to cite this episode

> Chris Green. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Chris Green: Do Google's Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?*, The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 2026-08-06. https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/

When quoting, name the speaker. Host and guest are both present in the excerpts above and their positions differ in places.

## What this file is not

This is a structured summary with verbatim excerpts, not the complete transcript. The full conversation is on the episode page linked above. Nothing here is paraphrased into a quotation: if it is in quote marks, it was said.

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The Unscripted SEO Podcast · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/