# Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era

> Machine-readable summary of one episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below carries its speaker.

| | |
|---|---|
| **Guest** | Patrick Stox, independent SEO consultant (formerly Ahrefs) |
| **Host** | Jeremy Rivera |
| **Show** | The Unscripted SEO Podcast |
| **Published** | 2026-06-26 |
| **Duration** | 44:07 |
| **Episode page** | https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/ |
| **Watch** | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlwa3d6hG-I |
| **Listen** | https://676ae6156fe309-82456168.castos.com/player/2506994 |
| **Transcript** | Full, cleaned, below. 6,600 words. |

## Abstract

Patrick Stox argues that SEO is a subset of GEO rather than a rebrand of it: the fastest route to changing what an AI system says about a company is to fix the product, the service and the reputation people are actually complaining about, because that is what the systems repeat. Around that he sets out an operational agenda — close the gap between being retrieved and being cited, replace generated content with genuine information gain harvested from in-house experts, and treat hands-on proof rather than polished prose as the defensible moat after the Helpful Content Update. He also warns that AI search systems have not yet made Google's decision to forgive past manipulation, and that today's scalable tactics carry unpriced future risk.

## Key claims

Each claim is attributed to a named speaker and backed by a verbatim quotation from the transcript. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse.

### 1. SEO is a subset of GEO, not a synonym for it

**Patrick Stox**, in *The Hot Take: SEO Is Part of GEO*:

> If you've got a problem with your product, the easiest way to get the LLM or the AI search system to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining on the internet, that's what it's gonna say. So it's business, it's branding, it's so much more.

Influencing AI answers is a product, brand and reputation problem before it is an on-page one. Stox draws a scale line: a local business can have an SEO work on sentiment; a large company cannot staff its way to changing the opinion of the internet.

### 2. AI search systems may not forgive the way Google eventually did

**Patrick Stox**, in *Do AI Search Systems Hold a Grudge?*:

> SEOs got lucky with Google. We got Penguin, and for a few years that was really painful — and then they're like, yeah, we forgive all your bad links. These AI search systems may make a different decision. How long will they hold a grudge against you?

Google chose to forgive link spam around 2016. That was a policy decision, not a technical inevitability, and Stox's point is that no one has made that decision on behalf of the AI systems yet. Tactics that work now carry unknown future liability.

### 3. Retrieved is not cited, and the gap is the opportunity

**Patrick Stox**, in *How Google Actually Works*:

> You get a bunch of pages, might be 90 pages retrieved, and then 13 of them get cited... Well, why were some retrieved but not cited? That's a really good question to look into. And it's usually like, you were relevant enough, but you didn't quite say the right thing, or in the right way.

The sharpest operational idea in the episode. Being in the retrieval set is table stakes; citation is a second, separate contest. Stox calls the gap “the low-hanging fruit of the AI era” because the page is already close enough to be pulled.

### 4. The frontier past AI content at scale is information gain

**Patrick Stox**, in *The Frontier Past AI Content at Scale*:

> Anyone can put out any number of pages. But if you're just using it for content — just the content — you're not providing resources, you're not sourcing where you got something. So anyone can do it, but it's a matter of: can you do it well?

His concrete alternative is to harvest expertise you already own: message five genuine experts inside your company via Slack, email or an AI-run interview, two or three times a week, and build content on what they say. He notes he sees almost nobody doing this.

### 5. Do not run a programmatic project without unique data

**Patrick Stox**, in *The Frontier Past AI Content at Scale*:

> Generally I wouldn't even recommend a programmatic project unless you've got something unique, different... Everyone's got reviews, but what if you did scoring? What if you did a market analysis? What's the sentiment? What is the brand search volume for each of these companies?

The differentiator is a derived metric no competitor has computed, not a larger pile of the same rows.

### 6. Hands-on proof is the HCU moat, and writing style is not

**Patrick Stox**, in *HCU, E-E-A-T, and Hands-On Expertise*:

> I don't think writing will get you but so far. Part of the thing they mentioned with that update was images — images and videos that show you've got hands-on with the product you're talking about... Not you pulled the stock photo offline from the manufacturer and then wrote a bunch of stuff.

His examples are competitors cutting running shoes in half to show the materials, and Cats.com sending pet food for laboratory testing. He also argues Google went too far, and that knowledgeable sites were caught unfairly.

### 7. Backlink correlation fell overall but held for local, and scarcity may raise its value

**Patrick Stox**, in *The State of Play in Backlinks*:

> The correlation with rankings went down overall compared to what we've seen traditionally. It was still high for certain things, like local companies... For the AI search systems, they probably are not using this directly, but a lot of them are pulling rankings from Google and Bing, who do still use them.

Links reach AI answers indirectly, through the ranking systems those answers borrow from. Stox adds the counter-intuitive turn: as the industry drifts away from links, rarity could make them a stronger differentiator, not a weaker one.

### 8. Google has more discovery inputs than sitemaps and crawling

**Patrick Stox**, in *How Google Actually Works*:

> Most people will tell you sitemaps, or crawling. Well, there's more. RSS feeds are a thing. Pinging the sites — the WebSub, PubSubHubbub, whatever... Submissions in GSC, the indexing API.

Useful when diagnosing discovery problems: the input set is wider than the two mechanisms most audits check.

### 9. Indie SEO tools can still win, but on niche and speed rather than data

**Patrick Stox**, in *The Two 800-Pound Gorillas and Indie SEO Tools*:

> I think there is plenty of space for more niche tools... They can focus and do things better than the big ones. They can move a little faster at times.

He is candid about the constraint from the other side: he cannot reproduce Ahrefs' crawl infrastructure, so anything he builds will run on smaller scale, weaker data, or uploads and integrations with the tools people already pay for.

## Entities mentioned

| Entity | What it is | Links |
|---|---|---|
| **Patrick Stox** | Independent SEO consultant. Six and a half years at Ahrefs (Product Advisor / product seat), four years at IBM, agency and in-house before that. Started as a developer. Co-runs Tech SEO Connect. | https://patrickstox.com/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickstox/ |
| **Jeremy Rivera** | Host, Unscripted SEO Podcast. | https://unscriptedseo.com/ |
| **Ahrefs** | SEO toolset. Stox worked on Page Inspect, site structure, Site Audit, the v2 to v3 infrastructure change, and Yep.com. Internal motto quoted: “first do it, then do it right, then do it better.” | https://ahrefs.com/ |
| **Tech SEO Connect** | Technical SEO conference co-run by Stox. Third year, Durham, North Carolina. | https://techseoconnect.com/ |
| **Firehose** | Web-history and page-monitoring tool; described as a combination of Visualping and Archive.org. | https://firehose.com/ |
| **Helpful Content Update (HCU)** | The Google update discussed at length, including the added “Experience” in E-E-A-T and sites Stox believes were caught unfairly. |  |
| **HouseFresh** | Cited as a well-known site hit by HCU that Stox says has since recovered significantly. |  |
| **Cats.com** | Cited as the standard for hands-on expertise: sends pet food for laboratory testing. |  |
| **SEO Community (Slack)** | Run by Noah Learner; named as the main SEO Slack community now. |  |
| **Tools Stox uses** | Claude and Gemini day to day; Nano Banana for images; Claude Code for building websites; Cowork for file access. Previously ChatGPT. |  |

## Questions this episode answers

- Is GEO just SEO with a new name, or is it a broader discipline?
- Why do some pages get retrieved by an AI search system but never cited?
- Will AI search systems forgive spam the way Google forgave link spam after Penguin?
- What comes after publishing AI-generated content at scale?
- How do you generate genuine information gain instead of rewriting what already ranks?
- When is a programmatic SEO project actually justified?
- Do backlinks still matter for AI search and for local SEO?
- What did the Helpful Content Update actually reward, and who got caught unfairly?
- How does Google discover content beyond sitemaps and crawling?
- Can an independent SEO tool compete with Ahrefs and SEMrush?
- Should an SEO build a career in-house, at an agency, or freelance?
- Which AI tools does Patrick Stox actually use?

## Related episodes

- [Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit, and Losing Control of Your Own Brand Name](https://unscriptedseo.com/ann-smarty-llm-consensus-reddit-brand-control/) — The same argument from the other end. Stox says fix the product because AI repeats complaints; Smarty shows how LLMs run branded search first and surface exactly those complaints.
- [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/) — Landwehr's consensus and fan-out mechanics are the machinery behind Stox's “retrieved but not cited” gap.
- [Chris Green: Do Google's Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?](https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/) — Picks up the PageRank-inside-LLMs thread that Rivera and Stox open in this episode.
- [Drew Dorenfest On Getting Verified By Crawlers](https://unscriptedseo.com/drew-dorenfest-on-getting-verified-by-crawlers/) — The discovery and access side of the same problem.
- [Jon Henshaw on AI Hype, Google's Sources of Truth, and the Long Game](https://unscriptedseo.com/jon-henshaw-ai-hype-google-sources-of-truth/) — More on where these systems believe information comes from.

## How to cite this episode

> Stox, Patrick. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era*, The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 26 June 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/

When quoting, name the speaker. The host and the guest are both present in the transcript below and their positions differ in places.

## Full transcript

Speaker labels are on every turn. Section headings match the locators used in the claims above. No timestamps are given because the source transcript does not carry them.

### Introduction

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host, and I'm here with the legendary Patrick Stox, who I've known for quite a while now. I think most people in SEO should be familiar with him. If not, lift up the rock, guys — it's kind of nice out in the sunshine. He's been with Ahrefs for a while, but now he's striking out on his own, and I'll add links to his stuff at the end. If anybody's looking for a great consultant, you would be a fool to pass up the opportunity to pick up Patrick. While I assume people know you, let's go back in time and talk a little bit about your past. Tell us where you've been and where you've gathered your expertise in SEO.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, most recently was about six and a half years at Ahrefs. I was at IBM for like four years before that. I was at an agency for a little while. I'm back to being a solo consultant, but I did that for a few years before, too. I was in-house at a mid-size B2B company. And long, long, long time ago I was actually a developer.

### Building the Tools at Ahrefs

**Jeremy Rivera:**
I know that you have those developer chops, because I think at Ahrefs your official position was in the product manager seat — is that correct? And you built some stuff. Tell us some of the stuff you built.

**Patrick Stox:**
Man, I was looking at this the other day — the product line, and so much of the new stuff was my tools, my ideas, my roadmaps. But even when I joined, we were in the process of an infrastructure changeover. So if you remember when version two became version three, I had a lot of influence on that — getting all the history and that kind of stuff accessible. And yeah, lots of charts, lots of reports. Page Inspect, site structure, obviously a huge impact on Site Audit. I should do one of those — do you know the guy, what was it, Atlassian? He did that breakdown of all the stuff he worked on. I should make a video like that for Ahrefs. But it might come off as too bragging or something. I don't know, might go off poorly. But a lot of things there.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Is there a tool that you dreamed up that you didn't get a chance to build?

**Patrick Stox:**
Oh yeah, many. They still have a giant backlog over there of things. I would say even ones that just never kind of worked out the way they should have. Page Inspect — I always wanted the visualization, so we did a lot of rendering and stuff, and basically the legal team was like, you can't show that, we're storing the content. That's not great. Some of that kind of made its way into Firehose, if you've checked out firehose.com — having the web history, being able to monitor anything on any page. That was supposed to be a combination of like Visualping and Archive.org, basically.

### The Two 800-Pound Gorillas and Indie SEO Tools

**Jeremy Rivera:**
From an SEO tools perspective, being part of Ahrefs, you've really gained that 800-pound gorilla reputation in the industry. Do you think that's helpful or hurtful to the SEO industry overall? Because you have a hundred-dollar price point between you and SEMrush, and anybody looking to develop an indie SEO tool immediately gets compared to — well, I could just go to Ahrefs. Is this really unique? Should I just use Ahrefs, or does what you do in a separate indie SEO SaaS actually offer something unique and different? So, introspective question: being one of the two 800-pound gorillas, is that really good for the industry, or does it propose some challenges?

**Patrick Stox:**
Both. I don't know. It's good to have a tool you can trust and rely on. And at the same time, I think there is plenty of space for more niche tools. There's been a lot that just came out and carved their own space — like Keyword Insights and tons of content tools and that kind of stuff. They can focus and do things better than the big ones. They can move a little faster at times. At least I hope there's space, 'cause I plan on building some things.

### Vibe Coding and Building SaaS

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Speaking of that space — what's it like sharing some of it with a tool that's also going to be helping a lot of people fill that space? We've got AI capabilities, and part of the dream that they sell is, hey, you can vibe-code your own stuff. But then that means we have more SaaS-capable people who just have this weird idea and can get it to market faster. And then you also have that side play where those people have the budget, they can vibe-code their own stuff. What does that interplay look like?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, I mean you can, but will the data be as good? There are other data sources that are very much not as good as Ahrefs, for instance. So quality is going to matter. People who've built their own tools know, too — there can be upkeep and all kinds of issues that you've got to resolve. And realistically, if you're one person and you're suddenly responsible for 10, 15 tools, and that's only part of your job — are you gonna build as good of a tool as someone who has entire product teams? Good question. I don't know that that will ever really work out that well. Some people will build very niche things and get a lot of use out of that. Even Ahrefs — they built Agent A, and that actually was really cool internally. I was a fan, because it was so hard for the product to mix data sets. In the dashboard, things have to be there in two seconds or people are pissed — the responses had to just be there instantly. Now, with AI and mixed data sets, you can wait a few minutes to build stuff, or have it build new databases that store the stuff and then present it faster for you. I think it's a really cool time to be building stuff.

### Beta Culture and the MVP Mindset

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Do you think that, as a potential SaaS developer, the broader acceptance of beta-test culture really helps meter those expectations — when the big boys break their stuff consistently, it kind of makes it possible for you to succeed as a SaaS with a little less polish?

**Patrick Stox:**
I mean, even Ahrefs — the motto was, first do it, then do it right, then do it better. So Ahrefs broke stuff, but usually even version ones were almost embarrassing to put out. I don't mean to sound that way — I love the tool, love the product, love the company, the people, everything. But it's very much an MVP. And then we do a big announcement, people try it and they're like, that sucks. If they come back three, six months later, it's awesome. So there's a lot of that that I think people don't realize goes on. But yeah — smaller companies, you're gonna break stuff too, and hopefully your customers forgive you and stick with you. It's just the reality of things. When you're trying to do a lot, or dealing with giant data — and at Ahrefs the infrastructure alone was absolutely insane. No question I could never copy something like that. Nowhere even close. And that means I'll never get their data from crawling and that kind of stuff. So when I go do stuff, it's gonna have to be a smaller scale, potentially a little worse data, or I have to do integrations — allow uploads of stuff — because people are probably already gonna have an Ahrefs or SEMrush, they're gonna have a Screaming Frog, other tools they're not gonna go away from. They might use some of the things I built for other things, but they're gonna have their core tools still.

### Tech SEO Connect

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Tell me about Tech SEO Connect.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, that's our tech SEO conference. We're now in the third year. It's gonna be November fifth and sixth, I want to say, in Durham, North Carolina. And it's awesome. We keep changing the venue — we make it hard on ourselves every year. We bring different stuff. It's great content, great people, lots of time for networking. We try to have amazing food, drinks, and just some fun stuff. We had a couple themes last year of de-stressing — and then everyone on stage is talking about AI and automating everything. We had some real content creators in the space. We had this guy Chris, he's the Poetry Fox, he's like the poet laureate in Durham. He dresses in a giant fox costume, you give him a word, he bangs out a custom poem on the typewriter. Love every second of it.

**Patrick Stox:**
And we had stuff like puppies, just to help manage stress, 'cause everyone — with AI especially — it's causing a lot of burnout. It feels like it should be taking stuff off your plate, but it's change, and then more to learn and more to do and more ideas, and people are stressed.

### The Frontier Past AI Content at Scale

**Jeremy Rivera:**
One of my last guests — I think it was Paul Pape — said LLMs and creating content at scale are now table stakes for small businesses across the industry. What then, if that's the baseline entry point, is the frontier?

**Patrick Stox:**
To actually make that content better. Anyone can put out any number of pages. I'm literally rebuilding my personal website, and there's a whole tech SEO hub — I don't know what it's up to, 160-some pages or something right now — and it's all AI-generated. Now, will it stay that way? The answer is no. I actually will go through it — I'm hoping I'll get some friends to go through, add comments, tell me where I got stuff wrong. I have a feature where I'm gonna have users be able to report something's inaccurate. But I use stuff like summaries and checklists, stuff that's actually useful. And I don't see enough of that. Yeah, you can generate a bunch of stuff now, but if you're just using it for content — just the content, that's it — you're not doing a summary, you're not providing resources, links. Because these things go out, they do the research, they create briefs — well, then if you're not sourcing where you got something, what's the point? So anyone can do it, but it's a matter of: can you do it well? Now we've got systems where you could have messages on Slack, emails, or text messages — or have AI call people who are experts on every one of these topics — and just do it once, twice, three times a week, whatever your content needs are. Message five people in your company who are actual experts, who know these things, who are in your industry, and have them answer some questions, get some insights, get some stories, real experience. And I don't see people really doing that. They're expecting this generated content to just work. And the reality is — you've probably seen the 'mount AI' stuff, it goes up, it goes down. If you're not doing something different, something better, if you're not adding value, that's absolutely gonna happen, especially with informational content.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What are some of the methods you're turning to in your consultation to generate that unique information gain? What workflows or processes are you recommending — instead of having somebody sit down and just put in prompts, is there some alternate process you're embracing or encouraging?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah — again, I talked about reaching out to the experts. But also leveraging any unique data that you have. Generally I wouldn't even recommend a programmatic project unless you've got something unique, different. If you're a directory — well, you've got reviews, or whatever. Everyone's got reviews, but what if you did scoring? What if you did a market analysis? There's so much opportunity for every one of these types of projects to do something different. What's the sentiment? What is the brand search volume for each of these companies? That would give you an idea of where they are in the market for the position. Why is no one doing that?

### The Hot Take: SEO Is Part of GEO

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What would you say is your hot take in the SEO industry right now? What's the most controversial thing you'd put out there about SEO?

**Patrick Stox:**
That I think SEO is part of GEO. I know people are saying it's the same, but really, if you're going to influence these systems, it's more than SEO. SEOs can only do so much. If you've got a problem with your product — you know the easiest way to get the LLM or the AI search system to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining on the internet, that's what it's gonna say. So it's business, it's branding, it's so much more. You actually have to be a better company, build a better product, improve your services. Because the things people are constantly complaining about, SEO can't cover that up at a certain scale. If you're a mom-and-pop local business, maybe an SEO can work on that. But big companies — they don't have enough SEOs on their payroll to go change the opinion of the internet.

### Do AI Search Systems Hold a Grudge?

**Jeremy Rivera:**
That's a good point, 'cause I was following a thread this morning about LLM tools seeming to hold a grudge. Like, if you got a negative review and it picked it up, it seemed to echo a lot longer than any good one. But they dug into it more and realized it's because that same problem occurred again in another one of your reviews. So the sentiment was there because the sentiment's there. And it's stepping away from that golden age of SEO — 2010 to 2020 — where Google was monopolistic, SEO was ascendant, and you didn't have to do anything other than open Ahrefs or SEMrush, crank out some articles, find some backlinks, fix some tech SEO problems, and you're square. You didn't have to worry about rogue LLM models ingesting comments from Reddit and surfacing them. We're entering a much more competitive era. You have genuine entries from Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and their models operate differently functionally. There are things you can do now specifically for Claude or specifically for GPT that don't seem to move the needle on the other models, and also have their own separate impact on SEO. So it's a bit of a wild, wild west and a bit of a scrum — but I'm actually kinda grateful. Are you?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah. They're gonna go through the same learning curve that Google did. A lot of the stuff that works too well now, they're gonna have to dial back. I think we already saw that with listicles and stuff — which about a year and a half ago I was saying is the first thing they're gonna kill off. So maybe anything the SEOs scale and start kind of spamming, they're gonna dial back. It might work now, it might hurt you in the future. It might hurt you for a long time, if you really abuse these systems. I think SEOs got lucky with Google. We got Penguin and stuff, and for a few years that was really painful — and then, what was it, 2016-ish, they're just like, yeah, we forgive all your bad links, no worries. They could have held that over us for another ten, fifteen years, easy. And these AI search systems — they may make a different decision. Some of the stuff I'm seeing companies do now, I'm like, that's obviously a bad decision. And the question is, how long will that hurt you? How long will they hold a grudge against you? So I think you've got to be a little careful on that kind of stuff too.

### The Hallway Track

**Jeremy Rivera:**
I've always found at conferences the best SEO wisdom doesn't happen on the stage — no offense — it's in the conversations at the bar. It's in the hallway afterward, where you find that weird anecdote from the guy sitting around with a snack and you just start chatting. In the hallways of your last Tech SEO Connect, what's something surprising — an anecdote, a story, a project — that you were genuinely struck by?

**Patrick Stox:**
You know, I don't want to share. I'm not gonna answer that — I don't want to share any detail. I got one piece of advice and I'm like, no, because it might identify a person or company, so I'm not gonna answer. I will say there's tons of time for networking, though. We usually — I think at one point we had tabs open at three different places. So there's a lot of bar talk. We have great food, it's a great time. Come out.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Fair enough. Keep your secrets — and if you want them, go to the conference. Actually, that's good advice in general if you're trying to grow in the SEO space as a career: conferences are fantastic.

### SEO as a Career: Which Path?

**Jeremy Rivera:**
That does make me ask — let's change topic a little. Let's talk about SEO as a career. You've been in-house as a product manager, been at an agency, done freelance, worked in-house on SEO. It kind of mirrors my own — I worked with Raven as a product manager, in-house, freelance. Which one do you like the most? And what would you recommend right now if somebody's, quote-unquote, considering getting into SEO — which direction would you push them?

**Patrick Stox:**
Everything is different. I loved my time at Ahrefs, honestly — great company, great people, great product. Agency can lead to burnout: it's a lot of hustle and deadlines and a lot of stuff going on. In-house is fun, but corporate and politics can be draining, and tons of meetings can be exhausting. Consulting has its own headaches too — I like the freedom, but then there's contracts and business stuff and cash flow and all that. If I had to pick one, I really enjoyed Ahrefs, but in-house I think is usually better than agency. I think I will enjoy the freedom of freelance again. So it's really hard to just pick one. But it's really hard to go freelance if you're not well known, if you don't have leads, that kind of thing. So you kind of have to build up. And that brings me to the other question: what should you do? Honestly, if you're trying to grow your career, just be active in the community. Go to conferences, talk with people, go to local meetups if they exist in your area — they're kind of rare now. But yeah, go right. For years I was just kind of quiet, doing my own thing. I learned a lot once I started participating in the community — started writing, started sharing, started speaking. I think that all made me a better SEO and led me into the position where I am. And it's a good position to be in.

### Where the SEO Community Lives Now

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Anywhere online? SEO had a super strong hub on Twitter, and then there's a diaspora spreading out. So where are some of the different SEO communities where you've ended up and found not just the spam, not just the self-promo, but the actual back-and-forth and useful conversations?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, there are still Slack groups. Noah Learner runs the SEO Community — that's the big one right now. I still enjoy Reddit — I'm on r/TechSEO, so hopefully there's not too much spam and nonsense there. Some of the others can be a little messy, but still entertaining. Everything split after Twitter went away. There's still a good community, I think, on LinkedIn, of course. Still some on Twitter, some on Bluesky and Threads — I don't know, I never actually joined either of those, but I know some people over there. Mastodon was a thing for a hot minute, but I feel like that's sort of dead. I could be wrong. Yeah, it's fractured right now.

### Mandatory Moves for the Year Ahead

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What do you think is the best practice for SEOs coming into the next year? What are some mandatory things that, if you're in the SEO niche, you've gotta be doing now?

**Patrick Stox:**
I would say experimenting with AI. Just try and automate any task that you're repeating. I've been doing this kind of stuff for years because I have the development background. It was like ten years ago, probably, I wrote a redirect-matching script because I was tired of, hey, this page should go over here — and like hours and hours, or days and days sometimes. I was doing a lot of website migrations, and I was like, come on, there's gotta be a better way. I looked into the machine learning stuff, and it's like, I can actually match content on this page with content on this page. And I'm like, that's fantastic. So anything that's taking too much of your time that you're having to do repeatedly — go try and build a skill, try and improve it. Get it to where it's good enough that you're like, I can trust that, or at least 95% of the way there, which takes a lot of the burden off you. And go build stuff. Everyone's got ideas for tools. I have a friend I was talking with over a beer the other day, and I was like, man, you gotta go try and build a site — use Astro, host it on Cloudflare Workers, etc. He's like, my wife has had this idea — and it was a history of the restaurant grades, basically, because they're big foodies. So, here's their sanitation scores over time. And he built it in like twenty-five minutes, and he was like, wow, this is a huge unlock. He had never tried to do it. He thought it's gonna be so hard, it's gonna be too difficult, he's not gonna be able to do it. But really — it sounds like such BS, but anyone can build anything at this point. That is a real thing. You have an idea and you're like, I don't know how to do this. I was doing some stuff on my own website, and I was like, yeah, this is way beyond me for infrastructure and dev stuff. And it's like, well, can you just run me through this — yeah, go here, change this, run this. And I'm like, okay, it works. Or if it doesn't work, it's like, okay, what went wrong, what do I need to actually do? And it'll run you through it. It's amazing.

### Which AI Tools Patrick Actually Uses

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Claude Code, Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Grok — different tools, different functions. Which do you like, which have you used, and anything special you've unlocked?

**Patrick Stox:**
I've tried all of them. I go between Claude and Gemini right now. For a while it was all ChatGPT. They kind of surpass each other in certain things in the market. I end up using Gemini and Nano Banana specifically for images, because Claude doesn't really do image generation — but also for a lot of general informational knowledge stuff. But mostly, if I'm coding websites, Claude Code for sure. I use Cowork actually a lot now, for the file access and everything. And just the regular chat also.

### The Worst AI Mistake

**Jeremy Rivera:**
I'm curious — what's the worst mistake you've made using AI? Something where you're like, that was bad? Or in retrospect could have been really bad, or you blew something up?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, all of the above. I've broken stuff so many times and I'm like, hey, how do I fix this, can you debug this? But one was just when I was first learning the limits — I was using the API and I didn't know about the caching or anything, and yeah, I ended up spending way more than I should have to do some things.

### The State of Play in Backlinks

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What's the state of play in backlinks these days — as important as ever, more important, or just a sidecar to best practice?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, well, I looked at this about a year ago with Ahrefs' data — maybe a little more, could be a year and a half. The correlation with rankings went down overall compared to what we've seen traditionally. It was still high for certain things, like local companies, and I forget what else at this point — but for local SEO they still mattered. I think it was more than we'd seen in the past. For the AI search systems, they probably are not using this directly, but a lot of them are pulling rankings from Google and Bing, who do still use them. So I'm gonna say they're not using them — they're using them in a roundabout way. But I wouldn't be surprised — the general trend I see is people kind of going away from links. And that means it's probably gonna be more of a differentiator in the future, as these systems start looking to say what is a good result. Now they could look at the links and say, now that they're more rare, the links actually matter more. So I'll — go ahead.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
No, I absolutely agree. As it gets less of that shiny-object syndrome, as fewer outfits can make their money, that ironically will flip it over to those still doing a good job on it. Not only are they gonna get the traditional good Google results, but any of these LLM models could already be modeling some sort of PageRank algorithm — that patent's been out for so long. And anybody who's worked on LLM systems knows there are 25 different APIs available that give PageRank-type information. With the amount of crawl these LLM tools are dedicating to discovering stuff — you guys at Ahrefs built your own index, your own Google. So it's not out of the range of possibility for any of them to integrate PageRank directly, explicitly, into LLMs. It seems crazy to say — Gemini's sitting right there within Google. It's not that crazy to think that some of the flags, the scoring, if they can integrate it into the ranking systems of Google results — it's not much of a leap to say the Gemini team is gonna have access to that same data.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, and any of the re-ranker models, or when you're choosing the citations — it's an easy data point to add. And even if it's not a Google or Bing, these other systems probably already have some access to the data. Again, they may be building their own, but it's pretty common knowledge that a lot of them are pulling from Common Crawl and they have their own version. The metrics are already there for the pages in the index.

### How Google Actually Works

**Jeremy Rivera:**
One of the biggest things I always learned listening to your stuff, reading your articles, listening to you speak, is your depth of understanding of the actual architecture of Google itself. Could you break out a little of what you find is useful to know about Google's infrastructure and system, because that can help better inform your SEO decisions?

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, so I actually have a whole deck — a 'How Search Works' deck. I think it's on the Ahrefs SlideShare. That was built after an internal training, when we were building Yep.com — I was trying to explain, this is what we know about Google's systems and how they work. That's all public knowledge. There's a lot of really interesting stuff. The web rendering system alone is a complicated thing. But what are the data sources for these systems? Most people will tell you sitemaps, or crawling. Well, there's more. RSS feeds are a thing. Pinging the sites — the WebSub, PubSubHubbub, whatever, I think it's just WebSub now. There are a lot of different sources or ways of getting this information. It's not that they're just gonna look at one or two things. Submissions in GSC, the indexing API — well, supposedly for a couple types of content at least. Any given system you think about, there's a lot of nuance: when are they storing stuff, what are they storing at each level. All that can have really interesting implications. The whole re-ranking system, how all that works, is kind of fascinating. A lot of that is just: okay, so you get retrieved, but maybe you don't actually end up ranking that well. And we see the same thing in the AI search systems — you get a bunch of pages, might be 90 pages retrieved, and then 13 of them get cited, or 30 of them get cited. Well, why were some retrieved but not cited? That's a really good question to look into. And it's usually like, you were relevant enough, but you didn't quite say the right thing, or in the right way. It didn't measure quite as well against the result, so someone else got cited. Even though you're there, you're in the ballpark — and that's kind of the low-hanging fruit of the AI era: you're there, but you're not quite in that result set.

### HCU, E-E-A-T, and Hands-On Expertise

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What do you think really is the role of the HCU within Google?

**Patrick Stox:**
I mean, it's supposed to be helpful content, useful content. They added the extra E in E-E-A-T — the experience — because a lot of people, SEOs in particular, were making a bunch of content about things they don't really know about, that they're not really the experts on. They're regurgitating what's out there, maybe making a slightly better page than what's out there because you combine information from different pages. But if you're not the real expert, if you're not the one with those insights, if you're not the one doing the tests — I love just the nerdiest guys and gals in different niches who are doing random tests on stuff. The Project Farms, the vacuum wars. There's a guy I watch for car detailing, and literally all he does — it's not even fully detailing, it's literally the pressure washers — and he's like, no, the flow on this is bad, replace this part with this, do this. He's so hardcore about it. You can tell this guy really knows what he's talking about. And that's the kind of folks they want to elevate. HCU hit a lot of sites, especially affiliates. It didn't hit all of them. I always appreciate — I have a cat, my wife is super into cats — Cats.com. They send off the food for lab testing to make sure of the safety, the nutrition profile, what's in there that shouldn't be, or whether it has what it's supposed to have. That's the level you have to be at if you really want to succeed with this.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
So is that an integration of writing style — showing off your expertise, taking the time to include anecdotes? Because if you need a bullet point, quite frankly, you can just turn to Claude. Claude's great at bullet points, terrible at anecdotes — and it certainly has no unique anecdotes, it can't have its own experiences. So does that come down to just writing style, or is it also that other pain point SEOs experience now, which is brand? You have to establish this brand entity. So is it those two — the addition of those two signals?

**Patrick Stox:**
I don't think writing will get you but so far. Part of the thing they mentioned with that update was images — images and videos that show you've got hands-on with the product you're talking about, that you've got actual knowledge of it. Not you pulled the stock photo offline from the manufacturer and then wrote a bunch of stuff. That's the level that's going to get hit, that's not gonna cut it. And I think some sites that actually were doing a good job got caught up in this. There was one — I think Sam O had done a video on it — of this running-shoe guy. The guy knew what he was talking about, super knowledgeable, I thought his content was great. But his competitors were cutting the shoe in half and stuff to see the materials it was made out of. How do you compete with something like that? This guy obviously went to the gym and everything, knew exactly what he was talking about, had real hands-on expertise, should not have been hit, I don't think. But compared to his competitors, he was still, I think, a level below where they were.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Hard to hear that — you wanna rank better, but quite frankly the other guys are better.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah. And again, he, I think, is one that unfairly got caught up. There were a bunch of those. You saw some very public ones — HouseFresh. I think I just saw something that they're back up with a massive increase. And Google, I think, went too far on a lot of the things. Hopefully they rein it back in even more, because there are a lot of deserving sites. Even someone — in my personal opinion — even someone who just aggregates the info better and makes a better website, better layout, that is still a result I want. So I think their systems went a little too far.

### Closing: The Real Itch, and How to Connect

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Is there any question I didn't ask that you would hope I would have asked?

**Patrick Stox:**
Honestly, I didn't know what you were gonna ask me. It's unscripted. I love it.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
What's an itch you're trying to scratch in the middle of your own back — if you could outsource a question or a challenge you're trying to solve? What are you spending time trying to solve right now in SEO? I'll ask the next guest and see if they want to take a poke at it.

**Patrick Stox:**
I mean, my problem isn't really SEO right now. It's getting used to the business stuff and contracts and all that again. It's just time-consuming. All that stuff is kind of annoying to set up.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
That's fair enough. I've done a couple of really good interviews, I'll add them to the show notes — but maybe do a roundtable and gather together some different people to talk about just the business infrastructure if you're becoming an SEO consultant. What are the best practices? Should you aim for a monthly retainer? Should you ask for all of it up front? Do you peg your retainer to an estimate of hours per month, or is it outcome-based? Is there particular software you use to align on that? Is there terminology to add or avoid when you're getting that contract signed? What's the best process for walking your client through those expectations, and what does expectation-setting look like in SEO? So I think I'll gather some cowboys.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah — what do you write in the contract? How do you handle the sales, the leads? Get rid of tire-kickers. It's been a process.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
I feel you. I definitely do, as a long-term freelance contractor on and off over the years. I've definitely made some huge mistakes. The biggest one is letting clients pay later — you've got to at least get half up front, if not all of it up front. That was a painful lesson. But there are some others. I think I'll take this as a hint and put together a panel where we talk about the mechanics of SEO consulting and best practices and put it all in one place.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah, that's awesome. I'll watch that episode.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
If people are interested in accessing your expertise, hiring you to build something for them, build their brand, build their company — how can they connect with you and get started?

**Patrick Stox:**
Right now I would say message me on LinkedIn — it's probably the easiest way. Otherwise, patrickstox.com is a work in progress, and you'll be able to contact me there soon.

**Jeremy Rivera:**
Well, I appreciate you stopping by.

**Patrick Stox:**
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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The Unscripted SEO Podcast · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/