In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Robert Spinrad, Associate SEO Director at SEO Interactive — a full-service agency outside Philadelphia specializing in home services, legal, and SMB clients. Robert has been in the industry since around 2015 and leads a team of roughly 40 people who work on local SEO, digital PR, and client strategy.
The conversation covers how the AI conversation inside agencies has evolved, why LLM traffic numbers need context before you draw conclusions, what business owners should actually be focusing on over the next couple of years, and why the human experience behind an agency’s work is the moat that no LLM can replicate.
The Shift: From Learning About AI to Earning AI Trust
Four or five months before recording, Robert noticed the internal agency conversation flip. It stopped being “what is AI and how does it work” and started being “how do we earn AI trust for our clients.” His framing: stop thinking about optimizing for LLM platforms tactically, and start thinking about improving your site in ways that make those systems trust you enough to surface you in their results.
His blanket statement: good SEO results in good AI visibility. He acknowledges there’s a lot underneath that worth unpacking — but the core idea holds. The fundamentals that earn Google’s trust earn LLM trust too.
The Fear of Going Backwards
Robert entered the industry just as SEO was finally shaking off its spammy reputation — the post-Panda era, when quality content started to matter more than keyword stuffing and link schemes. His concern now: AI-generated content spam could reverse that progress.
Platforms hallucinate. They produce junk at scale. And people are already using them to blast out content for quick short-term boosts — the same pattern that made SEO look bad for a decade before Google cleaned it up. He sees a bumpy period ahead before the industry separates the operators doing real work from the trend-chasers riding the wave.
LLM Traffic Numbers in Context
Jeremy brought up a stat from a previous guest — 20–30k monthly visitors from LLMs on a large brand site. Impressive until you compare it to 200k from Google organic. Robert’s response: “There’s the but, right.”
The point isn’t that LLM traffic doesn’t matter. It’s that agencies and clients being wowed by LLM numbers need the denominator before they draw conclusions. A channel driving 15% of organic volume isn’t a replacement — it’s an additive signal worth tracking. Context changes the story entirely.
Transparency as a Competitive Advantage
SEO Interactive’s approach to client conversations about AI is full transparency: yes, they use ChatGPT, Claude, and other tools. And they tell clients explicitly that everyone — including their own team — is still learning. They warn clients against taking SEO advice directly from AI. Their positioning: stay curious, ask questions, educate yourself, but trust the humans who have years of actual client results that no LLM was trained on.
Robert’s self-description for his team: humble experts. They know what they know, they know what they don’t, and they’re transparent about both.
Why LLMs Can Cite Experience but Never Have It
Jeremy referenced a quote from a previous guest — LLMs can reference experiences, but they didn’t live them. Robert extended it: every client his agency works with is a real family or small business. His team knows their seasonality, their market, their specific pain points. An LLM doesn’t have that context and probably never will.
That irreplaceable situational knowledge — the kind built through years of working with actual clients in real categories — is the real moat for agency work. The best practitioners don’t publish their competitive insights anyway. LLMs trained on public content are, by definition, missing the most valuable expertise in the industry.
Reporting: Revenue First, Everything Else Second
SEO Interactive used to load their monthly reports with data. Robert’s team learned that business owners either don’t read the detail or don’t understand what it means. Now their reports lead with leads, revenue, and conversions — whatever the client’s actual goal is — and everything else gets discussed live on a call where context can be provided in plain language.
Their agency website headline since day one: “It’s not about clicks, it’s about results.” The reporting philosophy follows from that.
What Business Owners Should Focus On Right Now
Robert’s two-part answer for the next couple of years:
- Show off your expertise authentically. Helpful content that isn’t locked behind a paywall. Listings on the right industry-specific directories — BBB, Avvo for legal, industry aggregators relevant to your category. Signals that tell both Google and LLMs that a real expert operates here.
- Reviews across platforms, not just Google. When you search for a local business in ChatGPT or Gemini and check the citations, you see Yelp, BBB, Facebook, and industry-specific sites alongside Google. A multi-platform review strategy is more important than it was when Google was the only platform that mattered.
Digital PR and the Quality Link Problem
For home service clients, Robert notes that getting links is relatively easy — but they’re usually low-quality (directories, aggregators). The harder, higher-value work is getting the right mentions: a quote from the actual business owner in an editorial context, never an AI-generated response. SEO Interactive has an internal PR team actively seeking these placements. It’s harder to scale, but the signal quality is worth the effort.
Community Involvement as a Link Strategy
Robert’s team had an internal discussion the week of recording about leveraging community involvement for SEO. Jeremy’s real-world example: a construction company doing a park cleanup in Cookeville generated a City Hall link, community event page links, and other natural placements. Robert’s framing: some clients feel uncomfortable thinking of charitable activity as a visibility play, but the signals are real and the activity looks authentic to potential customers who see it. Don’t brag — but do promote it.
Key Quotes
“We’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know what we don’t know, and that’s OK. We’ll keep learning.”
— Robert Spinrad
“It’s not about clicks, it’s about results. Clicks are great, numbers are great, but when it comes down to it, what people care about is how much money am I making?”
— Robert Spinrad
“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
About Robert Spinrad
Robert Spinrad is Associate SEO Director at SEO Interactive, a full-service digital marketing agency based outside Philadelphia. The agency has been in business since 2008 and specializes in home services, legal, and SMB clients across local SEO, digital PR, and content strategy.
