Three people building SEO software right now sat down for the first panel episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, and none of them are at the same stage. Patrick Stox spent years at Ahrefs and IBM and is now independent, with about a hundred and four free tools sitting on his own domain. Ben Wills has been in SEO since August 2001, disappeared into engineering for the better part of a decade, and is bringing all of it back into OppAlerts. Ben Senescu started OpenSEO in February after posting in r/TechSEO to ask whether anybody wanted an open source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs.
Nothing was pre-discussed. Below are the five questions that mattered most. Each one opens with a short answer, then what each panelist said in their own words, then the context around it.
What is different about building a SaaS now?
Asked by Jeremy to all three panelists
“I couldn’t build most of this stuff in the past. And now with AI, I can. Simple as that.”
“The LLMs had gone off and made database decisions that I didn’t agree with, that I actually told them not to, but they still did it.”
“What is the small next thing we should do?”
Patrick opened with the shortest answer of the episode, and every other problem on the panel is downstream of it. If you could not code before, you can build now.
Ben Senescu runs OpenSEO as a team of one, so he builds the product, answers support and does the marketing, and he does not think any of that was possible six months earlier. Because OpenSEO is open source, people send him pull requests for features that mostly work. The temptation is to merge everything and announce that the tool does everything. His answer is to hold the vision of what people actually want and ask what the small next thing is.
Ben Wills writes C for a living and calls himself weak on the front end. The AI fills the gaps he does not want to fill, and it also creates work that did not exist before. His summary of the job now: corral the output, double-check it, and hope you get there before you have painted yourself into a corner.
How do you hold the line on focus when every door is open?
Asked by Jeremy, after his story about Raven Tools growing from reporting into everything
“Being able to say no and understanding why you’re saying no”
“I would say the lesson is do what you want.”
Ben Wills is one step behind Senescu and said so out loud, which is the part of a panel you cannot script. He has built more than a hundred different ways to find opportunities inside his databases and is in the middle of cutting that down. He is looking forward to the stage where customer feedback tells you which no was the right no.
Patrick came at it from the other end, with a strong development team behind him, and the answer was still no. His point was that if Ahrefs had built what customers asked for, it would still be a low-cost link tool like Majestic. Features launched there that were cool and fun, did not get enough usage to justify their own maintenance, and got killed off. The test was never “is this good.” It was whether it would be used enough, whether it justified its existence, and whether there were resources to put behind it — at a company competing with rivals ten times its head count.
How does a new tool get recommended by ChatGPT and Claude?
Asked by Ben Senescu to the other two panelists
“You’re the only open source one.”
“I would find all the ones for open source and marketing tools. I would get on all of those.”
“One of the great things about open source is it inherently has distribution.”
The strongest stretch of the panel came when Ben Senescu stopped answering and started asking. He wants OpenSEO recommended when somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which SEO tool a beginner should use.
Patrick separated two things most people run together. Getting into the training data as a known entity takes a while. Until then, the pages the AI retrieves are where you need to be found. Look at the lists of popular SEO tools that already rank, and make sure they carry a call-out that says you are the open source option. Everybody knows Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking, and models keep repeating those names. Being the only open source one gives a model something new to add to the answer.
Ben Wills added the tactic. Find the awesome lists on GitHub for open source and marketing tools, then the publishers writing about free or small business marketing tools. Ask to be added to a list that already exists, or offer to write the piece that puts you alongside the other open source options. Being free opens doors that stay shut when you charge. Senescu already sees this: a week after launch, people on Reddit told him they had spent two or three weeks building the same thing and would rather use his.
Patrick closed the loop on lead gen. AI tools building something go looking for data sources that are free, cheap, or have a free tier, and there are directories they check. Most competitors cost a hundred dollars a month or more, so even a small free allowance earns its keep.
Both halves of that answer got written up on OpenSEO’s own blog afterwards. Two Surfaces, Two Timelines covers the retrieved-pages versus training-data split, and What Broke the $99 Ceiling covers the price collapse underneath it.
Should you build a SaaS at all?
Asked by Jeremy: “What is some wisdom you would share with anybody looking at this space and thinking, I could do a SaaS?”
“Starting a business is the same thing as like deciding to do drugs or not. Like you probably shouldn’t.”
“Find something you love. You love board games, do that.”
“You should really try to launch as quickly as possible so you can start getting feedback from people.”
Ben Wills followed the joke with the real advice: take it slowly, educate yourself, work the process. He tied curation to the word developers keep using about AI, which is taste. A model can write the code, but it cannot decide whether you need a B-tree or binary search on a sorted list. What you put in, and what you are willing to take back out, is the judgement you embed in the product.
Patrick has watched friends chase casino affiliate money because the money was there. If you do not care about the space, you will not stay long enough to win in it.
Ben Senescu came to SEO with no insight into it, only a belief that open source plus coding agents would let one person build what used to need a team. His point about early launches is that the product feedback will be rough, and people forgive that if you are upfront. The feedback on your messaging matters more, because the building and the marketing turn out to be the same work.
What should SEOs stop doing?
Asked by Jeremy as the closing soapbox
“They might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years, for all the spam that you did in the past.”
“If you’re gonna be a sushi chef the first year, you just make rice.”
“I just really urge people to give it a fair try”
Patrick declined to tell anybody what to do, and then said it anyway: any tactic that is abused will be shut down. He called listicles as the first casualty of the new spam systems. They worked, they worked for a couple of years, and they worked too well. When Penguin hit, Google eventually forgave the bad links. He does not expect the new systems to forget.
Ben Wills put his analysts on keyword research and nothing else, because doing it across ten, twenty, fifty sites is how you learn the relationship between a keyword and an intent. He thinks prompts are the same discipline now. Sit down and work out how to get the model to answer a certain way, and how to get your site into that answer.
That led to the test that makes personalization concrete. Tell a model you are flying to Los Angeles and renting a car, and the hotel it recommends depends on which car you named. Ben Wills added that ChatGPT saves details to memory, so a car you mentioned four conversations ago can shape a hotel answer in a completely different chat. In his words, “the personalization aspect is orders of magnitude more pronounced with LLMs” than with search. Two people can send an identical prompt and get different companies back.
Ben Senescu would not tell anybody to stop. He wants people to start: give Claude Code or Codex a real try for SEO research and planning, on a paid plan, for a full afternoon. He also had the sharpest read on why shortcuts keep selling. Somebody will always offer to spam your site across Reddit for two thousand dollars a month, or run an AI backlink exchange for a hundred. It might work briefly, and it distracts you from learning to market the business.
“The SEO framework will be here to stay, but the tactics will continue to change.” — Ben Senescu
The panelists
- Patrick Stox — independent consultant, ex-Ahrefs and ex-IBM, r/TechSEO moderator. Tools at patrickstox.com. His solo episode: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era.
- Ben Wills — founder of OppAlerts, previously Ontolo. His solo episode: Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing.
- Ben Senescu — founder of OpenSEO, the open source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs. His solo episode: Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling.
This was the first panel in a series. If you build in this space and want a seat at the next table, the show is at unscriptedseo.com.
