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. Here is what came out of it.
The build constraint is gone. The taste constraint is not.
Patrick opened with the shortest answer of the episode. “I’m probably the one non-engineer here. I’ve done some coding before, but mostly Python, HTML. I couldn’t build most of this stuff in the past. And now with AI, I can. Simple as that.”
That is the whole change in three sentences, and every other problem on the panel is downstream of it. Ben Senescu, running OpenSEO as a team of one, said the same thing from the inside: “It’s so easy to build a feature now that works ninety-five percent of the time.” He builds the product, does customer support and handles marketing, and he does not think any of that would have been possible six months earlier.
Ben Wills, who writes C for a living and calls himself weak on the front end, gave the counterweight. The AI fills the gaps he does not want to fill. It also creates work that did not exist before.
“I actually had to do a full database refactor, because 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.” — Ben Wills
His summary of the job now: corralling and double-checking the work, and hoping you get there soon enough that you have not painted yourself into a corner.
Saying no is the entire job
Once anybody can build anything, the scarce thing is deciding what not to build. Ben Senescu is open source, which means people send him pull requests, which means the temptation to merge everything and announce that the tool does everything.
“One of the biggest things now with AI coding agents is asking: what is the small next thing we should do? You have to hold the vision of what people actually want, instead of what is every single possible feature we could add to this tool to make it really bloated.” — Ben Senescu
Ben Wills is one step behind him 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 Senescu is at, where customer feedback starts telling you which no was the right no.
Patrick came at it from the other end, with resources and head count and a strong development staff behind him, and the answer was still no.
“If Ahrefs had listened to customers, they would be a low-cost link tool, something like Majestic still. Instead they’re one of the main tools used by practically everyone in the entire industry.” — Patrick Stox
Things launched at Ahrefs 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: will this be used enough, will it justify its existence, do we have the resources to put behind it.
Distribution comes from what you are, not what you spend
All three marketing plans were different and not one of them was a budget.
Patrick is leveraging a network built over twenty years. He does not post much, but he has trust, and friends who will try the tool. He has also published around 600 articles on technical SEO and AI search, written by AI trained on his own writing and talks, researched and cited, each one pitching his free tools inside the content. Free tools feed paid tools. It is the Ahrefs playbook, run by one person.
Ben Senescu’s distribution is structural.
“One of the great things about open source is that it inherently has distribution. If you build something that anyone can build on top of, that is free for anyone to do whatever they want with, people get excited about it and they want to share it.” — Ben Senescu
A week after launch, people on Reddit were telling him they had spent two or three weeks building the same thing themselves and would rather use his. So his ongoing work is not promotion, it is making the message easy for somebody else to repeat to a friend.
Ben Wills is going education-first, because he keeps running into logic that is wrong in a way only an engineer notices. His example: hallucinations are not mysterious. They happen because of byte pair encoding, tokenization, and a probabilistic chunking process. If you ask an LLM for the top sites it would recommend and it invents one, there is a mechanical reason, and knowing the reason changes what you do about it.
How to get recommended before you are in the training data
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. What should he do in the next month?
Patrick’s answer separated two things most people run together.
“You’ve got a while before you’re really in the training data as a known entity. For now, it’s the retrieved pages where you’ll want to be found. Look at what’s there — people have all these lists of the popular SEO tools. Make sure there’s a call-out section on those pages saying ‘hey, open source, this is me.’” — Patrick Stox
He also pointed at an asymmetry Senescu already owns: everybody knows Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking, and those names keep getting repeated as common knowledge. “You’re the only open source one.” That is a differentiator a model can actually use, because it adds something to the answer instead of repeating it.
Ben Wills agreed and added the tactic. Find the “awesome lists” on GitHub for open source and marketing tools and get on all of them. Find publishers writing about free or small business marketing tools, and either 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 are charging.
Patrick closed the loop on lead gen: the tools themselves are shopping. When somebody is building something and needs data, they go looking for what is free, what is low cost, what has a free tier. There are directories those systems check. That is where a free tier 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.
One tiny word changes the answer
Ben Wills has run 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. A Corolla and a BMW produce different hotels from the same question.
Then it gets worse, because the context is not confined to the conversation.
“ChatGPT saves little things to memory… you can talk four conversations ago about going to LA and buying a Civic or a Ferrari or whatever it is, and then when you ask for hotel recommendations, parts of that conversation could be used as context in a completely different chat. The personalization aspect is orders of magnitude more pronounced with LLMs than it is with search.” — Ben Wills
Search ran on keywords, all the way down to how the data sits on disk and how an inverted index works. Words, phrases, length, specificity, match. LLMs gather everything, form a sense of what a business is, and refer back to that sense while they generate. Two people can send an identical prompt and get different companies back, and neither of them did anything wrong.
Ben Wills also thinks the shape is more familiar than people admit: a large share of what an LLM does is act as a front end for a search engine, aggregating results and cleaning up how they get presented. When he released his AI search visibility reports, the ChatGPT, Anthropic and Gemini bots crawled the new pages hard and fast — faster than Google, faster than Bing. That is search engine behaviour, and SEOs have to catch up to what it means.
The lane you stayed in is gone
Jeremy called 2010 to 2020 the golden age of SEO, when you could bury your head and never talk to anybody. Patrick’s response was that he never stayed in his lane in the first place.
He is known for technical SEO and has led large content projects, gets into analytics, paid, data quality and site design. His argument is that cross-team work was always how things actually got pushed through, and now it is the only way. Paid and organic is the obvious pairing. Accessibility teams inside large companies are the non-obvious one: come together and you can sell change to the organisation and implement it at scale.
Ben Wills is building OppAlerts along the same line, asking how the tool supports PR, product, and whoever is handling reputation management. His picture of the AI search marketer is somebody who nudges every function in the right direction rather than handing out instructions.
Ben Senescu, running a team of one, is already living the version of this that everybody else is about to. He is defining exactly what each role does — what the marketer does, what the brand positioning is, what facts get written down — because that definition is the input. His advice: do not get too stuck in a single job description. Ask how you can be maximally useful to the business.
What they want SEOs to stop doing
Patrick declined to tell anybody what to do, and then said it anyway.
“Any tactic that is abused will be shut down… When Penguin came along it hurt for a few years, and then Google just said, all those bad links you built, we just forgive you. That may not be the case in all these new systems. They might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past.” — Patrick Stox
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. That is the tell.
Ben Wills reached for a training metaphor from his agency days: if you are going to be a sushi chef, the first year you just make rice. You do not touch the fish. He put analysts on keyword research and nothing else, because doing it across ten, twenty, fifty sites is how you actually 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 builds better intuition for AI optimisation than anything else on offer.
Ben Senescu would not tell anybody to stop. He wanted 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 has watched it get good over three or four months and thinks most people who wrote it off are working from an old impression.
He also had the sharpest read on why shortcuts keep selling. There is always somebody offering to spam your site across every Reddit forum for two thousand dollars a month, or run an AI backlink exchange for a hundred. It might work briefly. It is a distraction 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.
