In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Stephan Bajayo, CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic — and one of the people who helped build the enterprise SEO industry, including co-founding Conductor. Stephan describes himself as “the vibe” to co-founder Trevor Stolber’s “logic,” and the conversation lives up to that framing: part industry diagnosis, part practical playbook, all of it grounded in 25+ years of watching the space evolve from e-commerce at the dot-com era through today’s LLM disruption.
The conversation covers why SEOs have let everyone else define the discipline, why asking “how do I rank in an LLM” is the wrong question, why someone’s bullet point is someone else’s entire universe, and why the interview — not the keyword tool — is the most underused research asset in SEO.
SEOs Let Others Define Them
Stephan’s opening diagnosis: the “SEO is dead” cycle keeps repeating because SEOs have never successfully claimed what they actually do. They let other people name the discipline — GEO, AIO, “SEO killer” — instead of defining it themselves. His definition: SEO is optimization. Take data and content, help engines understand it better. The search engine is just the medium. Everything else is noise built on top of a failure to own the narrative.
The Original Sin: Channel vs. Information Asset
The worst thing that happened to SEO: it held the most valuable demand dataset in any organization — what users actually want, in their own words, at scale — and got treated as a traffic channel instead of an information asset. That data was never just for ranking. It was always the clearest window into audience intent, pain, and language. The industry’s failure to reframe that internally is why SEOs keep ending up at the tail end of organizational decisions instead of the front.
The Isolated Island Problem
SEOs are often the most capable practitioners in a room full of people who don’t understand what they do — but they can’t move without dev and content. Stephan’s framing: you could have the algorithm secrets whispered in your ear and still fail 100% of the time if dev doesn’t implement and content doesn’t execute. SEO success is an organizational capability problem, not just an individual knowledge problem. The smartest person on an isolated island is still stuck on an island.
There Is No Rank in an LLM
When practitioners ask how to “rank” in ChatGPT or Perplexity, Stephan says they’re asking the wrong question entirely. LLMs don’t have a ranking system — they interpret and synthesize. The real question is: what are you giving them to interpret? Expert-sourced, human-attributed, deeply useful content that goes into real user questions is what gets pulled. The strategy is the same as it’s always been — be genuinely helpful — but the frame of “how do I rank” is borrowed from a paradigm that doesn’t apply.
Someone’s Bullet Point Is Someone Else’s Entire Universe
Stephan’s most memorable content insight: he wrote a copy brief about divorce for a healthcare company. Not the bullet point that said “divorce is a life change event” — but every actual question someone going through a divorce has about their insurance coverage. Who keeps the plan. How COBRA works. What happens to the kids. That’s helpful content. The bullet point is the surface. The universe underneath it is the opportunity. Most SEO content never gets past the bullet point.
Be Where Decisions Are Formed, Not Made
Stephan’s framework for content distribution: buying decisions aren’t made in the moment of the search. They’re formed earlier — on Reddit, in articles, on partner sites and comparison pages. Those touchpoints don’t show up on any channel’s KPI. Nobody reports on them. But they’re where opinions calcify before a person ever types a purchase query. Showing up where decisions are formed is different from showing up where they’re executed — and far less crowded.
Interview-Based Keyword Research
Stephan and Jeremy’s shared conclusion: the expert interview is better keyword research than any tool. Two practitioners talking openly about a topic surface the most cogent pain points, the industry elephants in the room, the actual questions clients and customers have. Transcription is instant now; LLMs can extract and structure the research in minutes. The workflow: use an LLM to prep interview questions → conduct the interview → transcribe → extract. The keyword tool tells you search volume. The interview tells you what the audience actually thinks.
Self-Diagnosis Discovery: The Vibe Logic Approach
Stephan’s agency discovery process is designed to show prospects their own dissonance — the gap between what the CMO believes about their market and what the product team believes, or between what the company says externally and what customers experience. The roadmap gets shared whether or not they hire Vibe Logic. His positioning: if you can show someone a clear picture of their own problem, the question of whether to hire you to solve it is much easier to answer.
Key Quotes
“Someone’s bullet point is someone else’s entire universe. I wrote a copy brief on divorce for a healthcare company — not the bullet point that said ‘divorce is a life change event’ but every question someone going through a divorce actually has about their insurance. That is helpful content.”
— Stephan Bajayo
“There is no rank in an LLM. You’ve been trained to believe that ranks. That’s because you’ve been trained in the wrong things. The real question is: what are you giving them to interpret?”
— Stephan Bajayo
“Be where decisions are formed, not made. You form an opinion on Reddit. You form an opinion reading an article. Those are the places that aren’t on any channel’s KPI — and they’re where the actual buying decision begins.”
— Stephan Bajayo
About Stephan Bajayo
Stephan Bajayo is CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic, a B2B growth agency serving companies in the $10M–$100M revenue range. He co-founded Conductor, one of the leading enterprise SEO platforms, which was sold to WeWork and later bought back. Stephan has been in digital marketing since the dot-com era and focuses on web presence intelligence, content strategy, and helping B2B organizations turn their SEO data into organizational assets.
