Adrian Nikolov on the Unscripted SEO Podcast with Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera has been in search since 2007 and runs his show the way the name promises: no script, no prepared questions, follow the conversation where it goes. Ours went from AI tooling to funnel architecture to agentic commerce, with a detour through Starcraft that explains the episode's most quoted line.

Watch the full conversation:

Prefer audio? The episode is also on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast feed, and Jeremy's own recap lives on unscriptedseo.com.

AI is the steroids SEOs always needed

The first thread was productivity, and I stand by what I said on air: AI is "the steroids that we always needed." For most of my 18 years in search, the ceiling on any technical idea was the developer queue. You could design the tool; you could not build it. That constraint is gone. The biggest personal shift AI produced for me: I became the developer. Internal linking automation, ad automation, complete topical authority systems that improve themselves on their own performance data.

I compared the pull of this work to my Starcraft habit from a decade ago, which is the moment the episode stopped being an interview and became two players comparing notes — Jeremy ran one of the big Starcraft communities on Reddit. His own version of the same story: with Claude Code he had a new service site live within an hour, and the whole idea shipped within six. The lift that used to kill side projects no longer exists.

How a topical authority system actually runs

Jeremy asked what we deploy for clients, so I walked through the system end to end. It starts with an automated diagnostic — full crawl, keyword data pulled by API, a complete profile of the brand before any strategy exists. From that base we build a brand voice profile synthesized from everything the brand has published and everything its community has said about it. Then the system produces content across the whole funnel, not a blog pile: top, middle, and bottom, each page tracked in a dashboard that feeds performance data back into the build.

The part most teams skip is the funnel logic. Jeremy put it in a metaphor I intend to steal with attribution: feeding the ducks is not a strategy — "you need a duck catching system to turn the ducks into something." Content that attracts a visitor and gives them nowhere to go is decoration. Internal links, CTAs, and layout have to move the reader to the next stage, or the impression is wasted.

We also agreed on where established brands get failed by their SEO providers: landing a mature client and ordering another round of blog rewrites. The better move is almost always mid- and bottom-of-funnel work — linkable assets, knowledge bases, and direct optimization of the pages where the money is. Bottom-of-funnel pages are not unrankable; that belief is a leftover from an older search era.

Authority is the new PageRank

The AI-visibility part of the conversation stayed evidence-first, which is rare for this topic. The claims from the episode worth keeping:

• LinkedIn articles get cited by AI engines. Lily Ray pointed this out publicly over a year ago; I started my Search Engineered newsletter partly because of it and can confirm the citations from my own tracking. Generative engine optimization starts with being present where the models actually retrieve from.
• Prompt tracking is a weak signal. Jeremy cited Rand Fishkin's testing showing 80–90% non-repeatability for the same query across users. The one moment prompt tracking is useful: when you show up zero times. After that, watch actual LLM referral traffic and its conversion behavior in GA4 instead.
• Ask the machine why it cites your competitor. LLMs will tell you why a page surfaced — the reverse engineering that took weeks in link analysis now takes one honest prompt. That, plus a system to act on the answer, is the citation playbook.
• Agentic commerce is already here. AI agents are beginning to research, compare, and buy. The brands they buy from will be the ones with trust signals and machine-readable presence — which is search everywhere optimization, not a new discipline to purchase separately.

Jeremy's framing deserves its own line: an LLM is an untrained customer support rep talking about your brand all day (he credits Matt Brooks for the image). You can hand it accurate information or let it improvise. Most brands are letting it improvise.

The orchestrator thesis

Near the end we landed on the point I came to make, and I said it plainly on the show: "I do believe that SEO is the orchestrator of everything else right now." The job description now spans UX, development, content, conversion, and distribution. That breadth is exactly why the profession is splitting: one half will keep shipping deliverables, the other half will engineer and operate the systems. The second half is the one that survives the decade, and it is the discipline we build at Haide — Organic Growth Engineering: SEO, GEO, and AI automation as one owned system.

Downloads

• Slide deck — Organic Growth Engineering (PPTX)
• Companion eBook — Ten Ideas, One Engine (PDF)
• Full interview transcript (DOCX)

Follow the show

Jeremy interviews SEO practitioners weekly and maintains a full archive of episodes. If this conversation was useful, the back catalog is worth your commute time.

• Podcast archive: unscriptedseo.com
• Jeremy's consulting site: jeremyriveraseo.com
• SEO Arcade: seoarcade.com