Bridget Willard has marketed SaaS products on X and through blog posts for fifteen years, and her case for the platform is simple: "SEO is words, and words are SEO." A Twitter handle is a URL, Google shows tweets in its News tab, and LLMs only learn from what's public, so the conversations you have on X still feed Google and AI. Read the full recap of this episode, then see how Bridget Willard, LLC helps B2B software companies explain why their products matter.

Bridget and Jeremy Rivera start with what changed after X changed hands - analytics that kept coming and going, and brands that left on principle - and why she stayed anyway. Her test for whether social counts as SEO: do you want to be found? Yes or no? If you doubt X still matters, set up Google Alerts for your name and watch the tweets that mention you arrive every day. She lays out more of the thinking in her post on why X belongs in your SEO strategy.

• A Twitter handle is a URL. Why Bridget says B2B brands can't skip LinkedIn and X, should claim their profiles everywhere else, and should add YouTube if they can.
• Tweets as news. Searching her own name for her media kit turned up tweets in Google's News tab.
• Transcripts are gold. She sends her hot takes, PDFs and posts back into ChatGPT, then checks Google AI Overviews in incognito, because the machines only learn if we give them words. Related: how to get recommended by an LLM before you're in the training data.
• Public conversation before DMs. X as a think tank where side conversations turn into meetings, the same way they do when someone overhears you at a Chamber of Commerce event.
• Trust comes from vulnerability. Being public about something beyond your work - golf, homeschooling, the game last night - is why business relationships are built on small talk.
• No post and ghost. The day a PHP vulnerability leaked, Bridget stayed on X until eleven at night for her client Rocket.net, answering replies and celebrating the WordPress community's wins.
• Industry culture beats platform. Why a financial compliance panel was scripted, even though, as Bridget reads the FINRA rule on social media, it just has to be monitored.
• Attribution is kind of a lie. Sales and marketing are siblings, lurkers don't show up in analytics, and last-touch reports miss the years of trust behind a sale. Jeremy brings in Keith Perhac's take on first touch vs. last touch attribution.
• Saturday morning cartoons. A GiveWP team waving GIF sent to WordCamp hashtags, later run as a PPC campaign, lined up with two straight weeks of higher sales in those areas.

• (00:00) Why should we trust Bridget Willard?
• (00:56) What changed on X after the ownership change
• (03:22) A Twitter handle is a URL - SEO is words
• (04:19) Google Alerts and tweets in the Google News tab
• (07:04) X plus blog posts, and why transcripts are gold
• (09:11) Feeding ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
• (11:53) AI agents, compliance and regulated industries
• (12:44) Public conversation before DMs
• (15:07) Trust comes from vulnerability
• (17:00) Small talk is the social glue
• (17:53) Town square vs. soapbox
• (20:4...

"GEO is basically what the web is saying about you," says Lum Kamishi, the Kosovo-based SEO consultant behind LumKamishi LLC and founder of Assertio.ai. His take: GEO is SEO plus digital PR, and niche-relevant links matter more now than they did five years ago. Listen in, then read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks.

Lum has been in SEO for 11+ years. His first project was a Penguin recovery, he spent eight years in-house at marketplaces, and he started taking clients in 2025. He explains why LLMs are more primitive than Google and easier to manipulate, why ChatGPT pulled back on Reddit as a source, and why the citations that count are mentions from niche-relevant publications, not local directory listings. Jeremy brings in the Ben Wills backlink data: 20,000 positive matches and zero negative ones for links from sites in the same vector embedding space.

On content, Lum walks through what he calls topical proximity - the semantic distance between a blog post and the service page it supports. He builds mini clusters of two or three posts per service page and watches for topic cannibalization, where a blog post ranks for a money query the service page should own. For one home services client that meant killing 60% of the blog and promising at least 30 new articles. "I don't care about budgets, I care about results."

You'll also hear why the four-blogs-and-two-links agency retainer has stopped working outside low-competition local niches, why a topical map from Claude comes back as garbage, how the SEO community scattered across Slack, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, and what Jeremy found in his anchor text study: exact-match anchors did nothing, while token-match anchors showed a real effect.

Lum wants Google to stop lying, become a human-first search engine and stop picking fights with SEOs - and he admits that is wishful thinking. He closes with Assertio.ai, a multi-agent, answer-first content pipeline still in beta, built on featured-snippet formats like lists, tables and paragraphs. He runs it as a white-label service for marketplaces, e-commerce, local and SaaS sites.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, is back on Unscripted SEO with a blunt answer to the question of what matters most in SEO right now: machine readability. If a machine can't easily parse and understand your site, it gets much harder to show up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, organic search and LLM search. For Erika, that starts with technical SEO.

Erika and Jeremy Rivera dig into the two pitfalls she runs into most - page speed that clients keep kicking down the road, and tech debt that balloons when URLs change without redirects. One client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked all over the site it created a pile of 4xx errors. If you missed Erika's first episode, start there. Read the full recap of this one.

• Competitor page-speed comparisons against the two or three sites that pulled ahead, and the usual slowdowns: images sized wrong, third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content, and autoplaying video. Ten Speed's list of common technical SEO issues and how to fix them covers more.
• Lazy loading only below the fold - a lazy-loaded hero image scrambles things.
• Two megabytes or less, ideally a lot less, and a replace, modify or remove decision tree for whatever is inflating the page.
• Redirect debt from sunset and updated URLs, and how to properly redirect pages with 301 redirects.
• Enterprise buy-in: ship the big global fixes first, then take each win to every team it touched. One client is cleaning up two years of tech debt in 90 days.
• Claude as a second set of eyes on chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl, and for charts clients can actually read.
• EEAT and schema for LLM visibility: real customer stories, and review schema that connects your site to G2 and Trustpilot. See Ten Speed's 12-week generative engine optimization rollout plan and its research on what AI cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts.
• Backlinks and AI visibility: Jeremy walks through Ben Wills' AI ranking factor research, and Erika ties it to showing up the same way across the web.

• (00:00) Erika's intro: Director of Strategy at Ten Speed
• (00:39) Machine readability, the most consequential facet of SEO
• (01:46) The top pitfalls: page speed and URL tech debt
• (03:34) Proving page speed matters: competitor comparisons and the Walmart study
• (07:26) Images, third-party JavaScript, video and lazy loading
• (10:28) Page weight and the two-megabyte line
• (11:58) PDFs and bottom-of-funnel content
• (13:02) Two years of tech debt in 90 days
• (13:55) Winning enterprise buy-in with global fixes first
• (15:35) Claude, Screaming Frog crawls and the future of SEO SaaS
• (20:03) Lower barriers and the learning-curve worry
• (24:01) EEAT and schema for LLM visibility
• (26:48) Ben Wills' research on backlinks and AI visibility
• (30:17) Telling a consistent story across the web
• (32:26) Key takeaway: sample page speed across your site
• (33:11) Where to find Erika and Ten Speed