Rob Bonham on SEO in the Agentic Age

About the guest Rob Bonham is an SEO (https://theseoadvisory.com/about/) with about two decades of experience spanning local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home-services clients. Today he advises several startups on SEO (https://theseoadvisory.com/seo-advisory/) and works as a fractional SEO manager (https://theseoadvisory.com/fractional...) and director for a handful of agencies. You can reach him on LinkedIn (  / robbonham  ) . What we cover • Why the “agentic age” feels like the pre-Panda/Penguin wild west — and what that means for strategy • Why publishing AI content at volume backfires on user signals, rankings, and client trust • Measuring SEO in a post-attribution world where GSC and LLM data are unreliable • Link building reborn: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and partner links • Going independent: contracts, pricing, and filtering out tire-kickers Episode highlights Rob's throughline is that SEOs are now “stewards of the AI.” On the Unscripted SEO Podcast (https://unscriptedseo.com/) , he and Jeremy Rivera trace how AI has automated the low-level work — title tags, meta descriptions, on-page fixes — so the real job shifts to strategy and judgment. The freedom is real; so is the responsibility. Which is why volume is not a strategy. Just because you can publish 100 city-specific pages for a concrete contractor doesn't mean you should. When the user signals aren't there, Google devalues the content — a reality Jeremy underscores with his own post on why Google Search Console data isn't reliable (https://seoarcade.com/google-search-c...) . Look like a hero for a few months, then watch the site dive. In a post-attribution world, Rob argues you win by telling the right story with the data you do have — branded-search lift, conversion correlation, the “game of sums.” And he makes the case that link building (https://seoarcade.com/link-building-a...) is an easier sell than ever when reframed as footprint: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and legitimate partner and supplier links. The back half gets practical. Rob and Jeremy Rivera (https://jeremyriveraseo.com/about/) dig into going independent — setting expectations to avoid scope creep, pricing with conviction (a higher price can itself signal quality), filtering tire-kickers with a small paid audit, and surviving enterprise red tape and net-60 terms. Connect with Rob Bonham LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbonham (  / robbonham  ) (Rob points people to LinkedIn — he's “tied at the hip” with it — rather than a website.) About the show The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.