SEO SaaS Panel: Patrick Stox, Ben Wills, Ben Senescu

Three founders building SEO software sat down for the first Unscripted SEO panel. Patrick Stox (ex-Ahrefs, ex-IBM, now independent), Ben Wills (OppAlerts) and Ben Senescu (OpenSEO) on what actually changed about building tools, and how to get recommended by an LLM before you are anywhere near the training data. Read the full recap here.

Jeremy's read on the panel: Nobody Gets to Stay in Their Lane Anymore on SEO Arcade.

The build constraint is gone. Patrick Stox could not have built most of this before and now can, with about a hundred and four free tools live at patrickstox.com. Ben Senescu ships features that work ninety-five percent of the time while running OpenSEO as a team of one. Ben Wills had to run a full database refactor because the LLMs made architectural decisions he had told them not to make.

Taste is the new bottleneck. Ben Wills: "AI can produce stuff, but it doesn't have the taste to decide, do we use a B-tree, or do we use binary search on a sorted list. That curation is your taste." Patrick's version from inside Ahrefs: if they had listened to customers, they would still be a low-cost link tool.

How to get recommended before you are in the training data. Patrick splits it into two surfaces on two clocks. The training data is slow and largely passive. The retrieved pages are workable this week, so get a call-out onto the lists that already rank. Ben Wills adds the GitHub awesome lists and the free-tool directories that AI tools query when they go shopping for data. Both halves are written up on OpenSEO's blog: Two Surfaces, Two Timelines and What Broke the $99 Ceiling.

One tiny word changes the answer. Ben Wills's own test: name a Corolla instead of a BMW when you ask about a trip, and the hotel recommendation changes. ChatGPT memory then carries that context into a completely different chat days later.

What they want SEOs to stop doing. Patrick Stox: "Any tactic that is abused will be shut down... they might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past." Ben Wills: if you are going to be a sushi chef, the first year you just make rice. Ben Senescu: give Claude Code or Codex a real afternoon before you write it off.

The panelists and their solo episodes: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era, Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing, and Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling. More episodes at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.