I’ve spent 20 years watching SEOs panic every time the ground shifts, and I keep coming back to one boring, durable truth: the content nobody else can copy is the content you actually made yourself, with a real human on the record. Interviews are how you manufacture that at scale.
Why “more content” stopped being a strategy
AI knocked the bottom out of content production. Anyone can spin up a thousand competent blog posts this afternoon. When execution costs nothing, having a lot of content isn’t an advantage. It’s table stakes that everyone now meets. Nick Eubanks, who built SEMrush’s own-media program to eight figures and now runs global marketing at Digistore24, put the consequence about as plainly as it can be put.
Distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite.— Nick Eubanks
He’s right, and there’s a corollary he didn’t quite say out loud: the only thing harder to copy than distribution is the raw material you feed it. A scraper can lift your rankings, your structure, your headlines. It cannot lift a 60-minute conversation with a named expert who said something nobody else has on the record. That recording is yours. The transcript is yours. Every quote, framework, and offhand analogy inside it is a primary source your competitor would have to go conduct their own interview to match.
The interview is the best research tool you own
Most people think of an interview as content. It’s also research, and it beats every keyword tool I’ve ever paid for. Stephan Bajayo, who co-founded Conductor and now runs Vibe Logic, made the case that two experts talking openly will surface the real pain points faster than any database of search volume. Transcription is instant now. An LLM can pull the structure out in minutes. The interview originates the insight; the tools validate and expand it.
This is the same instinct behind building SEO on the back of a podcast rather than treating the show as a marketing afterthought. The conversation isn’t promotion for the content. The conversation is the content, and the research, and the proof that a human with expertise was actually in the room.
Depth is where the moat actually lives
Distribution gets you reach. Depth is what makes the reach worth anything. Stephan’s line about content depth has stuck with me longer than almost anything else from that season.
Someone’s bullet point is someone else’s entire universe.— Stephan Bajayo
His example was a healthcare client whose coverage doc listed “divorce is a life change event” as a single bullet. He turned that bullet into a full brief: every real question a person going through a divorce has about their insurance. Can I keep my spouse on the plan? For how long? What if we’re only separated? That’s helpful content, and it’s the kind of depth a generic AI draft never reaches on its own, because the draft doesn’t know which bullet point is somebody’s whole universe. A guest who has lived the problem does.
This is also why I stopped chasing gimmicks years ago. The authenticity-over-tactics lesson I took from Marisa Cali applies directly here: a real expert saying a real thing builds trust that no clever format can fake.
Use AI in the right order
Interviews don’t mean you reject AI. They mean you point it the right way. Nick’s sharpest practical observation was that most agencies have the workflow backwards: they automate the brief, which is where strategy lives, and keep humans on the writing. Flip it. Humans set the brief and conduct the interview, AI drafts and structures the transcript, humans edit for voice and judgment. The proprietary input stays human. The grunt work goes to the machine. That’s how you get volume without producing slop, and how one good conversation becomes a recap, a newsletter, social posts, and a pillar page without losing the thing that made it original.
Build the library, then own the distribution
Put those pieces together and you get a content library no competitor can copy: primary-source interviews going deep on real questions, repurposed across every channel you control. That’s the engine behind Unscripted SEO and Unscripted Small Business — every episode is research, content, and a distribution asset at once. It’s why I point the tooling at SEO Arcade and why I keep showing up at the Digital Christian Collaborative here in Cookeville: the relationships produce the conversations, and the conversations produce the content that compounds. And once that library does its job and sends the right person to your site, the last step matters just as much, which is why I keep hammering on how a clunky contact form quietly kills the conversions all that compounding content worked to earn.
Here’s my takeaway after two decades and a lot of dead “SEO is dead” headlines: stop trying to out-produce a machine that produces for free. Go get the conversations only you can get, take them deeper than anyone else will, and distribute them everywhere you own. That library is the one asset nobody can scrape, regenerate, or buy out from under you.