Grant Simmons on Entity SEO, LLMs, and the Future of Search Visibility
I’ve spent years helping clients understand that SEO isn’t just about keywords and links — it’s about how clearly you communicate what you are to machines that are trying to understand your brand. When I sat down with Grant Simmons, who has been in SEO since the mid-90s and led the recovery of Homes.com from a 60% traffic loss, I knew we’d get into the brass tacks of entity optimization in a way that actually applies to agency and consultant work. What came out was one of the most practically grounded conversations I’ve had on the show about what it means to do entity SEO right now — and specifically how that intersects with LLM visibility in a way that isn’t just hype.
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GEO Is Great SEO — But Only If You’ve Done the Fundamentals
Grant’s opening challenge is one I’ve been making to clients for a while now: too many people are trying to optimize for AI Overviews and LLM citations without having done the foundational work of making their site unambiguous. He’s seeing sites with escaped URLs in sitemaps trying to chase GEO visibility. As he put it, they’re shooting to the moon without a rocket ship.
The reason LLMs hallucinate about your brand is almost always because you haven’t filled the gaps on your own site. You haven’t clearly explained who you are, what you do, who you serve, and where you serve them. That’s not an AI problem — it’s a content architecture problem.
Entity SEO: One Entity Per Page, Connected to the Graph
Grant’s entity SEO framework is built around meaning, not metadata. The core process:
- One entity per page — tight topical focus without query drift
- Connect pages to known graph sources: Wikipedia, schema catalogs, authoritative entity catalogues
- Use Query Drift to analyze whether a page has outlier topics that deserve their own URL
- Disambiguation entities within a page support the main entity — they clarify without diluting
The EntityMap.org standard — just announced at the time of this recording by Dixon Jones and Fred Loral at Waikay — is a logical extension of this thinking. It creates a structured ‘meaning layer’ on key pages that gives LLMs more to work with when grounding their results.
Hallucinations where LLMs make stuff up is generally because we haven’t filled the gaps on our site to explain fully, clearly, and unambiguously who we are, what we do, who we serve.
Grant Simmons
Schema: Still Worth Doing, Even in an AI Overview World
The schema debate comes up constantly with clients. Grant’s take is the most practically useful framing I’ve heard: there’s a limit to the ROI of deeply nested schema, but the mid-surface case is strong. Google uses schema for ontology categorization. The LLMs that ground on Google’s index inherit that categorization. Google AI Overviews are still the most prominent AI surface. So why not?
Mark Williams-Cook and Grant agree: schema may not directly influence LLMs today. But RAG in LLMs is largely a wrapper for Google results. What helps Google categorize your content correctly flows through to the LLM layer.
Budget, GEO, and the Client Relationship Problem
There’s a real tension in the industry right now about whether LLM optimization should sit inside the SEO budget or get its own line. Grant’s take cuts through it cleanly: this is a client relationship problem, not an industry problem. If you’ve been doing SEO for someone for three to five years and the definition of what counts as SEO has expanded, that’s a conversation about evolving scope.
The specific work that actually costs more — link building for citable sources that LLMs ground on, entity mapping on key pages — that’s easy to cost separately. The content work isn’t different: you’re still creating content for your audience, not redefining your audience as a bot.
Google’s Opacity and What the Antitrust Docs Actually Confirmed
The antitrust documentation confirmed what many SEOs had suspected for years: click engagement signals — dwell time, pogo-sticking, SERP interaction — account for roughly 30% of how ranking decisions get made. That was denied for a decade.
We will learn more by seeing outcomes than we can by listening to Google.
Grant Simmons
Grant’s engagement framework: consistent paths to satisfaction, dwell time per query, and connected navigation paths that Google can see through Chrome. Test and validate — watch what happens — rather than defer to spokesperson statements.
The Beta Culture Problem
Grant named something the industry needs to hear directly: most new LLM SEO tools being shipped are, in his words, shite — and the builders know it. We are beta testing the beta testers. The right posture is to not outsource uncertainty to LLMs — treat their output as the answer they gave you, not the answer you wanted.
I don’t outsource uncertainty to LLMs. I don’t take what they say as the answer I want. I take it as the answer they give me. We are just in a big petri dish right now.
Grant Simmons
The Reporting Gap and Grant’s Tools
Reporting is the biggest unresolved agency problem. There’s no consistency in tying SEO efforts back to KPIs for the business. GA4 is Google’s punishment for the industry. SEOgets and Raven Tools provide insights — but insights aren’t KPI-connected narratives.
Grant’s tools at AppSlicer include an AI Overview impact estimator (YoY CTR + position + query count analysis) and SEO attribution work. His Query Drift tool handles entity-level page analysis. Log file analysis and first-party pixels — not third-party scrape data — are where high-confidence signals actually live.
The Homes.com Recovery Story
Grant came into Homes.com in 2014 after the site lost 60% of its organic traffic. He identified a Panda penalty, removed 5 million pages from a 110-million-page site, fixed bad internal linking, and confirmed the diagnosis with John Mueller at SMX London — who checked his laptop and said “yeah, you’re under a Panda penalty” twenty seconds later. When Panda rolled out, the traffic returned fully and then some. Grant stayed seven-plus years, finishing as VP of Performance Marketing through the CoStar acquisition.
Where to Find Grant Simmons
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simmonet
- Twitter/X: @simmonet
- Fiat Growth — Head of SEO & GEO
- Waikay — US Ambassador (LLM search visibility tracking)
- Inlinks — US Ambassador (entity SEO platform)
- AppSlicer — GSC query data tools & AI Overview impact estimator
- Query Drift — entity-level page analysis tool
