Grant Simmons has been practicing SEO since the mid-1990s. He built websites when Yahoo directories were the discovery mechanism, built a video-sharing platform before YouTube existed, and spent seven years leading SEO at Homes.com — recovering a site that had lost 60% of its organic traffic by removing 5 million pages from a 110 million-page index. He currently runs SEO and GEO at Fiat Growth and builds tools at querydrift.com and appslicer.com.
He sat down with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast for one of the most practically useful conversations we’ve heard on what AI engines actually do with your business information — and what to do when they get it wrong.
The entrepreneur takeaway is straightforward: if an AI engine halluccinates about your business, describes you inaccurately, or can’t find you at all, the problem almost certainly lives on your own website — not in the AI.
Why AI Engines Get Businesses Wrong
When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews describe your business incorrectly, most business owners assume it’s an AI limitation. Grant’s framing is different — and more useful:
“Hallucinations where LLMs will make stuff up is generally because we haven’t filled the gaps on our site itself — to explain fully, clearly, and unambiguously who we are, what we do, who we serve, areas we serve.” — Grant Simmons
AI engines don’t invent things out of nowhere. They synthesize what they can find. When the information on your site is ambiguous, incomplete, or scattered across too many topics without clear focus, the AI fills the gaps — and it fills them incorrectly. The hallucination is the symptom. The unclear website is the cause.
This directly mirrors what the free entrepreneur resource hub on our Training page covers through Bruce Ashford’s work: most businesses can’t describe what they do in under 30 words, can’t say it from memory, and lead with their credentials instead of their customer’s problem. The result is a website that neither a human nor an AI can quickly understand.
The Test Every Entrepreneur Should Run This Week
Grant’s framework for entity SEO — the practice of making your business unambiguously identifiable to search engines and AI — starts with four questions. Answer them honestly about your own website:
- Who are you? Does your homepage state your business name, location, and identity clearly — not buried in a paragraph, but in the first thing anyone reads?
- What do you do? Is your core service or product described in plain language that a non-expert would immediately understand?
- Who do you serve? Is your target customer explicitly named on the page — not implied, not vague?
- Where do you serve them? If you’re a local business, is your service area stated clearly and repeatedly?
If you can’t point to specific text on your homepage that answers all four questions in under ten seconds, an AI engine scanning your site will have the same problem — and it will either make something up or skip you in favor of a competitor who answered the questions clearly.
Grant calls this “treating Google and LLMs like small kids.” They need to be told clearly, repeatedly, and without ambiguity. They are not inferring. They are pattern-matching against what you’ve given them.
One Entity Per Page — The Most Actionable Rule
Beyond the homepage, Grant’s most actionable rule for any business website is this: one entity per page.
Every page on your site should be tightly focused on a single topic, service, or concept. Not “services” as one giant page covering everything you do. Not a blog post that starts talking about one thing and drifts into three others. One clear topic — with everything on the page supporting and clarifying that topic.
When pages try to cover too much ground, they suffer from what Grant calls “query drift” — the page starts ranking for things you didn’t intend, or fails to rank for what you did intend, because the signal is diluted. The fix is focus: tighter pages, clearer topics, one thing done well per URL.
For a Cookeville entrepreneur with a five-page website, this might mean separating “landscaping” from “lawn care” from “tree removal” into three pages instead of one — each one clear, complete, and focused on a single service. It means your About page talks about who you are as a company, not a mix of your team, your history, and your services all at once.
This is the same principle behind the Digital Christian Collaborative’s approach to digital marketing training — clarity over completeness. A clear page that does one thing well outperforms a comprehensive page that does everything ambiguously.
GEO Is Great SEO — You Don’t Need a New Playbook
One of the most reassuring things Grant said in the conversation was this: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the practice of optimizing for AI engines — is not a separate discipline with its own new rulebook. It’s great SEO. The businesses that are showing up well in AI search results are the same businesses that have always done the fundamentals well.
Grant’s phrase: people are “shooting to the moon in a Hyundai” — trying to get LLM citations and AI visibility before they’ve fixed the sitemap, clarified the content, or answered the four questions above. The fundamentals come first. They always have.
What this means practically:
- A clear, fast, well-structured website that tells humans and AI the same thing — who you are, what you do, who you serve, where
- Focused pages — one topic per page, not everything on one page
- Third-party mentions — reviews, local citations, editorial mentions, community involvement; AI engines synthesize what other sources say about you, not just what you say about yourself
- Schema markup — Grant’s position: low lift, supports Google’s ontology categorization, a “why not?” at minimum
The free entrepreneur resource hub on our Training page covers the third-party mentions angle through Jason Wade’s work — authority is what third parties say about you, not what you say about yourself. Grant’s entity SEO framework and Wade’s AI visibility framework converge on the same conclusion: get clear on your own site first, then build the external ecosystem that confirms it.
Don’t Outsource Uncertainty to AI Tools
Grant had a clear warning for entrepreneurs who are now using AI tools to understand their own business performance, write their own marketing copy, or make strategic decisions:
“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 — and so yes, we are just in a big petri dish right now.” — Grant Simmons
This is the same principle that runs through the Collaborative’s entrepreneur blog — the tools are multipliers for people who already know what they’re doing. They are not substitutes for that knowledge. An AI tool that generates your website copy doesn’t know your customers. An AI tool that analyzes your marketing performance doesn’t know your goals. You have to bring the understanding; the tool executes.
Grant’s framing for the current moment: we are beta testing the beta testers. Most LLM tools being shipped right now are unfinished, and most people using them are accepting subpar outputs rather than demanding better ones. The right posture: use AI as a capable assistant whose work you review, not an oracle whose answers you accept.
The Question Worth Asking About Your Business Right Now
Try this: open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask it to describe your business. Not your industry — your specific business, by name.
What comes back tells you something important. If the description is accurate and complete, your digital presence is doing its job. If it’s wrong, vague, or missing — that’s the gap Grant is describing. And the fix isn’t to complain about AI. The fix is to go back to your website and make it unambiguous.
The four questions. One entity per page. Clear description of who you are, what you do, who you serve, and where. That’s the work. It was the work before AI search, and it’s the work now.
Want Help Auditing Your Digital Presence?
Jeremy Rivera works directly with entrepreneurs through the Digital Christian Collaborative — starting with an honest read of your website, your search visibility, and what AI engines currently say about your business. $100/hr consulting rate — 30-minute foundational session.
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Sourced from Grant Simmons’ conversation on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Grant is Head of SEO & GEO at Fiat Growth and US Ambassador for Waikay and Inlinks.