Grant Simmons: What 30 Years of SEO Looks Like When the Algorithm Doesn’t Know Itself

Unscripted SEO Podcast · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Grant Simmons, Fiat Growth

There are conversations where I learn something new, and there are conversations where someone articulates something I’ve known in my gut for years but never quite framed right. My episode with Grant Simmons was mostly the second kind — and that’s the best kind. Grant has been practicing SEO since the mid-90s, led Homes.com back from a 60% traffic collapse, and has spent the last five or six years building entity SEO tools and frameworks that are starting to look prescient now that LLMs have made ‘who are you and what do you do’ a question with real ranking consequences.

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The Entity Problem Is a Content Architecture Problem

Grant’s opening frame is one I keep coming back to in my own consulting work: LLMs hallucinate about your brand because you haven’t filled the gaps on your site. You haven’t told the machines — whether Google or an LLM — clearly, completely, and unambiguously what you are. That’s not new. That’s entity SEO. That’s what Jason Barnard has been saying at Kalicube for years. But it lands differently now that there’s a direct line from ‘you didn’t fill that gap’ to ‘the AI made something up about you.’

Grant’s framework is one entity per page, connected to known graph sources via schema and sameAs references, with query drift analysis (querydrift.com) to catch pages that have sprawled into too many topics. It’s rigorous, it’s testable, and it applies equally to a local service business as it does to a 110-million-page real estate portal.

EntityMap.org — The Meaning Layer Standard

The EntityMap.org standard, just launched by Dixon Jones and Fred Loral at Waikay, formalizes what entity SEO practitioners have been doing manually. It creates a structured summary from key pages — not a description of what the page is about, but a map of associations, connections, and disambiguation. A meaning layer.

What EntityMap does is create a summary with associations, connections, disambiguation — a meaning layer. It’s really about meaning and understanding and those connections.
Grant Simmons

Google’s Opacity and What the Antitrust Docs Actually Confirmed

One of the most validating parts of this conversation for me was the antitrust documentation discussion. For years, anyone who suggested that click behavior — dwell time, pogo-sticking, SERP interaction — was a significant ranking signal got laughed out of the room. Google denied it continuously. The court documents confirmed it’s approximately 30% of how ranking decisions get made.

Google doesn’t know how it actually makes decisions, the algorithm. They know how it works fundamentally, but the results are a matter of machine learning and predictive analytics.
Grant Simmons

This is why Grant’s approach — test and validate, watch outcomes, don’t defer to spokesperson statements — is the right epistemology for this industry. He’s been writing about engagement signals (paths to satisfaction, consistent dwell times, connected navigation paths Google sees through Chrome) since 2013–2014. The vindication took ten years but it arrived.

Budget 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. The specific work that actually costs more — link building for citable sources, 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.

The Beta Culture Problem

Grant’s petri dish metaphor is the best description I’ve heard of where the industry is right now. People are dropping droplets on us and watching to see if culture grows. Most of the new LLM SEO tools being shipped are, in his words, shite — and the people building them know it and are shipping for feedback. We are beta testing the beta testers.

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.
Grant Simmons

Reporting: The Biggest Unresolved Agency Problem

This was the sharpest practical point in the episode. The gap between insights (SEOgets, GA4) and KPI-connected narratives that justify SEO investment — that’s what no one has solved yet. GA4 is Google’s punishment for the industry. Grant’s tools at AppSlicer — including an AI Overview impact estimator and SEO attribution work — are trying to close this gap.

The degapinator conversation — triangulating Ahrefs + GA4 + GSC to reconstruct a query click map — is one every SEO managing content performance should be having. Grant’s counter: 16 months of GSC data, a confidence score on every output, and first-party data (log files, first-party pixels) as the high-confidence foundation.

The Homes.com Recovery

Grant came into Homes.com in 2014 after the site lost 60% of organic traffic. He identified a Panda penalty, removed 5 million pages from a 110-million-page site, fixed internal linking, and confirmed the diagnosis with John Mueller in the SMX London audience — who confirmed the penalty 20 seconds after Grant described the site. When Panda rolled out, traffic recovered fully and then some. Seven-plus years followed, finishing as VP of Performance Marketing through the CoStar acquisition.