Grant Simmons, Director of SEO at Fiat Growth, has spent over 20 years navigating the evolution of search, from Yahoo directories to entity-based SEO to today’s AI-driven answer engines. In this episode, Grant shares how organizations can build lasting organic visibility as search fragments across Google, ChatGPT, and other LLM-powered platforms.
Grant explains why the marketing fundamentals of understanding your audience have stayed constant even as the surfaces for reaching them have multiplied. He breaks down how to reframe SEO conversations with executives around business KPIs instead of vanity keyword rankings, and why forecasting should focus on user intent rather than raw search volume.
The conversation covers Google’s AI Mode and query fan-out, and what it means for how marketers should structure content architecture around user intent clusters. Grant introduces his “golden knowledge” framework, content that is unique, retrievable, and generates the engagement signals that earn citations from LLMs and search engines alike.
He also digs into technical debt as an emerging AI-era problem, using real examples of JavaScript-heavy platforms that block search engines from crawling critical navigation and content. Grant makes the case for why SEO and GEO specialists, not developers alone, should be driving platform and architecture decisions.
Rounding out the episode, Grant challenges the idea that AI visibility and traditional SEO are competing priorities, explains why internal linking and entity optimization remain essential fundamentals, and shares his “eat your own dog food” philosophy for CMOs auditing their own websites through a user’s eyes.
Whether you’re a marketing executive, SEO practitioner, or founder trying to make sense of generative engine optimization, this episode offers a grounded, experience-based perspective on what actually drives visibility in 2025 and beyond.
Takeaways:
- SEO should be justified through business KPIs, not just keyword rankings.
- People search for their problems, not for branded solutions or products.
- Search volume matters less than intent when LLM prompts are near-infinite.
- Query fan-out reveals multiple intents marketers must address with content.
- "Golden knowledge" content must be unique, retrievable, and signal-generating.
- Technical debt, like uncrawlable navigation, silently blocks retrieval and rankings.
- CMOs should audit their own sites as users, not as SEOs.