As SEOs, we are used to being adaptable to changing algorithms, so LLM optimization should be a simple extension of that process.
To discuss the industry debates surrounding the differences between SEO and GEO and clarify whether they are the same or different, I spoke with SEO veteran Grant Simmons.
Grant has over 30 years of experience helping brands grow and has spent decades focused on meaning, intent, and topical authority long before LLMs entered the conversation.
I spoke with Grant about signal alignment, how Google’s latest continuation patents reveal the mechanics of LLM citations, and what SEOs are getting wrong about topical focus.
“We talk about writing for the machines, but we’re really writing for human need because it’s all driven by the prompt or the query.” – Grant Simmons
You can watch the full interview with Grant on IMHO below, or continue reading the article summary.
Great SEO Is Good GEO
At Google Search Live in December 2025, John Mueller said, “Good SEO is good GEO.”
I asked Grant what he thought were the differences between optimizing for search engines and for machines, and if he thought there were any overlaps.
Grant’s approach echoes what John Mueller said, but “Not everyone has been doing great SEO,” he explained. “Great SEO was always about building topical authority.”
He continued to say, “Essentially, machines (whether it’s Google or whether it’s an LLM) have to understand the underlying meaning of the content so they can present the best answer.
They have to understand the query or the prompt, then they have to send the best answer. So in that way, it’s very similar.”
Where Grant sees divergence is in how the systems evaluate content. Google has historically ranked pages, and even with passage ranking, it still considers the page and the site as a whole. LLMs operate differently.
“LLMs are looking more at that passage side, you know, something that’s easily extractable, something that has value semantically related to the query or the prompt. And so there’s that fundamental difference.”
Grant also stressed that great SEO has always been holistic, touching social media, PR, content, and brand messaging. Having brand awareness, brand visibility, and brand consistency across all channels is a significant factor in LLM representation. And this is exactly the kind of work that the best SEOs do.
“We’re marketers. We should make sure, not just from a standpoint of what we do in SEO and GEO for our clients, which is connecting a need and intent to the product or service that satisfies that intent, we’re also doing the same in our own marketing. We have to understand what our clients are looking for.
“[GEO] is the same [as SEO] if you’re doing it well. It’s not the same if you weren’t. And of course, there’s nuance.”
My thoughts are that SEOs who have been in the industry the longest are experiencing less disruption because they have seen it all before. They learned to be adaptable in the early years when there was so much flux as we progressed from multiple search engines to just one. Whereas for anyone new to the industry, they don’t have the same background points of reference.
Why Consensus Matters To Be Surfaced By LLMs
I went on to ask Grant about Google’s latest continuation patents, which describe two distinct systems that work together.
The first is what Grant describes as a response confidence engine. This system evaluates whether a passage can be corroborated, whether the information has consensus across the web.
“If they return a passage and they can corroborated that it is true, and when we say true, it’s true in the sense of more than one person is saying it, that doesn’t mean it’s true, but it means the consensus is there,” Grant explained. “The consensus generally wins out.”
The second system is what Grant calls a linkifying engine. Once a passage has been confirmed through consensus, this engine determines whether a specific sentence or sub-element within that passage, what Grant calls a “chunklet,” can be matched and linked to a source.
“Consensus decides whether it’s surfaced in the first place. The linkify engine actually decides whether it’s linkable, whether a citation is actually going to happen,” Grant said.
Getting mentioned by an LLM is one thing. Getting an actual link back to your content requires that the specific passage is both verifiable through consensus and uniquely attributable to your source.
Golden Knowledge Content Wins
So, what kind of content earns this kind of AI visibility? Grant described it as “golden knowledge,” content that is unique in some meaningful way.
“Generally, data-driven, your own data, your own opinion that’s proof-backed, evidence-backed. Taking a different view of things,” Grant said. “But in the same way of taking a different view, there still has to be some kind of consensus. If other people are agreeing with you, that is really important. Your content needs the uniqueness and the data-driven aspect, but it still has to align with the overall consensus on the web.”
Grant was also clear that while we often talk about writing for machines, the orientation should remain human-centered: “We talk about writing for the machines, but we’re really writing for human need because it’s all driven by the prompt or the query.”
This balance between uniqueness and consensus is perhaps the most actionable takeaway. Content that simply restates what everyone else is saying won’t stand out. But content that takes a position without corroboration elsewhere won’t pass the confidence threshold to be surfaced. The sweet spot is original, data-driven insight that others can and do validate.
The Biggest Mistakes SEOs Make With Topical Focus
When I asked Grant about the most common mistakes he sees with topical diversification on pages, his answer was clear: trying to be everything to everyone.
“When you think about intent, suddenly you understand that pages have a right to exist,” Grant said. “I call it path to satisfaction. Understanding who the audience is and what they need to find, you have to provide a path to that satisfaction.”
Grant pointed out that most SEOs inherit existing sites rather than building from scratch. The temptation is to focus on the surface-level optimizations, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and headers, without reviewing whether a page is actually focused on a specific intent or whether it has what he calls “drift.”
“What they won’t do is fundamentally review the page and understand whether that page is focused on a specific intent or whether it has this drift,” Grant explained. “Cleaning out those outliers, topics that you’re covering when you don’t really mean to, is essentially diffusing what the page means. Those are the things that I think SEOs miss out on.”
This ties directly back to LLM citability. If a page lacks clear topical focus, it becomes harder for AI systems to extract a self-contained passage that answers a specific query. Tightening that focus isn’t just good SEO; it’s the foundation of being visible in AI-generated responses.
Grant’s Strategy Recommendation For 2026
I finished by asking Grant what he’s recommending to his clients right now.
“Let’s double down on what’s working,” Grant said. “LLM traffic is so small today that optimizing for LLMs is important for the future but not for today’s metrics. Let’s improve our SEO. Let’s get to that great SEO level. And as we’re doing that, we are incorporating the elements that will help you show up for GEO, that will help show up on these other surfaces.”
His focus is on great content, topical authority, uniqueness, data-driven approaches, citations, and digital PR. In Grant’s words: “Getting content so good that LLMs can’t ignore you, Google can’t ignore you, and publications can’t ignore you.”
It’s the Steve Martin philosophy applied to SEO: “Be so good they can’t ignore you,” and, coincidence or not, the rule I have applied for the last 15 years in SEO.
Watch the full interview with Grant Simmons here:
Thank you to Grant Simmons for offering his insights and being my guest on IMHO.
More Resources:
- How LLMs Interpret Content: How To Structure Information For AI Search
- Do We Need A Separate Framework For GEO/AEO? Google Says Probably Not
- SEO In The Age Of AI
Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal
