Why AI Gets Your Brand Wrong (And How to Fix It) - Grant Simmons Presenting
Presentation:
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity what your company does and you'll get a confident answer. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's a mashup of an old About page, a competitor's category, and a two-star review from 2019.
Grant Simmons has spent the last few years working out why that happens and what actually changes it. The short version: LLMs run on consensus. They aren't looking for your site. They're reading what the rest of the web says about you, across Reddit threads, review profiles, directories, and other people's content. If those sources disagree about you, or barely mention you, the model fills in the gaps on its own.
Grant will walk through how LLMs decide what an entity is, why ranking on Google doesn't guarantee a mention in an AI answer, and how a citation actually gets attached to a source. Then the fix: lining up every signal about your brand so machines and humans land on the same answer, earning mentions on the sites AI actually reads, and creating what Grant calls Golden Knowledge, the unique, evidence-backed content that gets cited by name instead of blended into the answer.
You'll leave with a way to check how AI describes your brand today and a plan for correcting it.
Speaker:
Grant Simmons has been helping businesses show up online since before SEO was a thing. He's the co-founder of Graick Agency, a boutique SEO, GEO, and digital PR shop, and Director of SEO and GEO at FGV, a growth firm for startups. Earlier he was VP of SEO and Performance Marketing at Homes.com, on the executive team ahead of its acquisition by CoStar, and before that he grew his own agency from one client to more than 140. He comes at search from a development and database background, so his work starts with how machines retrieve and understand information, which is also what his Golden Knowledge series on LinkedIn is about. Born in London, Grant now calls Virginia Beach home.
Venue:
We'll be gathering at the FM:Systems (now part of Johnson Controls) office at Raleigh Iron Works, 1101 E Whitaker Mill Rd Suite 220, Raleigh, NC 27604.
The office is located on the second story of the building, stairs and an elevator are available to reach the second story.
Quick first person video walkthrough of how to get up to the second story and to the entrance of the office:
Parking at Raleigh Iron Works is free and can be found on-street surrounding the building, in a nearby parking deck (behind the Ponysaurus brewery), or in the handful of adjacent parking lots.
Thank you to the team at Johnson Controls (formerly FM:Systems) and to Brian McDonald for graciously hosting us in their beautiful office.
Food & Drinks:
Pizza is coming from Capital Pizza Box, the takeout sibling of Oakwood Pizza Box.
Drinks are from St. Pierre Wine Shop + Bar again: natural reds and oranges, bubbles, a good mix of beer, and non-alcoholic options.
Food and drinks are free, show up hungry!
Schedule:
6:00pm - Doors open, drinks, mingling, networking
6:30pm - Presentation, Q&A
7:15pm - Drinks, mingling, networking
8:00pm - Doors close