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Details
Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM ET
Location: FM:Systems Office, 1101 E Whitaker Mill Rd Suite 220, Raleigh, NC 27604
Food & Drinks: Provided
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 brands get found online since before Google existed. He started an agency in 2001 with a single client and grew it to more than 140, ran SEO at Homes.com through its sale to CoStar, and now consults through his own shop, Graick. Lately he's been chewing on one question: how AI decides what your brand is, and how you change its mind. He grew up in London, lives in Virginia Beach, and would rather be sailing.
Food & Drinks
Pizza is coming from Capital Pizza Box, the takeout sibling of Oakwood Pizza Box. Same New York style pies people line up for on Person Street, minus the line, and it's a few minutes from the venue so it shows up hot.
Drinks are from St. Pierre Wine Shop + Bar again: natural reds and oranges, bubbles, a good mix of beer, and a real non-alcoholic lineup so nobody's stuck with water.
All of it's free. Show up hungry.
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.
Schedule
6:00pm - Doors open, drinks, mingling, networking
6:30pm - Presentation, Q&A
7:15pm - Drinks, mingling, networking
8:00pm - Doors close
About
The Triangle SEO Meetup is a free monthly meetup for SEO professionals and marketers in the Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and greater Triangle area of North Carolina. We alternate between casual community hangs and speaker-led presentations.
Learn more about us, find out our upcoming events, and signup for our email list on our website triangleseomeetup.com.