I had the pleasure of attending the Tech SEO Connect conference in Durham, NC over the last couple of days, and I must say, my cup is full :)

Several of the presentations honed in on how I’ve been thinking about how large language models (LLMs) behave, and why SEO infrastructure matters more than ever.

Some stand out highlights of this conference:

1. affordability — a low key–warehouse style venue, there were plenty of food and drinks, baristas providing custom coffees (!!), and lots of great local eateries.
2. fantastic expert lineup — longtime favorites including: Cindy Krum, Dana DiTomaso, Jamie Indigo, and Rachel Anderson, plus lots of newer-to-me fascinating, expert speakers
3. every presentation was a winner — so many actionable takeaways
4. single track topic — no stress about missing sessions
5. networking — lots of opportunities between presentations and at after hours events
6. there were puppies

‘Grounding’ & ‘Fan Out’

I’m going to drill down on two concepts that came up repeatedly and that do a good job of capturing ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while: grounding and query fan out.

When I talk about LLMs finding their anchors, this is what I mean.

• Grounding – per Drishti Shah: “LLM grounding refers to the process of linking AI-generated responses to factual, authoritative sources.”

  In other words, grounding is how a model anchors its output to concrete, trustworthy information.

  This is a concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot, LLMs needing concrete and credible information in order to present reliable feedback.

  LLM knowledge can feel somewhat ethereal — when their reasoning is anchored by structured data and consistent entity references across sources, they can be a solid source of information. But take away those anchors, and the grounded part of their reasoning goes poof.

• Fan Out — often referred to as “query fan out”, describes the retrieval process an LLM uses when responding to a prompt; the process of an LLM taking the language of the user’s input and simultaneously checking for references to the different parts of the user’s meaning and intent across the resources it can access at response time. It retrieves the most relevant information, and refines its response by comparing and contrasting those signals.

  Put more simply:
  1. Fan out is about how widely and intelligently the model searches for relevant signals.
  2. While grounding is about how well those signals are anchored to concrete, trustworthy facts.

  (The term ‘fan out’ was mentioned by more than one presenter. Michael King gave a presentation on Query Fan Out).

In essence, the more grounded (concrete) the information an LLM can retrieve in relation to the user’s prompt, the more reliable — and less hallucinatory — its response will be.

Why Hallucinations Happen

Hallucinations occur when a model is forced to predict rather than retrieve—when it doesn’t have the necessary information to produce a concrete answer. In cases like these, it does what it was trained to do: it predicts the most plausible continuation, even if that means confidently making something up.

Hallucinations can happen either because relevant information is missing, or because the retrieved signals are weak or inconsistent.

Why don’t LLMs just say “I can’t reliably answer that”

This behavior isn’t intentional; it’s a direct consequence of how these systems are built and trained.

Two key reasons are:

1. The architecture is generative, not discriminative – LLMs are trained to predict the next token that best continues the conversation based on patterns in their training data. (Brown et al., 2020¹). In simple terms they are like a massive autocomplete engine.
2. Training data contains millions of examples where humans “confidently guess” (Bender & Gebru et al., 2021²; Lin et al., 2021³). In books, articles, and forum conversations, people rarely say: “I don’t know enough to answer that.”, they more often offer a confident-sounding explanation — even when incomplete or speculative — LLMs learn this pattern.

Website Optimization

This is where all of this ties directly back to SEO and AIO. Make sure your foundation is solid using traditional website optimization best practices — maintain clarity and consistency in:

• urls/directory structure
• title tags
• meta descriptions
• heading hierarchy
• internal linking + anchor text
• Schema.org structured data

… these have always helped search engines understand content. Historically these are important tagged “snippets” that search engines value and potentially trust.

As search and conversational systems increasingly share retrieval infrastructure, these same signals now help with both grounding and fan out. When your URLs, headings, internal links, and structured data clearly point to the same topics and entities, a model’s fan-out process is more likely to retrieve multiple highly relevant, mutually reinforcing signals—from your site and from external sources.

This is similar to how local business citations work. When the same words (and numbers) related to your business (think NAP: Name, Address, Phone number) are consistently repeated across multiple sources, the data, and in turn your business, is viewed as more credible and trustworthy.

Final Takeaway

If you want your business, your products & services, and your content, surfaced to potential customers in search and conversation engines, it needs to be concrete, repeatedly sourced, and reliable. Then when models fan out, they consistently find you, and when they ground their answers, they can safely lean on your content.

And if you want to up the bar on attendee happiness at your next conference, definitely provide puppies!

Learn more about Tech SEO Connect here:

• Tech SEO Connect 2025 website: https://www.techseoconnect.com/
• Presentations on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@techseoconnect/

Related Research:

1. Brown, T. et al. (2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
   — Foundational paper explaining the generative next-token architecture.
2. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T. et al. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
   — Shows how LLMs learn human linguistic patterns, including confident guessing.
3. Lin, S. et al. (2021). TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07958
   — Demonstrates how models imitate confidently expressed human errors.

The post When LLMs Go ‘Poof’: Understanding Grounding, Hallucinations, and SEO appeared first on CCSEO.

This is how it panned out…

We had no unused Goals in any of our Goal Sets in Google Analytics for this particular Analytics Property (website), so to track some conversion events for a new campaign we were doing I renamed and reset some old goals.

Fyi… when importing from Analytics, in the Adwords Conversions “Import from Google Analytics” tab you can’t see your goals in the import list unless they have already been triggered in Analytics by Adwords visits.

I waited till the next day then checked: Adwords > Tools & Analysis > Conversions > Import from Google Analytics. At this point they were showing up in the list with the correct goal names: Stay 15 Seconds, Rebate Download, Click Internal Links.

I clicked on the three goals I was importing, identifying them via their correct goal names, then clicked the big blue “Import” button at the bottom of the screen. However, once they had imported the names reverted back to the previous goal names.

So now on my Google Adwords Conversions screen I see the old goal names, however it is actually the new goal data that is being tracked. This can be confirmed by hovering over the speech bubble under “Tracking Status” for each conversion listed, and by clicking on the linked goal conversion name which takes me to a screen that shows me the webpage url where the Goal is being triggered.

Since we’ve used up all our goals our only choice in the future will be to rename & re-set goals when we want to track new campaigns, so unless Google fixes this it will continue to be an issue every time we want to track Google Analytics goals as conversions in Adwords.

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You may already have noticed that when you search for your business one the web, there are many directories & search engines that are offering information about your business to your customers. This happens because many sites ?scrape? your information from public records, phone book listings, and other websites in order to populate their business directory or search engine. Most of these sites allow you to claim your local business listing so that you can edit it and optimize it, correcting any misinformation and adding descriptions of services and products, photos, and other information your potential customers might be interested in.

Every time you claim a business listing, you are creating an online account requiring a username and password. With hundreds of business directories and local listings available online, keeping track of which directory listings you claim and how to access them is crucial to maintaining an organized web presence.

Often, business owners hire professional local SEO companies to claim, optimize, & maintain their business listings. If you?ve worked with more than one professional, or have had employees claiming your listings for you, trying to figure out which directory listing is already claimed can become confusing.

How to tell if your listing has already been claimed on the top 5 local business listing sites:

Google Places

• Find your Google Places Listing by searching Google Maps and click on your name.
• Look in the top right corner of your Places Page. It should say ?Owner-verified listing? if it has been claimed.

Bing

• Search Bing for your business name. How detailed and filled in your business listing appears may indicate that it has been optimized, and therefore, already claimed. Near the bottom, look for this wording: ?Change your business listing? and click on this link.
• If it has been claimed, the phrase ?This listing has already been claimed? will show up next to your business name.

Yahoo

• Go to Yahoo Local and search for your business name.
• Look at your listing to see if it is correctly filled out.
• If it has not been claimed, it is unlikely that it will have photos and detailed information about your business.
• Click on the words “Edit Business Details” at the bottom of the listing.
• Click on “Edit as a Business Owner?”
• You will be prompted to log in to your Yahoo account. You may attempt login recovery if you don’t remember your password.
• If you are able to log in & your listing has been claimed, your business information will be available for you to edit.
• If you are given the option to claim your business, then it has not been claimed already and you can do so now.
• Be careful not to create duplicate listings. If duplicate listings already exist, you should claim and delete them.

Yelp

• Search Yelp.com to see if your business name and information shows up.
• If it does, check to see if the words ?Provided by business? show up next to your business descriptions.
• If you find that your business listing has not yet been claimed, you can claim it on Yelp here: https://biz.yelp.com/claiming

Superpages

• Search for your business on superpages.com
• Look to see if the information is accurate
• Look for a yellow box at the bottom of your business listing that states: ?Are you the Business Owner?? and has a ?Claim My Listing? button. (This will appear even if your listing is already claimed.)
• Follow the process to claim your listing or log in to see if it appears in your dashboard.

Other Local SEO Resources

Here are a couple more ways to see if your business listings have already been claimed:

Getlisted.org is an easy way to double check the status of your business listings. A quick scan will provide you with a free status alert, but be sure your information has been entered correctly.

Yext.com doesn?t let you know if your business listings have been claimed, but it will let you know if they’re listed and how well optimized they are.

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Here at CCSEO we are celebrating Mr. Clokey?s life & accomplishments as well as the successful launch of the new official website for Gumby and Friends, Gumbyworld.com, built and search optimized by our team over the last month.? The website was revealed this week as a tribute to Art Clokey, and to celebrate his Birthday with Google and Gumby fans worldwide.

In keeping with CCSEO’s high standards, the GumbyWorld.com website launch focused on search engine friendly and modern website architecture, with a strong effort to improve overall web visibility.

Starting yesterday, when Google began featuring the Gumby doodle in countries that are a day ahead of the U.S., Gumbyworld.com became the center of attention for a global audience. Gumby lovers from Australia, India, Argentina, the Philippines and dozens of other countries have been interacting with the new site and re-engaging with a favorite childhood icon.

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All of the public Internet servers throughout the world are interconnected. When a person goes online with their personal computer, they connect to the Internet and are then able to access all publicly available documents and files stored on the World Wide Web.

The location of a website and its files on the Internet is usually identified by a domain name.

When you type the domain name for a website (website address) into a browser address field, or click on a link to the website via a search engine results page, you are requesting to view that page and the related files stored on the server at that location (the domain).

Your request is sent from your computer to the server of your Internet service provider, which then passes on your request. The request is passed through a series of interconnected servers until it gets to the host server where the website files are stored.

The host server responds to your request by sending the content back to you, via your web browser, along a similar path of Internet servers. You are then able to view the web page and related files via your web browser, e.g. Chrome, Safari, or FireFox, etc.

Since these terms are somewhat abstract some people confuse their website ‘domain name’ with their website ‘hosting’. In my next post I will go into a bit more detail about what a domain name is, and how it relates to your website and hosting.

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The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers. These interconnected computers are able to share data (information), however not all the data on the Internet is available via the Web. When you get online with your computer, you become part of the Internet, i.e. your computer becomes one of the interconnected computers on the Internet.

The World Wide Web is a system of interconnected servers (computers) that support specially formatted documents (web pages) that contain HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), and hyperlinks. The key elements here are the markup of the documents and the linking within the text and graphics. When clicked upon, these links (hyperlinks) give a user immediate access to additional web pages and multi-media items such as image, video and audio files.

Software applications called ?browsers? enable us to access the information on the Web. Two of the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer (Microsoft), and FireFox (Mozilla). Other browsers commonly used are Safari (Apple), Opera and most recently, Chrome (Google).

It is the specially formatted documents, the linking within them, and the related files, all accessible via a browser, that make up the World Wide Web.

In a nutshell, without the Web the Internet would still exist, without the Internet the Web could not exist.

Stay tuned for our next post where I will talk about websites and how they work.

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SERPs are ‘Search Engine Results Pages’

Understanding what kind of content is presented to you in the SERPs, and how it got there, can help you be a more shrewd and savvy searcher.

If you’re a business owner, with or without a website, getting to know what the SERPs have to offer gives you more ways to market your products and services, and maximize your web visibility.

A Google Results Page

At the end of this post is a large screenshot of a Google search results page with the various parts identified (click on the thumbnail on the left to see it now). It highlights the paid and organic listings, the shopping results and the universal search results, all of which I’m now going to describe in more detail.

Organic vs Paid Search Results

One of the first things you need to know about SERPs is that they usually offer at least two kinds of results, organic search results, and paid search results.

On the left of the SERP you will see the organic listings, which are given the majority of the page space. The term ?organic? is used to describe the non-paid search results that are ranked by Google?s calculation of their value and relevance to the search query you?ve entered. The owners of the organically listed websites have almost certainly spent time working on the quality of their content and optimizing their web pages for the search engines.

Paid search listings are placed at the top and right hand side of the page (or sometimes only on the right hand side of the page). These results are labeled ‘Sponsored Links’ and if placed above the organic search results are distinguished by a pastel backround. This is what is known, among other things, as ‘Pay-Per-Click’ advertising. The advertiser has to pay for every click through to their site via one of these paid search results.

So as a web user, when choosing what to click on, it’s important to bear in mind, that the organic results have earned their placement based upon their content. The sponsored listings have paid for their placement.

Universal Search & Google Base

Also, on the left, in the main body of the Google search results pages, you might see some other results from Google’s ‘Universal Search’. These are results Google offers if it’s pertinent to your search query.

For example if you are doing a search on a product, you’re likely to see shopping results at the top of the page listing the product and various prices. These listings come from Google’s ‘Product Search’ database. If you own an e-commerce website you can upload your products and related information, for free, to Google Base for the opportunity to have your product listings show up for related shopping searches.

Google?s Universal Search also includes, when relevant, video results, image results, news results, book results and more.

Local Search: Google?s Local Business Listings

If you are searching for a service and use a town or city name in your search, then Google will show a map and a list of 1-10 related business listings at the top of the search results page.

As of April 2009, even if you don?t use the town or city name, Google will try to identify your location and show you the local business listings if you type in a location-relevant search term such as ?restaurants? or ‘bicycle repair’.

If you?re wondering how Google knows where you are located, you can read more about it here – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-becomes-more-local.html

There are a couple of ways Google gathers content for these listings. They either retrieve the information from other web sources, or the business owners? set up a Google Account and enter their business information via the Local Business Center. This is one of many free services Google provides.

In this post we’ve touched on organic vs paid search, shopping results, universal search and local search and have pretty much covered all of the basics of the Google SERPs page. If you have anything to add or any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Example Google Search Results Page

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When we evaluate an existing website, we try to consider and balance many aspects including usability, scalability, modern development standards, design, seo requirements, and cost.? Unfortunately, we often find that existing sites are not designed with scalability in mind, and are built and maintained with outmoded development practices, and more often than not with no consideration for SEO.

In a lot of cases, we conclude that the best and most sustainable route for these websites is to initially re-code them (and sometimes update the design). ?There are always minor improvements and enhancements that can be made without a re-code, but it is often like using a bandaid to mask a problem where surgery is required. ?Also, it often seems irresponsible to make changes and improvements to a website if there are underlying problems that haven’t and won’t be addressed without a rebuild.

Without a sufficiently sized, well engineered, and stable foundation, it will often be more time consuming and costlier (in the long run) for our client to continue to add to an existing website. ?Naturally, it seems counterintuitive to some people to take their functioning website and recreate it, especially given the increased initial cost, but it is often the only reasonable route. ?It saves money and frustration down the road, lays the proper foundation for SEO basics, and ensures that their website maintains it’s usability and functionality with growth.

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The World Wide Web (www), or ‘the web’ as it’s more commonly referred to, consists of gazillions of interconnected computers called servers. Stored on these servers are squillions of web pages and files, the same way we store files on?our own personal computers. The web pages and files for each website are stored in one or more folders (directories) on these servers.

Search engines work by sending out a robot (web crawler), an automated software program, that crawls the web collecting information. The robots crawl from web page to web page and from website to website by following links. They retrieve the content they crawl, the web pages and related?files (image files,?PDF files, Word documents etc.)?which?are then added to the search engine database (index). Search engine marketers commonly refer to this as ‘indexing’.

Each search engine has an algorithm, a set of rules by which it determines the value, validity and relevance of the content it has retrieved.

When a web user types in a search term (keyword) at that search engine, the content the search engine considers most pertinent to the search query, based upon its algorithm, will rank highest in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The search engine robots aren?t genius and can only do what they?ve been programmed to do. They?re also not human, and historically have not been able to do many of the things that humans can do, e.g. see images, see flash movies, interact with web pages that require the clicking of a button or the filling in of a form.

A website can be built in ways that can either promote or inhibit crawling by a search engine robot. If a robot can?t navigate a website easily, it can?t access all the content. In turn, this means that the search engine will not index the content. If the content isn?t in the search engine database, there is no way for a web user searching at that search engine to ever see those web pages come up in the search results.

Ideally, to promote crawling and indexing of all of a website?s content, the website should be built to web standards using search engine friendly coding. If that content is also optimized for the search engines by adding target search terms in the appropriate places, then the search engine robots will be able to identify & evaluate the website content and rank it for its target search terms (keywords). This will give your web pages a better chance of being seen by the web user searching for your topic, products or services at that search engine.

Knowing the basics of how search engines work is not only the beginning of achieving good web visibility, it is also important to properly approach website search engine optimization.

Thanks to Jeff Jones Illustration for the artwork :-)

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We plan to publish regular updates covering search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), local search, social search, web analytics, website usability, website design, web development, and anything else related to the business of web visibility.

We happily encourage comments, questions, and feedback, and hope to hear from you.? Please subscribe to our feed, or check back regularly for new posts!

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