Pubcon Austin 2025 Recap: LLMs and Two Ridiculous Rides | Grant Simmons

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Getting to Pubcon is Half the Fun!

Pubcon Pro Austin 2025 wasn’t just another SEO conference—it was an AI-powered choose-your-own-adventure, held in a city where tacos are currency and the heat makes your slide deck melt if you’re not careful.

Let’s start with the ride. My first Waymo trip. Buckle up? Nope—don’t touch the wheel. Because apparently, the big cat (Jaguar) on the steering wheel is just there for decoration. I rode hands-free through downtown Austin like a sci-fi extra with trust issues. The future is here, and it’s got a smug little dashboard sign telling you to relax while it calculates a U-turn that may or may not clip a taco truck.

My What AI Knows About You – Waikay for Short – Presentation

Once safely (ish) delivered to the AT&T Conference Center, it was all systems go. The sessions were strong, the hallway conversations even stronger, and the bar – well, let’s say the unofficial after-hours roundtable may have solved more SEO mysteries than a full year of Reddit threads.

I had the privilege of giving a talk titled “Tracking What AI Knows About You and Your Brand,” which, yes, sounds like a privacy lawsuit waiting to happen, but was actually about how LLMs, search assistants, and AI-fueled overviews are rewriting the rules of visibility, trust, and findability. Spoiler: They don’t care how “optimized” your title tag is if your brand doesn’t exist in the right datasets.

My talk was anchored in a framework I’ve been refining – Create. Curate. Connect. Simple, actionable, and designed to help SEOs stop shouting into the void and start feeding the machines what they actually crave: structured knowledge, consistent identity signals, and topical expertise. And before you ask – yes, I name-dropped a few legends who helped shape that thinking and provided the “gut-check” on my thoughts as SEO evolves.

Who Says I’m Quirky?

And then there was Danny Goodwin, my editor at Search Engine Watch, who generously (he didn’t know, lol) let me throw up a slide of him calling me “quirky” while my Sherlock character grinned like Ted Lasso at a press conference.

Beyond the stage, Pubcon Labs made a glorious return. Real-time feedback. Tactical tips. No fluff, no filler, just pure marketing nerdery. And hats off—backwards cap and all—to Brett Tabke, who pulled it together like only Brett can. The man is the Gandalf of conferences: he always shows up exactly when needed and makes the magic happen.

Is SEO Dead Again?

The big takeaway? AI isn’t the end of SEO – it’s just the next iteration. SEOs aren’t becoming obsolete. We’re becoming knowledge architects, brand librarians, and digital cartographers. And Pubcon Austin made it abundantly clear: we’ve got the tools, the brains, and, apparently, the self-driving cars to lead the way.

Till next time, Austin. Keep it weird. I’ll keep it “quirky.”

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