Credentials
The credentials behind SIMLL's AI SEO practitioner
Every SIMLL program is built by Jose Villalobos, an AI SEO practitioner trained by the people who wrote the methodologies and the labs that build the AI engines. Here is each credential, explained rather than listed.
Methodology origin
Koray Tugberk Gubur's Holistic SEO Community
Member since 2022. Koray Tugberk Gubur is the SEO who systematized topical authority: the idea that search engines trust sites that cover a topic completely, with every page connected to a deliberate semantic structure, over sites that publish scattered content. His Holistic SEO Community is where that methodology is developed, tested, and argued over in the open. It is the origin of the mapping discipline SIMLL applies to every client market.
Applied program
Topical Authority Course graduate
The Topical Authority Course is Koray's applied program: building topical maps, structuring content networks, and executing them without cannibalization. Graduating it means the mapping work SIMLL does at onboarding follows the discipline as designed, not a paraphrase of it.
On-page rigor
Kyle Roof's IMG
Kyle Roof's IMG. A membership rather than a certification. No certificate exists. What it provides is the full course library, which Jose has worked through, plus live sessions with Roof and other practitioners. The on-page methodology it teaches is POP, Page Optimizer Pro.
Kyle Roof is known for single-variable SEO testing: proving what actually moves rankings by isolating one factor at a time, most famously ranking pages written in lorem ipsum to demonstrate how on-page signals work. The methodology turns on-page optimization from taste into measurement. It is the standard SIMLL applies to every page before it ships.
Formal certification
Google AI Professional Certificate
Google AI Professional Certificate. Issued by Google. A hands-on program covering AI fundamentals, prompting, responsible use, and applying AI across professional work. This is the one formal certification in the stack, and it is directly relevant to what SIMLL does: the firms that get cited by AI search are the ones whose partners actually understand how these systems behave.
Model-side training
Anthropic coursework
Completed the training programs Anthropic makes available on how Claude reasons and cites sources. For an AI SEO practitioner this is the other half of the job: knowing how the engine on the answering side selects, weighs, and attributes sources.
OpenAI coursework
Completed the training programs OpenAI makes available on how ChatGPT assembles answers, the retrieval and citation behavior that decides which businesses get named in a response and which stay invisible.
An honest note on formal certifications: Anthropic and OpenAI do not issue formal certificates for their coursework. What Jose holds is the training itself, taken directly from the labs.
Put these credentials to work
A free 30-minute discovery call with the practitioner himself. No sales team, no handoff.