The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/76589811311e2d30

There's this term everyone's hearing about AEO. Answer engine optimization. Just how do I show up in not LMs as an answer. It feels like such a big deal to win at AEO. In order to win something like what's the best
website builder that Google they would win if their blue link showed up first. But that's not the case in the LM because the LM is summarizing many citations. And so you need to get mentioned as many times as possible. Chat GPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter. You can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow and start showing immediately. You can have a Reddit thread, you can have a YouTube video, you can be mentioned
So early stage.
Companies can win. They can win quickly. Are the leads that these answer engines driving to companies actually valuable? Significantly more valuable. A lot of people are seeing this as everything is different. Nothing we've done before is gonna work. We have to rethink everything. There's significant misinformation.
information on AEO. There's news articles about how Google searches is going to die because it's a new thing. Google's slice of the pie stays the same, the pie gets bigger.
Today, my guest is Ethan Smith.
Ethan is the CEO of Graphite and my go-to expert for all things SEO.
SEO is going through a major transition right now.
Everyone used to get a Google anytime they had a question.
Or we're looking for a product or doing research.
These days, a lot of people are moving to ChatGPT and Claude and Geminine Perplexity to get answers to their questions, and this will only be accelerating over time.
And even Google is changing the search experience in a pretty radical way, with AI overviews at the top and their newly introduced AI mode, which is basically their own version of ChatGPT.
This means that the world of SEO is going through a big change.
including the rise of AEO, which stands for Answer Engine Optimization, basically SEO for ChatGBT.
Getting your product to show up in the answers that people get.
Ethan has been at the forefront of this new skill and channel, and in this conversation, he shares everything that he's learned about how to get your product to show up more often.
Inside of the answers that people get. The advice that Ethan shares in this conversation is incredibly tactical and worth a lot of money, so please slurp it up and use it for your own products.
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With that, I bring you Ethan Smith.
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Ethan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to the podcast.
I'll be back.
We did a podcast episode just over two and a half years ago.
I think of it as the definitive guide on how to win an SEO. People have been referencing it ever since. I'm really proud of what we did there.
But
Things have changed. Things are changing in the world of SEO. And so uh I'm excited to talk to you again.
About
How to be successful in this new emerging world.
Where AI is changing.
How I see it works, the rise of AO and GEO.
Let me start with just this question. How long have you been working on SEO at this point and
Has anything come close to being this significant in changing the skill of SEO?
Yes, so I got started in SEO in two thousand seven, so it's been eighteen years.
And
The
Actually the largest change when I got started in SEO, I got started in programmatic SEO and commerce SEO, like next tag and shopping dot com and
And uh
Price grabber.
And
That was when you could do
Mass auto generated.
Landing pages.
And uh
That was probably the biggest ship, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and and similar things, to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from
Yeah, C being spam to not spam.
That was probably the biggest change. And then this was probably the second biggest change.
I think that the main thing here is it is related to search, but it's a summarization of search and there's new inputs. So it's probably the second biggest change.
Okay, that is really interesting,'cause I think a lot of people are seeing this as like everything is different.
Nothing we've done before is before is gonna work. We have to rethink everything. You're saying this is actually the second biggest change and the just like Google's update back in the day was actually even more significant.
Yeah.
Very cool. Okay.
Let's set a little context for folks.
Let's define some terms. There's this term everyone's hearing about. There's actually two.
A EL and G E O
What do they stand for? Are they different? What are they referring to specifically?
They I think are the same. Ultimately the definition of a word is whatever a group of people agree is the definition of a word. So I think we'll see what people decide as the definition of the word. I'll put forward my definition.
So A EO and GEO are are essentially trying to describe the same thing, which is
How do I show up in in not LMs?
That's an answer.
And
I personally prefer
Answer engine optimization versus generative engine optimization, because generative can you can generate images and videos and
Things other than an answer.
Whereas answer is more narrowly defined. So my personal preference is we're talking about
Optimizing L and so an answer is more.
more uh narrow of a definition than generative, but ultimately it's whatever whatever we decide is
Is the name and the definition is what it will be.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Answer engine optimization sounds a lot the cleaner to me.
If you have to pick one. So it's good to know they're the same thing. People some people just prefer the latter one for some reason.
Uh
It's interesting'cause recently uh I don't know if I told you this, but
I was looking at my
referral traffic and I found that
Chat GPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter.
Which I did not see coming, so somehow it's already happening. Uh I'm excited to learn just how to
Lean into it potentially and optimize it further.
And when did you see the spike? Did you see when it started growing dramatically?
Unfortunately the dashboard I have doesn't give me the great like peripheral traffic optimization. When when do you think I probably saw it?
Companies that we work with started in January.
And it started.
One because of more adoption, but two is because the answers became a bit more clickable. You have maps, you have shopping carousels, you have clickable cards. So I think the clickability of the answers increased and then the adoption increased.
And that was around January.
Okay. Uh I'm gonna come back to this question of is this good that chat GPT is
sucking out all my content and giving people answers.
And then sending me some percentage of that, but I wanna let's not get into that.
Yet
I want to talk about just what kind of impact
You can
have on having your stuff show up in chat GPT.
So
I had the head of chat G P T, Nick Charlie, on the podcast recently asked him, What do you think of all the stuff, Ao, G O? He's like
Don't don't worry about any of that. Just write awesome stuff, create quality content.
It'll figure it out, it'll find the best stuff.
Imagine you
Very much disagree. I imagine you have seen real impact getting your stuff.
uh pro actively into these answer engines. Talk about just the kind of impact you've seen and what you
And just your your reaction to that.
Yeah, I agree and disagree, but uh you know, the way that I think about it is anything can be optimized. You just need to understand.
the underlying systems and the rules of the game. And if you do that, then you can optimize anything. You can optimize algorithms, you can optimize people, anything can be optimized.
Um
What I think he probably meant by that, I mean probably meant two things. One is please don't spam.
My product. Uh
And two is if you do
I will
see it and I will stop you from doing that. So it's not a long term robust strategy to create spam just like it wasn't a long term robust strategy to create spam on Google. Eventually Google is going to say
Huge shopping comparison sites for making a hundred million.
Uh auto auto generate.
Search pages and I don't like it. I'm gonna
Get rid of the whole category. So same thing with chat GPT.
Anything can be optimized, but if you're spamming it, they'll see that and they'll have a whole team looking at that and then they'll change your algorithm to uh prevent you from doing that.
What kind of impact have you seen? You've done work with a lot of companies. We'll talk through a few examples, maybe share one.
uh to give us context, just like how much can you impact this sort of thing where you show up in, say, Chat GBT more often.
You can uh you can sh I'm affect it a lot. So
Uh specific example with web flow.
is we are working with Webflow on their SEO or on their content.
And we're seeing a lot of wins on the answer engine optimization side. So the specific things that we've done there, one is just
Traditional CO so make landing pages for high search.
Uh high search volume keywords.
Like uh
No, best no code.
website designer and you then for free you'll get answer engine optimization
Impact from that.
So it's just traditional seal.
Which works very well for you. That sounds exactly the same as regular SEO.
Yeah, so I would say everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things uh beyond SEO that also work in AEO.
So second thing uh th and the way that I think about AEO versus SEO.
is that the
The head and the tail are different.
So the head is different in that
In order to win something like what's the best website builder.
Even if Webflow's URL shows up number one in the citations, they're not going to win the answer because their URL showed up number one. But at Google they wouldn't they would win. If their if their blue link showed up first, they would win.
But that that's not the case in the LM because the LM is summarizing
Many citations.
And so you need to get mentioned.
as many times as possible. So usually when you n and you ask something like what's the best tool for X?
The first answer will be mentioned the most in the citations.
So that's very different from from Google.
And so for webflow we uh
Work with them on uh YouTube videos, uh Vimeo videos.
Getting mentioned in Reddit, getting mentioned in other blogs, uh
affiliates stuff like that. So tried a bunch of stuff. The stuff that worked especially well was just straight SEO.
Uh number one. Number two is YouTube videos, and then the third is uh Reddit optimization.
Okay, wow. So you're saying if you
If you can get to number one
If when you ask Chat GPT what's the best website builder and webflows at the top.
that doesn't actually drive them as much traffic as simply being mentioned most often across the summary.
Yes.
And
Part of why that's interesting is because if you're a when when uh startups come to me and ask me for SEO help.
My
First response is don't do it at all.
Uh
spending your time on something else'cause you're not going to be able to grow SEO ear on as a
Uh in search.
Because you don't have enough domain authority.
And it takes a while to get domain authority. And only once you have domain authority can you rank. And so for Google, it's usually something that you do series A, series B, or later. You don't do it as soon as you start.
'Cause you can't win uh early on.
That's not the case for
And optimization because
You can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow.
and start showing up immediately. You can have a Reddit thread, you can have a YouTube video.
You can be mentioned on a blog, like a you know, a brand new Y C company launches, everyone's talking about them. They could show up in an answer tomorrow as a result of that. So
early stage companies can win. They can win quickly.
They can win quickly.
And anyone can win.
quickly.
by getting mentioned as many times as possible by the citations.
So that's the that's what's different about the head.
What's different about the tail?
is that the tail is larger in chat than in search.
So the average number of words, I think Perplexy said this to somebody else said that it was around twenty five words were versus Google words around six words. So the tail's just much, much larger.
People are asking lots of follow up questions. The question you're asking.
Yes. Uh meaning that if you if if if you map out all of the questions
that people ask kind of like an SEO long tail keywords.
If you do long tail questions.
The size of the tail is larger.
Meaning the amount of questions.
that are very specific is larger. The per you know the share.
And the volume.
And there's probably
Uh questions that have never been asked before.
And uh questions that have never been searched before because search can't support
lots of really specific, super specific stuff, whereas chat is specifically made to
Ask a bunch of follow up questions and have a conversation.
And so there's all these questions that have never been asked or searched for before that are now being asked.
And then you can win that. And when I got started in SEO, it was long tail SEO, where you have a page for every single keyword, which doesn't work anymore.
But now the long tail is back.
And shop.
And if you know all those really specific
questions that people are asking.
You can also win that. And you can probably also win that early. And I've seen
Uh
examples of early stage companies who just
launch some really specific AI enable
payment processing API thing.
And they will show up and they'll show up because they're answering questions never been uh answered before.
Are the leads that these
Answer engines driving to companies actually valuable? Are these like good quality leads for P to B SaaS especially?
They are uh significantly more valuable. So
Webflow.
we saw a six X conversion rate in uh difference between
L traffic and
Uh Google search traffic.
Six times. So significantly more qualified. I think that's probably for a couple of reasons. Uh
Probably it's because you're so primed because you're having a conversation with multiple follow up. So there's so much intent that you built.
And you've probably really narrowed in on what you want. So when you're going somewhere.
it's probably highly qualified. And so we're we're seeing that it's a much higher uh conversion rate.
Wow.
This is so interesting. Uh and it makes sense. Like
People trust chat GPT.
To tell them the answer.
And if you are the answer, you have so much
advantage you like that is what people want to know and then okay, cool. Thank you. I'm gonna go check this out.
Uh this all just makes sense.
Going back to the three levers you shared, essentially it's landing the things that you see work in driving.
you uh showing up more in these answer engines.
Uh landing pages, YouTube videos, and Reddit.
Is that right?
Those are some of them.
Uh
The other things so I would I would break it up into
Stuff on your side, onside and off site.
So on site would be traditional SEO.
The difference would be this long tail. I would also say that the difference is lots of follow up questions about does your product do this thing? What are the use cases, features, integrations, languages, like tell me about your product and really specific details about that, and that's on your site.
Then the second group would be off site, which is
show up in all the citations. Citations are comprised of
Video.
Uh
U G C like Reddit and and Cora.
Affiliates.
Dot dash.
Meredith is showing up all over the place, glamour, good housekeeping.
Like getting mentioned there.
Logs.
Uh so it's those two groups.
And that all that all sounds very similar to SEO.
showing up on other people's pages, showing links from say Reddit is always great.
It's interesting that Reddit is such a big deal. What's going on there, do you think?
Okay, we're at it as
One of the most interesting things.
It's
Uh hugely cited.
And
Alms.
And it's
probably the number one
thing people are asking, customers are asking me is how do we optimize for Reddit?
And uh
This goes back to the head of Chat G B T's.
question about please don't spam my my product.
And um
So Reddit is a community where it's real opinions from people.
Authentic.
And it's heavily managed by the community. And the community's very good at managing it.
And so the obvious
strategy for a growth person is
Лец
Hm.
make a bunch of automated spam and spam run it all over the place and get my product to show up everywhere. That the that's the growth mindset.
Uh w which makes sense. The hustle mindset.
So
What are people looking at? They're they're looking at creating hundreds of fake Redd accounts.
P uh pretending to be someone that you're not. Like I have a single person, I'm gonna make a hundred Reddit accounts, I'm gonna
auto-post comments and then like my own comments and then build a trust score and then show say everywhere.
That uh my uh my
Product is the best product.
Fortunately that doesn't work very well, but that's the obvious strategy.
And so we're seeing people trying to do that and we're also seeing those accounts get banned, those comments get deleted.
And so we're seeing people trying to spam and being unsuccessful.
So that that's one strategy.
Their strategy is
The whole purpose of Reddit is to post useful, high quality, authentic
Comments from real people.
So
Uh at Webflow.
We w we uh
We have a couple people at Webflow.
Going to comments.
And saying, This is my name, this is where I work.
And here's a useful piece of information. So
The strategy is
Find a thread that is a part of a citation that you want to show up in.
Say who you are.
Say where you work.
And then give a useful piece of information.
And that works really well. And that sounds simple if you're non
in the growth mindset of I need to scale this to hundreds of
Comments but you don't actually need
ten thousand comments. You know, even five could be
Great. And that scales perfectly well. So the the Reddit strategy is the obvious strategy, which is just just to be an actual user of Reddit. Make an account, say who you are, say where you work, and give a useful answer.
We had the early growth leader from Dill D E E L on the podcast a while ago and
This is how they grew up.
before AI even came around.
Just going big on Reddit and answering people's questions and like hey, happens to be deal can help you with this problem.
So that's interesting.
Uh
It's interesting that Reddit is what is keeping
Chat GPT from being spammed with stuff like
It's not that chat GPT is stopping the spam. It's Reddit is just really good at that.
I
think that in a sense chat GPT is policing because ChatGPT is running a search, it's finding citations, there's a search algorithm that's trying to select
Which citations are useful.
There are people at Shat G B T who are
tuning their search algorithm to select which sources they trust. I'm sure that there's
A search evaluation team saying, Do I like these citations? Yes, no. Is Reddit showing up? I want it to show up. So I think that they're actual people.
Uh
Chat GPT.
Or intentionally.
configuring their algorithm.
to use Reddit because it's trusted. And if it wasn't trusted, they wouldn't use it. Same with Google. Google has specifically
configured their search algorithm to rank.
Uh Reddit and Twitter and Cora because they want
uh user generated content. And if it wasn't good content then they would change the algorithm and they wouldn't
They wouldn't rank it. So I think that they are
Pleasing it in a sense.
Got it.
And all of this is
Post training search oriented
Uh
Feat of of these models. It's not a good thing.
data they were trained on.
Is that right?
I
would assume that the so there's the core model and then there's reg. So the core model is I'm looking at common crawl and billions of web pages and then I'm tr uh you know re retraining the model.
And if you have something like what's the capital of California, it predicts the next word, which is Sacramento.
And that's based on the core algorithm.
Which is not max work prediction.
Then there's Rag, and Rag basically means search, retrieval augment generation. So I'm gonna do a search and then I'm gonna summarize the search.
the there there are these two different things. And so most of what I'm describing is about the rag piece.
not the core model piece. To in uh to influence the core model is probably extremely hard and
Maybe you
You will see the impact a year later, and it's probably something
You know, s some sort of obscure thing that nobody would want to do, like make a million pages that say
Best product for X is brand, which
I don't think most most people want to spend their time on. So I'm
Mostly focused on the Rag side because that's the main thing that's controllable. And I think also the LM is is probably not going to say your product if it didn't show up anywhere on the Rag. So I think that's where the most of the interesting stuff is.
F from an optimization perspective. Cool. I yeah, I I didn't even think about the side of it when we started talking about this, but I think that's an important thing to note is just
This has nothing to do with the training data. This is
post training, once the model's live, what it can do to find recent information using
Rag, web search, things like that.
Okay. Before we get into how to actually do this step by step, how to win at AEO.
What are two or three things that you think it are important for people to understand to be successful in this world just broadly?
First thing is just
recognizing that this is related to search. So it's L on plus Rag. It's summarizing a set of search results usually.
So L on plus drug, number one.
Number two is topics. So
And search.
A landing page is targeting hundreds of keywords.
Which we talked about on the last podcast.
So I'm not targeting one keyword like I was in two thousand seven.
I'm targeting
A thousand keywords and each landing page needs to target that set of thousand keywords, and that's a topic.
Same thing is true for for Anshengine optimization. Each page is targeting hundreds
Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of questions. And so I want to
Group all those questions.
Which then brings us into content. So
How would I rank? How would I get my URL to rank or how or other useful
URLs being decided whether or not they rank.
They answer all the questions. The more of the questions that I answer, the better. So in Google Search, if I have a landing page about website builders, the more that my page answers all of the subtopic follow up questions, the more I'm to show up in Google Search.
Same with shot.
The more uh you answer all the questions, the better. If you don't answer a question, then you're probably not going to show up. And if you answer a questi as follow up question and subtopic somebody else is not answering, you're gonna be more likely to show up. So
Topics number two.
A third is
question research. So how do I know which questions people are asking?
And that's actually pretty hard because in search
Google just tells you with their ads API. They say this is the search volume for this keyword. There's a truth set from Google. And ChatGPT is not giving us that, at least not yet.
Maybe when they do ads they'll they'll give us more access to
Search volume, but there's no truth set.
So how do we know the questions that people are asking?
Uh
One way would just be to take up m my search terms and
change them into questions. So website builder, you can assume that what's the best website builder is probably
A question that's probably asked proportional to the search volume for that keyword.
So that's one the but then I I mentioned that the tail is larger.
Uh and there's parts of the tail that don't exist in search. So how do we know what the tail looks like?
And uh
One strategy that you can use is
What are all the questions people are asking you on your sales calls, customer support?
On Reddit.
uh mine all those questions that exist somewhere else.
probably those similar th those same questions are being asked in chat. And so that's another way to
Yeah.
Fine questions.
Yeah.
The last is citation optimization or off site.
So
Uh
Again, the LM is summarizing.
Right.
So how do I show up as many citations as possible and you can break up the citations into different groups. My site
Video, YouTube Vimeo.
U G Core Core Reddit.
Uh tier one affiliates like dot dash.
Tier two affiliates.
Blogs.
Um so it's it's uh breaking up all those different citations and having s specific strategies for each group.
What is dot dash?
Exactly.
Dot dash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with good housekeeping, all recipes, investopedia.
It's the it's probably the most successful.
SEO.
And
It's also
one of the most cited, probably the most cited in uh LMs as well.
Wow, did not know this.
As you talk, I think about like if you go to Google, no offense, Mr SEO.
But if you go to Google these days, it's just like a bunch of
Unuseful stuff just like hyper SEO'd.
Content.
Do you think
Chat GPT will be able to avoid that fate where it's just a bunch of
hyper SEO'd content that is not what you actually want.
Probably.
And
What you're saying with SEO is that everyone's rewriting each other's content.
non-experts rewriting each other's content. So I got a content scoring tool, which then looks at all the results in Google and it says these are all the things that the other articles are saying. And then this is what you haven't said yet. So the here are recommendations for how to be more typical.
And then everyone rewrites each other's article.
And then
Uh all one other interesting thing is that the majority of landing pages
uh drive no impact.
So we did an analysis where one out of twenty landing pages drive roughly eighty five percent of all your traffic. So nineteen out of twenty landing pages drive little to no traffic.
Which means
If I get
If i if I want to get ROI, I need to spend a small amount of money
On a large number of pages.
And so then you get a non expert to say
uh rewrite this other person's article because that's cheaper than
hiring someone from the New York Times to write your
You know, your your article about what's the best payroll management software.
But
If you knew the few things that would work, the few landing pages that would work, and you wrote them really well, then you could push all that money.
To that one page.
Which is what we try to do.
But uh
Right now it's people rewrite each other's content. So Google has not solved that yet.
That's probably a very hard.
Problem to solve.
Will they ever solve that? Probably.
Will chat GPT ever solve that?
Probably how I would solve that would be
Uh one one concept would be information gain. So did you say something that somebody else didn't say?
Two is how typical are you? Are you so typical?
that I think that you're a rewritten version of somebody else's content.
Potentially Google has eat ex uh expertise, authority, trustworthiness, which actually I don't see having an effect, uh, unfortunately, but
It could. And I could say, Well, this person's an expert, this person's a certified financial advisor.
rank them higher. And I'm actually not seeing that, but they could increase the weight of that. So
These are all potential solutions, but I'm sure that the reason why it has not been solved yet and why everyone's rewriting each other's articles is probably just hard to
build an algorithm to solve that, but will they ever solve that? Probably.
This algorithm or heuristic you just shared is so interesting.
Uh
Because it's helpful for just what is
good content, say with a newsletter or a podcast.
Uh info gain and is it typical. Are you adding something new to the conversation?
And is this unique?
Uh
I think it's a really good strategy for just producing great newsletters and podcasts and and uh all that all the content in the world.
Yes, and ideally did you do original research and do you have some domain expertise?
And did you mention that on the in the content.
This is uh this is a great uh heuristic for just content in general, which is exactly what you want these
algorithms to be looking for. So the alignment is there.
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Let's give people an actual actionable plan to start executing on this and winning essentially at AEO.
Uh if it's helpful, use my newsletter as an example, like how would I show up more often on ChatGPT?
Or Gemini or whatever, or if it's a B to B SaaS company, whatever's easiest.
Let's just talk about how to actually do this.
First I would figure out which questions I want to rank for.
how I would figure out which questions I want to rank for, I would take my search data. I would maybe take my paid search data.
Like what are my money terms? What are my competitors' money terms? So if I'm rippling
What is deal.com bidding all their
Paid search on.
then I would transform those into questions. And actually you can just give those keywords to chat GPT and say, make these into questions and it does a pretty good job.
So take your competitor's paid search data or mine.
Or your own?
Put it in chat GPT get the questions.
So that's step one. Step two is then track them.
So
Put them in a uh in a EO tracker, in a in in a answer tracker.
Third thing would be
Who is showing up as citations.
And then have a strategy for each of those different groups of citations.
Uh
The third would be landing make your own landing pages. So what are the kinds of landing pages that are appearing? Is it a listing? Is it a category page? Is it an article?
tool page like figure out what page type is seems to be showing up the most.
And then you make your own page for that.
How do you
Have your page rank?
answer all the follow up questions. So what are all the follow up questions that someone might ask? You could go back to your search data and look for groups and themes of your
Uh keywords.
that are in your a uh SEO topic.
Same thing for for AEO topic.
Then on the sh uh off site. So
Different strategies for each of those groups.
And I would say that uh
Depending on the company.
Paying an affiliate to mention, you know, that's pretty easy if you have the money.
So if you want to be the best credit card
You paid Forbes.
And then you're the best credit card.
That's strategy one. Expensive, easy, controllable.
The
uh YouTube Vimeo strategy is also actually pretty easy.
because there's no community saying I don't like your YouTube video. You make a YouTube video
You can do whatever you want.
Maybe people view it, maybe they don't, but you can make a YouTube video.
or or a Vimeo video. And the interesting thing with this, especially for B to B, is that
uh YouTube, Vimeo, other video sites.
The kinds of things people make videos for are food, travelling
Fun beauty.
There's not that many.
videos about
AI powered payment processing APIs.
As interesting as that is.
But it's a uh great money.
Turn.
So if you make a video for these really specific high L T V
Maybe non glamorous.
Keywords, questions, topics.
Uh that's actually a big opportunity.
Then uh Reddit. So I mentioned
What we did which is just
Make a Reddit account, say who you are, say where you work, and give a useful answer.
That one is a little bit trickier because the community might say, I don't like your answer. So you can't guarantee that
Your
Comment is there, but it is easy.
So I would do that that group.
Oh, and then uh experiment design.
Experiment design and seeing what works.
So
SEO
and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are n are not correct.
Uh and the reason why is because people don't do analysis.
Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated.
And everyone and then it becomes best practice.
And no one ever did analysis.
So
You you did all the stuff that I just mentioned.
Do an experiment and see if it worked.
Maybe half the stuff I said works, maybe half it doesn't. Do your own experiment. Most best practices, most blog posts are uh not correct.
So how do you set up an experiment?
You get your questions?
You turn tracking on?
Give it a couple weeks.
Make your changes.
Had a test group.
Have a control group.
Intervene on the test group, make your changes.
See if the chart went up, see if the control group did not.
And now you know your particular strategy worked.
So I would definitely do experiments and I would not assume that stuff you read online is
Is correct?
And then you need a team. So who's your team?
Probably your team is
Your SEO team or your SEO agency or your SEO consultant probably
Hopefully they can do this stuff.
Uh and then however
what I think is hard to hire for
is the uh is the off site stuff. So most SEO people are not gonna be amazing at creating YouTube videos and
Reddit strategy. So you might need a different person for that. That might be a community
generalist marketing person. So it would basically be your SEO team.
Please now do answer engine optimization and then marketing community team.
Please uh help me show up in in more citations.
Well.
Okay.
That is incredibly
Valuable. Thank you for sharing all that. I imagine some of this is like
Like you're just giving away a lot of
Amazing.
Advice for free here.
Uh
Thank you. First of all, I imagine there's like a layer, there's only so far you can go on your own. And so eventually it's like okay, we really need help.
That's where a team like yours comes in.
Let me ask a few questions here to follow up. One is this tracker concept. So what is this tracker? It can track like how often you show up, say Letty's newsletter shows up in answers for the questions that I'm targeting.
Yeah, so there's answer tracking, which is kind of like keyword tracking. So keyword tracking would be
Best growth podcast and you put that in
Uh keyword tracking tool. There's
A hundred of them.
They're all the same.
And you see whether or not
What what do you rank?
Uh maybe you rank.
Hopefully you rank number one.
Now in uh answers it's very different, but it's not a little bit more.
Uh related.
So if you ask the same question.
you will have different answers each time. Mm-hmm.
Uh if you ask a questi
There's uh different answers per run. And so
Chat GPT is basically calculating a distribution of all the
you know, potential answers it would give and depending on when you ask it. It's basically like a weighted random sample.
And so you're gonna get different answers.
You you also have question variants.
So you can ask.
different versions of the same question. And you might show up in one and you might not show up in another.
Then there's different surfaces. There's perplexity, there's Gemini, and there's Chat G BT.
Many I.
And so these surfaces have different answers.
And so you essentially need to create a share of voice.
for f across all these different things and create you know, like a distribution.
So how often am I showing up? What's my average rank?
And that's answer tracking.
So then
Where do you get answer tracking? And answer tracking's essentially um an evolution of keyword tracking.
So there's
Uh we have a page with uh sixty different answer tracking tools.
But it's ultimately just like he were tracking, it's all the same thing, roughly. And so
Pick one of the sixty. We have answer tracking.
Uh we'll w we're building answer tracking.
There's fifty nine other options, probably all pretty good, probably all pretty similar.
Uh but but pit one.
Uh my general suggestion is
It the one that
Pick the cheapest one that does what you need.
Uh, just like keyword tracking, you can only you know, so there's not a premium version of keyword tracking you rank number three or you don't
So
Pick the keyword tracker that
is the cheapest that does what you want. Same with answer tracking.
Uh and so then when I'm doing an experiment.
Put your answers in.
track them.
See a chart over time, see your average rank, how often are you showing up and what's your average rank?
And then you make a change, and then hopefully you go up.
Amazing.
Uh I love this term voice share.
Uh I never heard that before. Uh makes sense. The L like percentage time you're showing up in LMs.
Is there
Is there an LM is it just like ChatGPT, is like Google equivalent now to Chat GPT?
How do you recommend people think about say Gemini or Claude or or Perplexity and others?
So interestingly
There are similar
foundational algorithms across all of these.
Like they're all using Surge.
They're all using search and they're all using
LMs, which, you know, foundation algorithms are all the same.
The results are actually pretty different. So we're we're doing a study, we're seeing that Google and Bing are not that similar.
search engines, we're saying that chat GPT citations and Google search results are actually not that similar.
uh perplexity is ac interestingly
Similar to
More more similar to Google than uh than ChatGPT. We we did a study looking at thousands of questions and saw the uh citation overlap with Google search results was around
thirty five percent for ChatGPT and Google. So not that much. Perplexity was around seventy percent, but essentially they're all similar algorithms, but with very different
citations and and results.
So
Then look at which surfaces have the most traffic.
And then
Track those.
You probably don't need to track all of them, but um
Look across all those, but you but you you do need to look at it.
your share of voice or the percent of time you show up across all these surfaces, you need to ask the question multiple times and you need to ask the variance of the question to truly know how frequent you're showing up.
Considering that ChatGPT they're gonna hit something like a billion weekly active users in the near future.
Like do you need to worry about
Claude and Gemini.
And perplexity, like is the traffic there meaningful? I know it is, you know, a lot of people
But
Like how important is it to focus on those other LMs?
Well, the way that I would answer that is I believe AOL was the one of the largest search engines early on.
And Google was not.
And so we could ask in nineteen ninety nine or whatever.
Should we just focus on AOL search and and Yahoo search? Do we really need to worry about
Google and the answer is we don't actually know. It's very early. We don't know who's gonna win. Uh I do think that Chat GPT for sure is going to be large. Will perplexity or Claude or these others
Compete with them? Probably.
Just like search. I think that there will probably be multiple winners and probably you'll need to optimize for several. I don't think that you'll need to optimize for ten, but there'll probably be around three or so that you'll wanna that that will win.
Uh that you want to optimize for.
Okay. By the way, I want to make it clear I I love Claude, I use Cloud and Chat GPT equally, roughly.
Uh I didn't want to make it sound like uh ChatGPT is the only product people use.
Okay.
How does this strategy change depending on the kind of company you are? Say you're a B to P SaaS company or a consumer product, does anything in these
Seven steps change significantly.
Let's take B to B, for example. First thing is that the citations that are being mentioned are gonna be quite different.
So uh citation optimization will vary quite a bit.
Just to clarify what you just said, what do you mean when you say citation strategy is different?
Meaning the citations that show up for B to B versus marketplaces are are different kinds of citations. So for B to B it might be
Like tech radar shows up a ton.
When I ask questions.
I've never read Tech Radar, but for some reason it shows up all the time. I'm I'm sure it's great. But uh Tech Radar is showing up a ton for for B to B.
For whatever reason.
In commerce, it's not gonna be that. It's gonna be
glamour and cosmopolitan.
For marketplaces, it'll be
Eater and uh you know.
Yelp, TripAdvisor, place like that. So so the kinds of citations that show up are different.
Um
Most of the stuff that I've been talking about is specific to B to B.
Stuff that's different for commerce. So
Uh
For most B to B questions
The answers are not clickable. There's nothing to click on.
And so if you actually want to measure the impact, you cannot just look at last touch.
Referral traffic.
You have to see whether or not you
shut up in the answer with tracking, and then you also need to ask
The user
How did you hear about us post conversion to actually know the impact? It's so it's harder to track for for B to B.
Uh
Also for B to B, you're probably deciding which payroll management software to use after
fifty touch points with a brand, it's not gonna be you just search for something you suddenly spent a hundred thousand dollars on.
Parallel management software.
So that's B2B. Commerce is different. So commerce actually now has more clickable cards like you would in a Google. So if you ask what's the best d uh TV for
For apartments.
They're actual shoppable cards.
Uh.
those shoppable cards are
Showing multiple sellers. Those sellers have rich snippets. Schema is important. The number of reviews are important. So it's actually quite different.
You can look at
Last touch, referral traffic.
to get a good sense about the number of conversions that you're getting.
for commerce similar with l uh
With
restaurants and hotels and local marketplaces.
Uh somewhere there. And then
I would say early stage is also different. So I mentioned earlier, early stage, my recommendation is don't do SEL at all for uh for Angela.
Answer engine optimization.
Definitely do.
A Eo.
And only do citation optimization and long tail. Don't do any
Of the mid
uh SEO stuff, just get cited and answer really specific questions.
It's so interesting that so much of this is just like having showing up as that little
Tag slash pill in the answer.
Uh obvio like it's obvious now that I think about it, that's the only way someone will get to your site.
from an LM it's just like clicking that okay, let me go read this article.
Yes.
But what they will do is they will open a new tab.
And they will type in the brand name.
And they'll go to Google.
And then they'll click on your domain.
And you will think that it was branded Google search when it wasn't.
Or they'll open up a new tab.
And they will type in your domain and they'll go directly to your domain.
And you'll
Falsely think that it was direct traffic.
What is your coming back to a question kind of raised at the beginning. So for my newsletter.
The fact that they're sucking up all this content, like I don't even know how much.
And sending me some percent of traffic. You have any I don't know.
Just sense of like is this good? Is this what I if you were running my newsletter.
Would you encourage
All these Lamps to suck up my stuff and then
I'd be like, Oh yeah, you could check it out in Melanie's newsletter if you want.
Yes, and I would get the same answer that uh Brian Balfour gave on your

It's not your choice whether to play the game. Uh you
are playing the game, whether you want to or not, so you might as well
try to show up. Uh if if you just say, Don't look at any of my data.
Then you
Cannot.
Show up and your competitors will. Now what you can do is you can say, I don't want you to train on my data. So you can index my site, but please don't train on my data.
And they have different user agents for that and different bots. So you can just say
And we're b building a a webflow app to block
Training but not
uh indexation.
Or you've just put it in your robots.txt.
This training bot not allowed.
Index bot, you are allowed.
So if you're concerned about that, I I I would suggest that. I think probably a lot of people will do that. But
Saying you can't index my set at all, that doesn't
Makes sense to me.
Such a good point because uh my I don't I don't know if I have competitors in this exact space, but basically they would show up instead and then I lose all that traffic.
Such a good point. Okay, let me come back to the steps you shared just to see if there's something here that's worth diving into a little further.
So this essentially had a
Be more successful showing up.
in LM responses.
One is figure out what questions you want to rank for and you could do this by looking at what your competitors are
advertising and their paid ads and things like that.
Uh just like look at the terms ask the almost chat GPT or Claude, turn these into questions people would ask to find these terms.
Then set up a tracker to see just how you're doing today. Like how often are you showing up.
There's a million trackers, you have a link we'll link to.
To check these out.
Then you look at who is showing up today.
Were they?
Being taken today.
Use that to inform landing pages.
That you create.
To answer those questions better.
And it's an
You you make it very clear that it's very important not to just answer that main question, but also follow up questions.
Then there's off site stuff, so get into affiliates like M Dash.
Uh YouTube Reddit, Cora, sounds like or the core.
And then run an experiment. So you look at this tracker.
And then you
How let me actually ask this.
Uh and the next step is just set up a team, but just to come back to this step.
How do you set up an experiment that isn't just like a before after? How do you do a control group situation?
Yeah. So what I would do is I would take a hundred different questions.
Half of them.
I will intervene, half of them I won't. Or let's say let's take two hundred questions.
So a hundred of the questions.
I'm not gonna do anything. So that's my control group.
And we are seeing a fair amount of
variance in answers just
without doing anything at all. So you definitely want to control group.
And also we're seeing people
you know, people are using LMs more and LM traffic is going up. So you definitely need to control especially in Anstrand optimization.
So control group is don't touch it at all. Leave it leave it as it is. That's a control group.
Test group would be
I'm going to now
Comment on Reddit Threads.
So let's test that. Or I'm now going to make a a YouTube Vimeo video, or I'm now going to pay
Forbes advisor to say that I'm the best credit card.
Maybe break those up into a few different buckets.
Track them, have a couple weeks before.
Couple weeks after
Against the
Control group.
And then
And then the stuff that we're going to do.

Group did not.
Worked and the stuff that didn't did not.
And then
Reproduce it. So
Reproducibility is very important. And
Uh my background's in academic research and it's common to do a study.
That cannot be reproduced.
And so for something to truly be accepted with ac with an academia, it needs to be reproducible, meaning multiple people have done this study and reproduced that thing over and over again. And especially in SEO, it's common for something to change and you think that it was this thing that caused it and it's actually not.
And you just assume forever that that
Uh works.
So reproducibility is very important. Try to do that study multiple times. Try to get studies from other people. And if you know if it works ten times, then it probably works.
And the stuff that and that this comes back to the waste problem. Most work is wasted in SEO. Most work is wasted in AEO.
So how do you know what's not wasted? You do an experiment, you don't assume that what you read online is true, you do your own experiment and then you reproduce it multiple times.
And keep doing the stuff that works and don't do the stuff that doesn't.
It feels like such a big deal to win at A A E O.
Just coming back to this idea that like people are coming to Chat GPT Cloud Gemini.
Looking for an answer.
If you are that answer, I feel like that could just make or break.
your company.
Uh it feels like even more important than SEO.
Just getting this right.
I would
Say that
where I want to get the most conversions possible.
How big is the channel? The b channel is not as big as Search. The Search is definitely larger, but it's it's it is a substantial channel now. And uh Webflow, they get eight percent of their sign ups from
From LMCU.
It's now your one of your top channels.
So it's large. It's not the largest channel. It's not the number one channel. Paid is probably the number one channel, but it's definitely a substantially large channel and
One worth optimizing for.
And as you said, probably growing over time.
Yes.
Okay, let me zoom out a little bit and let me just ask you this. What do you think are maybe the most surprising
Or under disgust.
topics when it comes to AI, N SEO and AEO that we haven't already talked about.
The first thing is that there's
significant misinformation.
on on AI and on AEO. And and it's pretty extreme. It's unusually
The percent of misinformation to
Correct information is is pretty substantial.
So one example is
Every two years there's
news articles about
how Google searches is going to die or it is dying because there's a new thing.
So
That's happening right now with with uh
AI overviews and with AEO.
Google's going down, which is not true.
Before that it was TikTok search. So everyone is using TikTok now.
Gen Z is using TikTok. They're never gonna use SEO. SEO's gonna be dead.
And so you really need to focus on TikTok search, which is not false. But it's it's it's not untrue. It's but it's not
Taking
share away from Google is just a new service. And then before that it was Instagram, and then before that it was Facebook and it was YouTube. And people do search and discover on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube.
Uh but it doesn't take away from Google search.
it adds on top of it. These are all new channels. So
Google's slice of the pie stays the same, the pie gets bigger.
And so misinformation about Google going down. Google is not going down. Google published something recently, their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our
the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it has not down it's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down and most of the
news information about that is saying that it's going down.
So that's the first surprising thing.
The second surprising thing is tooling.
And I've never seen
A channel where these
Extremely expensive tools that essentially do commodity tasks. So imagine if I said, I'm going to charge you fifty thousand dollars for keyword tracking.
You would say, Well, of course that's absurd. It's keyword tracking, I could write this in a day.
Uh no one would do that. But for answer engines.
It's mysterious and people don't really know how it's working. And also the slope of the growth curve is so significant that I'm seeing people
Spend.
Huge amounts of money on what are essentially
you know, keyword tracking uh or commodities.
That's the second thing.
The third thing is the the growth.
Curve of the channel.
And uh we did
A a reforge
AEO webinar a year ago.
And it there was excitement and then it died and there was very little excitement about it. This was in gin.
And then people didn't really care.
They were intrigued intellectually by it, but they didn't care because they didn't see the impact from that. So there's essentially very little interest
between
July and
January. And then suddenly in January is just skyrocketing.
So
you know, if it's if Chat GPT launches, people are very interested, and then it's not not that interesting for growth people. And then there's this little spike in June.
And then it's like this.
Which is usually not what you see with a with a new channel. So the slope of the curve is
is unusually steep.
And the shape of the
Uh
curve is is was also very unusual.

Uh the the last is that
A lot of people do think that SEO and AEO are are different.
And and they're not different.
Uh I think probably part of that is because it sounds great to say that there's this new channel, it's completely different and I'm an expert and I have a tool to sell you and you know, it's totally unique and uh you know, all these other tools are not
Not relevant.
In reality, it's actually
There there's quite a bit of overlap. There is the difference of the citation optimization, the head is different and the tail is different, but the core
uh the core technology is is pretty similar. So those are probably the most most surprising things.
This piece about January being the inflection point.
You mentioned that it was because references started showing up more prominently. Is that the big change?

Increase of adoption of LMs by people, so it's just actually growing more? And then the clickability
And I am seeing
You are seeing now this large increase of actual clicks.
Probably before you got no clicks, even if you showed up an answer. So the clickability of the answer has increased. Especially for things like commerce and local and hotels because they have these rich modules where you can click on stuff and go
somewhere which was not true before. That and I think people are just using
Uh Ellen's more.
Uh, either let me just say I'm learning so much from this conversation. What a fun thing.
Uh I could see it's just like clear how much you
Love this stuff and just how nerdy and deep you get into it. And it's just fun to talk to someone that's so deep and knowledgeable about all these things. So
Thank you for sharing all this with us.
I'm gonna go in a slightly different direction.
There's this whole world of AI content, people generating content with AI, generating landing pages, just like oh my God, SEO's never gonna
Just like just generate all the stuff, AI is gonna make all this stuff easier.
You guys did a really big study on
How that works, whether it's a good idea to generate content with AI.
Can you just talk about what you learned from that and how people should think about AI in generating?
content.
Yes. So I remember when ChatGPT launched and Brian Balfour posted on LinkedIn. What do you people think that is gonna happen from
uh chat GPT and AI and my in my immediate response is
Spam.
So just lots and lots of spam.
Especially SEO spam.

And then there was a whole industry around AI generated content and um
And I knew immediately that it wouldn't work. And the reason why I knew it wouldn't work and when I say AI generated content, I mean
Automated content with no human in the loop.
So I think that the future of content is clearly
AI assisted. Like clearly you and I will be using AI to help us write. So it's not no AI at all, but it's not one hundred percent generated with AI.
I immediately knew that it wouldn't work.
Why did I know that? I knew that because I created spam in two thousand seven.
And I knew what
that what Google did about it.
And how? And I knew the exact same thing was gonna happen.
So what I did in two thousand seven is
I and all the other shopping comparison people.

Scraped all each other's content, reviews, chopped it up, scraped content, hundred million search pages.
Snippets.
And uh and it worked really well.
And then it stopped working. And then all those companies disappeared.
I know that that was exactly what's gonna happen with AI generated content.
And so uh
From the beginning I've I've
not focused on I generated content. Many people have
And uh we
But
I don't know. So maybe it does work. There's lots of
Case studies about it working. So
Let's do a study and let's do an analysis.
So we took
Uh
We looked at both Google and at Chat GPT where we took thousands of searches.
And thousands of questions.
And we put those searches into Google search.
We put those questions into chat.
And the chat GPT.
And then we looked at the citations or the Google search results.
Then we looked at an AI detector.
So we used Surfer Surfer SEO's AI detector.
Now.
When I tell people this they say, Well, you can't detect AI.
So then we evaluated the
the efficacy and the accuracy of the AI detector. So we did that by generating
thousands of AI generated articles.
And it was very predictive. And then we looked at real
Articles.
We did that two different ways. One way is we write real articles and the other is we took uh
Random sample of
A hundred thousand
URLs from common crawl.
Over the last five years.
And then we l looked at the AI detector before ChatGPT was launched. So it necessarily was content not created by a human. And then the false positive rate was around eight percent. So basically the AI detector is very accurate. So
Yeah.
Then we ran it on the content.
Then what we saw was it was around ten to twelve percent of content in Google search and in chat GPT are AI generated.
Ninety percent or not.
And we ran a correlation analysis showing the exact same thing.
So we essentially did a very rigorous study showing
That AI content doesn't
Does not work.
AI assisted content edited.
Is great.
Uh
We we we do that sometimes, other people do that. That is clearly the future of content. So that that does work and should work and that's good.
Uh but purely one hundred percent AI generated does not work.
So then the second thing that we did
was we found that w this was unexpected, but we found that
There's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content.

So back to the common crawl study. We we looked at a hundred thousand different URLs over the past five years. And then you can see this curve where AI generated is now higher than
Human created. So there's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content.
Which is kind of disturbing.
So then let's say that AI generated content did work.
Yeah.
generated content worked.
then everyone would do it. Just like in two thousand seven, shopping comparison sites, if I can scrape my content, why would I pay anyone to write it? I'll just scrape it from you and I'll chop it up.
So then everyone will do that.
And then it will go from
most content is AI generated to almost all of the content is AI generated.
Then what will happen?
If that works.
Is that
Google now becomes a search engine for chat GPT responses.
So if Google's a search engine for Chat GPT responses, there's no reason for Google to exist. Just go to ChatGPT.
Which is the exact same thing that happened in two thousand seven. Google said, I see all these shopping comparison search engines showing up in my search results.
So I'm essentially a search engine for search engines.
Uh
I should be showing
The T V.
in my results. I shouldn't be showing other s vertical search engines. So I'm gonna get rid of them and I'm just gonna go straight to the product.
Same thing will be we true for Chat GPT. Now for Chat GPT, what let's say that Chat GPT ranks its own
derivatives in its citations.
So then you have this infinite loop of derivatives. So I go to chat GPT, I say generate ten articles, I put those articles into the citations, and then I say summarize these citations that were derivative, and then I keep on doing derivatives of derivatives. And then you have an infinite loop of derivatives. And now AI is summarizing itself.
We've uh there's a paper about this
called model collapse. So again there's the core algorithm.
And then there's the rag piece. So the core algorithm uh a group did a
study showing model collapse, which was what if you feed in AI derivatives into the model and train on your own derivatives?
train the core model derivative. And then what happened was you had all these
Problems hallucinations. Things break very quickly.
Okay, so then we did a study on what if you feed derivatives into the rag piece. So
Uh generate ten derivatives, put that in a rank, summarized that and then
generate ten more and then summarize my summarizations infinite loop of derivatives, what happens.
And so what happens is there's a
There's a wisdom of the crowd they all am is summarizing the opinion of many people. So if you s ask a question like what's the best flavor of ice cream
There's not one answer. There's
Thousands of opinions. So the all I'm summarizing these many, many opinions. There's wisdom of the crop.

Uh if you take the average of a large group of people.
They're
average response will be better than the best single individual in the group.
And so it's
Better to have.
More diversity of opinions, wisdom of the crowd.
So what happens to the uh
to the infinite loop of derivatives, you essentially converge on one opinion. So if you ask
What's the best flavor of ice cream?
it will eventually say it's vanilla and it's only vanilla and there's no other flavor of ice cream.
And so that's a simple example, but if you feed in
Derivatives of derivatives?
into the model.
you will basically take the wisdom of the crowd and that will shrink and you'll have a single opinion on everything.
Which is really bad.
So
That's what happens if AI content
uh one hundred percent unassisted AI content works.
I'm afraid of this world where everything is
Trained on AI and AI is trained on AI and generating AI and just like nothing is trusted.
And I love how it's interesting just how much of the incentives are driving this. Like if
Chat GPT was
Finding this valuable. This is what people do, and then just kinda goes off the rails.
So there's just like some team there that is keeping this from happening.
How do you think this evolves? Like if you're them
What would you do over the next few years to
Keep things.
high quality and not drive these perverse incentives.
So I would identify what the perverse incentives might be.
And uh air generated content is one of them.

The second thing is I think that
LMs and search are gonna converge.
And so you're seeing that with Google Search, where they're having L M AI overview.
You're seeing that with LMPs where they're incorporating maps and shopping carousels and it's converging on search. So I think it'll converge on a single
Experience.
That's the first thing.
Figure out what
Two thousand seven Ethan would do uh to create spam and and make sure that he doesn't do that.
Like yeah, generate content or or uh
It's great content.
That'll be the second thing.
And the third thing is there's all these other interesting features that
Use cases that LMs can be great for. So LMs could be great for remembering everything that you've ever asked. It could be good for personalizing stuff specifically to Lenny.
Uh one uh interesting use case that I think will eventually come would be
I say plan a trip to San Francisco and decisions are made for you.
Without any intervention, I have this wonderful EA named Jen.
And I say, Jen, I'm going to Miami.
Please just do everything for me. And she does everything for me. She she knows me, she knows my preferences. She knows that I wanna
Ocean view and I wanna
restaurant with music.
She does all that and I don't have to intervene.
AI can essentially do that.
eventually. And that would do that because it would deeply understand you, it would remember everything about you would have context. It would have a reasoning. And then it would be able to do make all these decisions without your without your intervention, which would be uh autonomous agents. So I think that that's also another very interesting uh
place for someone like me to uh to to optimize for as well.
Yeah, I was just gonna say just imagine
Not even being told this is what you're choosing. Like Oh, and go check out subscribe to the best newsletter out there and you know, if you're up there.
Uh you the good things will happen.
Wow.
What a wild world.
Is there anything else that
We haven't covered that you think would be helpful to folks that are trying to get better at the stuff, try to take the first steps down this road of AEO.
Yes. Ma the most exciting topic which is help center optimization and and support.
Sweet.
So
I mentioned that.
People in chat are asking follow up questions. They're looking for tools. Do you have this feature, this use case, this integration?
And that frequently can
Be answered in help centers.
And usually you would not have uh an SEO team and say, We really want you guys to focus on the Help Center.
But
And chat, since you're there's all these questions about can you do this thing, can you fulfill my use case.
Uh a help center is actually a great place to do that.
And so I think
How how can you optimize the help center? So number one.
Is
It's frequently on a subdomain.
for whatever reason subdomains don't work well sub directories. Move it to a subdirectory. Number one.
Number two is make sure that you're cross linking well.
So usually
Uh
You do not have optimized internal link, so we'll
Link from help center page to help center page. Make sure there's lots of crossing.
The third is you probably have help center content about the head, but the tail you probably don't have any help center uh content for. So an example of this is I was looking for, I wanted to
Track our sales calls.
And
Look to see.
who was in the meeting and what the sentiment was. And I wanted to put that into looker.
So I said which meeting transcription tool
Integrates with liquor.
And the answer is not that.
But
You could use otter.
because Otter has a zapier integration, you could send a zap of the meeting.
put it in the big query, and then
do looker on top of that, but there wasn't
A help center article about that.
Because it's a very obscure use case, but it's not a zero use case.
And so the tail, there's gonna be a bunch of questions in the tail that you may not have help center articles for. So
Again
Uh what are the questions in sales calls? What are the questions that you see in customer support?
having pages for that.
I might even open up to the community.
Anyone can ask anything'cause the community will then fill on the tail.
Uh and then answer those.
And again.
In many cases there might be nobody talking about this at all. So you could be the only m
citation for this and then win that uh tail of questions.
Are there any help desk uh I don't know, systems to offer that are just making this easier yet? Or you think that's an opportunity for say Zen Desk or Intercom?
I think probably all of them should work perfectly well. I think that the only thing you need to do is cross linking and subdirectory rather than subdomain, which probably most of them do. So I think that they should all work for free. That the main thing you would want to do would be again open it up to the community and make sure that you fill on the tail, but probably all those tools should be good for this.
Well, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
Got five questions for Ethan. Are you ready?
I'm ready.
What are two or three books that you
Find yourself recommending most to other people.
Number one is emotional intelligence.
And uh
people talk about the concept of emotional intelligence, but there's actual research in psychology around that. I believe it was published in the eighties, but there's a really good book that summarizes the foundational research around emotional intelligence.
And uh it's very useful when uh
When
Building relationships and communicating with people to understand their emotions.
That's the first one.
Uh and doing growth.
Because growth is
You know.
getting people to use your stuff. And so if you have frameworks
to inform how people are will use your things, then you can be a more effective growth person.
Which brings me to my second book, which is Cialdini's Persuasion Book. Uh Robert Cialdini does a bunch of books around persuasion.
But again, there's frameworks for how to persuade somebody to sign up, buy something.
And so he breaks down.
his framework for that. And again, it's based on psychology. And I think
Especially in growth, there's all kinds of psychology research and behavioral economics research to inform
Tests.
And if you just read
Taking fast and slow, persuasion, emotional intelligence, you can basically take those uh frameworks and apply it to growth in all kinds of different uh ways.
And then the last is how to measure anything. So how to measure anything is about
measuring things that are not immediately obvious to to measure.
They give this example of
They wanted to measure how good an orchestra conductor was, and they could survey or they could see the number of standing ovations.
for each uh orchestra conductor and the more standing ovations probably means it's this this better one. And that you don't need to survey people, but much of growth and and business is things that are not immediately obvious for how to measure, but anything could be measured. And so that's my uh
The recommendation.
Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
I don't really watch T V, but I watch two different
I watched it.
uh really aggressive sports.
So I really like
Michael Jordan documentary Last Dance.
Uh I like
Lance Armstrong documentaries about how aggressive and confrontational he is, and I love watching UFC.
Like extreme
Aggression and and intensity.
The other group of stuff that I like to watch are climbing documentaries.
So anything that uh Alex Honnell, Jimmy Chen
Uh
Do I watch all that, which is the exact opposite of
Aggressive sports.
Being present, slow and steady, craftsmanship.
But this is sort of how I approached my work, which is extreme intensity and aggressiveness.
And then the uh Zen.
Craftsmanship.
uh being present.
I love uh how this explains why people
Love working with you and where you're good at this is
Uh like this competitiveness and also just like the super nerdiness to get
really knowledgeable about how all this stuff works.
And then uh I didn't think about the Zen element of it, just like staying calm throughout it all.
Flow.
Low state.
Wow.
What a funny microcosm of of why you're so good at this.
Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna keep going. Uh do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
This camera and this microphone.
So
I
I got a Sony
Mirrorless SLR, I forget which one, but getting a Sony or sorry, getting a mirrorless SLR with a wide angle lens.
really transforms your
Video calls.
And then I have this uh this sure microphone.
And uh
I think it's like one eighty.
s this dramatically improves the quality of my
Video.
Call and
I like to design things and you can design your
video calls and you can make them amazing. You can have
Yeah, you can have flowers in the background.
Over here. Some sunflowers. So beautiful.
products are my uh my camera, my SLR camera that I use for video calls and my microphone.
Uh your background is quite exquisite, uh I didn't mention that, but it looks beautiful.
Okay, two more questions.
Do you have a life motto?
that you find really useful in work or in life.
I uh th there's a th there's the
Outliers book about ten thousand hours.
And the themes there are
You don't have to be the smartest.
You have to be sufficiently smart.
Number one.
Number two is focused practice.
So it's not just trying hard. It's doing it in a in an intentional focused way.
And the third thing is lots of practice.
So you're not going to master any no one can master anything because they're a genius.
They master it because they spend a significant amount of time practicing and they practice in a
In an intentional way. And so my motto is essentially a combination of those things, which is that

I'm not going to necessarily win because my brain is the largest brain.
Or that I tried the hardest.
It's because I'm going to be the most intentional
about my practice and I'm gonna be ex as intense as I possibly can be about that practice.
Okay, final question. I'm curious if there's just like an S C O or even A EO win.
you are just most proud of that you always think about, wow, I can't believe I pulled that off.
I can't believe the impact we had there.
I I I always like the uh example of butter lettuce with master class because
master class when when I was first working with them.
They did not have nearly as much authority as all recipes in Martha Stewart.
And we d I actually didn't know I actually didn't know if I should take the project because I thought it might be too hard.
I did it the project. It w and it was hard. But uh we
We're able to rank really competitively and way better than I expected. And I think it's probably because of all these, you know, specific little execution details.
But uh butter lettuce was was my uh favorite one and I like butter lettuce. So
I can search for butter lettuce and I can get a recipe on master class.
That's amazing. Uh I don't know if Butter Lettuce has been mentioned on this podcast before.
Uh
Ethan, this was incredible. This was everything I was hoping it'd be. I feel like we've just leveled up everyone's knowledge on what the hell is happening with SEO and AEO. Uh forget about GO.
Two final questions, where can folks find you if they wanna potentially work with you guys?
And how can listeners be useful to you?
So where you can find me, number one, is on LinkedIn. I spend lots of time on LinkedIn and I publish
Original so we do original research. We have a ro whole whole real research team.
hypothesizing and evaluating those hypotheses. So we publish
all all the studies that I mentioned we publish on our site and I publish them on LinkedIn. So
Follow me on LinkedIn, add me on LinkedIn.
Send me a message. Uh LinkedIn number one. And then number two is we have a a blog which which we call the five percent. So slash five percent, which stands for
Five percent of work, five percent of landing pages drive almost all the impact. So that's sort of the theme. This is only useful stuff. So uh
our our blog at five percent you could subscribe.
Uh to our
to our email and to our studies.
And then how can people be useful to me? So I spent time thinking about this.
And
There's two ways people can help me.
The first way is that there's not that much.
uh research around what works in AEO.
And I would love to know what people are testing and what the results are and what works. So
people doing studies and publishing that or sending it to me. I would love as you know, as much analysis and research as possible. Number one.
Then the second one is
Uh two
Help me on LinkedIn by commenting on my posts and on my comments. So you posted most recently uh the Brian Balfour episode.
For which I read a long thoughtful comment.
And then I got about twenty five legs and then I got responses to that.
So I've been commenting on other people's LinkedIn posts and I've been writing these long LinkedIn
Posts.
And when people comment, it boosts the engagement within LinkedIn.
And then I get mass distribution. So the more people
con and thoughtful comment. So not this is great, but you know, a long thoughtful comment that stimulates
Conversation.
So if people comment on my posts, then I'm just gonna blow up in LinkedIn and I might be as big as you someday.
I love how tactical this ask is. Uh it's something Brian Johnson I noticed is really good at on Twitter, the longevity guy.
He just replies to tweets in a really funny way and
Feels like that's a big growth channel for him.
So uh I love that that you have this in common with Brian Johnson.
Yes. Also just to point people to your domain, graphite.io. Is that the right domain?
Yep.
Amazing.
Ethan, thank you so much for sharing so much with us and for being here.
Absolutely.
It's gonna be yeah.
Bye, everyone.
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