Ethan Smith
Ethan Smith is the CEO of Graphite—the leading SEO growth agency—and my go-to expert on SEO. After 18 years of mastering traditional SEO, Ethan has been at the forefront of what is called AEO: answer engine optimization, or, more simply, getting your product to show up in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity answers. He’s discovered that ChatGPT traffic converts six times better than Google search—and most companies are completely missing this opportunity.
Growth & Retention Skills
Success in Answer Engine Optimization depends on the frequency of mentions across multiple authoritative sources rather than just ranking high on a single page.
"In order to win something like what's the best website builder? At Google, they would win if their blue link showed up first. But that's not the case in the LLM, because the LLM is summarizing many ci..."
Traffic originating from LLMs often yields much higher conversion rates than traditional search traffic because users are deeper into their research or decision-making journey.
"Significantly more valuable. Webflow saw a 6X conversion rate difference between LLM traffic and Google Search traffic."
The significantly longer queries in AI chat create a massive opportunity to capture high-intent users through specific, long-tail content that traditional search often ignores.
"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, Perplexity said this to somebody else, said that it was around 25 words, whe..."
Unlike traditional SEO which requires long-term domain authority building, AEO allows startups to gain instant visibility by generating immediate citations on high-authority platforms like Reddit.
"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. So early-stage companies can..."
LLMs rely heavily on granular data to answer specific follow-up questions, making detailed documentation and help centers critical for capturing AI-driven traffic.
"What's different about the tail is that the tail is larger in chat than in search. ... People are asking lots of follow-up questions."