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

Lenny Rachitsky:There's this term everyone's hearing about AEO answer engine optimization just how do I

Ethan Smith:Show up in LMs as an answer.

Lenny Rachitsky:It feels like such a big deal to win at AEO.

Ethan Smith:In order to win something like what's the best website builder then 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.

Lenny Rachitsky:ChatGPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter.

Ethan Smith: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 win they can win quickly.

Lenny Rachitsky:Are the leads that these answer engines driving to companies actually valuable?

Ethan Smith:Significantly more valuable Webflow saw a six X conversion rate difference between LM traffic and Google search traffic.

Lenny Rachitsky:A lot of people are seeing this as everything is different nothing we've done before is gonna work we have to rethink everything.

Ethan Smith:There's significant misinformation on AEO there's news articles about how Google search is is going to die because there's a new thing Google's slice of the pie stays the same the pie gets bigger.

Lenny Rachitsky: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 go to Google anytime they had a question or were looking for a product or doing research these days a lot of people are moving to ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini 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 ChatGPT 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 if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it helps tremendously and if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get a year free of 15 incredible products including lovable Replit Bolt N Eight N Linear Superhuman Descript Whisperflow Gamma Perplexity Warp Granola Magic Patterns Raycast Japyardee and Mobin check it out at Lenny'snewsletter.com and click product pass with that I bring you Ethan Smith this episode is brought to you by Orcus the company behind open source conductor the orchestration platform powering modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows legacy automation tools can't keep pace siloed low code platforms outdated process management and disconnected API tooling fall short in today's event driven AI powered agentic landscape Orkus changes this with Orkus Conductor you gain an agentic orchestration layer that seamlessly connects humans AI agents APIs microservices and data pipelines in real time at enterprise scale visual and code first development built in compliance observability and rock solid reliability ensure workflows evolve dynamically with your needs it's not just about automating tasks it's orchestrating autonomous agents and complex workflows to deliver smarter outcomes faster whether modernizing legacy systems or scaling next gen AI driven apps Orcus accelerates your journey from idea to production learn more and start building at orcus.i0/lenny that's 0rkes.i0/lenny my podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit you know what we don't love talking about SOC two that's where Vanta comes in Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI automation and continuous monitoring whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC two or ISO twenty seven zero zero one or an enterprise managing vendor risk Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker easier and more scalable Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times so that you can win bigger deals sooner the result according to a recent IDC study Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are 3x more productive establishing trust isn't optional Vanta makes it automatic get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky:Ethan thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast welcome back to the podcast.

Ethan Smith:Excited to be back.

Lenny Rachitsky: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 at 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 I'm excited to talk to you again about how to be successful in this new emerging world where AI is changing how SEO works the rise of AEO 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?

Ethan Smith:Yes so I got started in SEO in 02/2007 so it's been eighteen years and the actually largest change when I got started in SEO I got started in programmatic SEO and commerce SEO like Nexttag and Shopping.com and and Pricegrabber and that was when you could do mass auto generated landing pages and that was probably the biggest shift which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms a Panda and and similar things to prevent you from doing spam so essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam that was probably the biggest change and then this is 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay that is really interesting because I think a lot of people are seeing this as like everything is different nothing we've done before before is gonna work we have to rethink everything you're saying this is actually the second biggest change and just like Google's update back in the day was actually even more significant

Ethan Smith:Yep

Lenny Rachitsky: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 AEO and GEO what do they stand for are they different what are they referring to specifically

Ethan Smith: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 AEO and GEO are are essentially trying to describe the same thing which is how do I show up in in LLMs as 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 LLMs so an answer is more more 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay yeah answer engine optimization sounds a lot cleaner to me if you had 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 it's interesting because recently I don't know if I told you this but I was looking at my referral traffic and I found that ChatGPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter which I did not see coming so somehow it's already happening I'm excited to learn just how to lean into that potentially and optimize it further

Ethan Smith:And when did you see the spike did you see when it started growing dramatically

Lenny Rachitsky:Unfortunately the dashboard I have doesn't give me great like peripheral traffic optimization when when do you think I probably saw it

Ethan Smith: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

Ethan Smith:And then the adoption increased and that was around January

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay I wanna come back to this question of is this good that ChatGPT 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 wanna talk about just what kind of impact you can have on having your stuff show up in ChatGPT so I had the head of ChatGPT Nick Turley on the podcast recently asked him what do you think of all this stuff AEO GEO he's like don't don't worry about any of that just write awesome stuff great quality content it'll figure it out it'll find the best stuff I imagine you very much disagree I imagine you have seen real impact getting your stuff proactively into these answer engines talk about just the kind of impact you've seen and what you and just your your reaction to that

Ethan Smith:Yeah I agree and disagree but 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 what I think he probably meant by that I mean probably meant two things one is please don't spam my product 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 gonna say huge shopping comparison sites are making a 100,000,000 auto auto generate search pages and I don't like it I'm gonna get rid of the whole category so same thing with ChatGPT 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 prevent you from doing that

Lenny Rachitsky: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 to give us context just like how much can you impact this sort of thing where you show up in say ChatGPT more often

Ethan Smith:You can you can affected a lot so specific example with Webflow 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 SEO so make landing pages for high search high search volume keywords like you know best no code website designer and you then for free you'll get answer engine optimization impact from that so that's just traditional SEO which works very well for AI.

Lenny Rachitsky:I just gonna say that sounds exactly the same as regular SEO.

Ethan Smith:Yeah so I would say everything that works in SEO works in AEO but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO so second thing 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 in 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 when you ask something like what's the best tool for X the first answer will be mentioned at the most in the citations that's very different from from Google and so for Webflow we work with them on YouTube videos Vimeo videos getting mentioned in Reddit getting mentioned in other blogs affiliates stuff like that so try a bunch of stuff stuff that worked especially well was just straight SEO number one number two is YouTube videos and then the third is Reddit optimization.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay wow so you're saying if you if you can get to number one if when you ask you what's the best website builder and Webflow is at the top that doesn't actually drive them as much traffic as simply being mentioned most often across the summary.

Ethan Smith:Yes and part of why that's interesting is because if you're a when when startups come to me and ask me for SEO help my first response is don't do it at all spend your time on something else because you're not going to be able to grow SEO early on as a 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 so for Google it's usually something that you do series A series B later you don't do it as soon as you start because you can't win early on that's not the case for answer engine 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 YC 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 and 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 Perplexity said this to somebody else said that it was around 25 words where versus Google words around six words so the tail is just much much larger people are asking lots of follow-up questions.

Lenny Rachitsky:Tail the the prompt essentially the question you're asking.

Ethan Smith:Yes 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 you know the share and the volume and there's probably questions that have never been asked before and 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 in chat 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 examples of early stage companies who just launched some really specific AI enabled payment processing API thing and they will show up and they'll show up because they're answering questions never been answered before.

Lenny Rachitsky:Are the leads that these answer engines driving to companies actually valuable are these like good quality leads for B2B SaaS especially.

Ethan Smith:They are significantly more valuable so Webflow we saw a six X conversion rate in difference between LM traffic and Google search traffic.

Lenny Rachitsky:Six times.

Ethan Smith:Six times so significantly more qualified I think that's probably for a couple reasons probably it's because you're so primed because you're having a conversation with multiple follow ups and so there's so much intent that you've 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 much higher conversion rate.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow this is so interesting and it makes sense like people trust ChatGPT to tell them the answer and if you are the answer they 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 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 showing up more in these answer engines landing pages YouTube videos and Reddit is that right.

Ethan Smith:Those are some of them the other things so I would I would break it up into stuff on your site on-site 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 and then the second group would be off-site which is show up in all the citations citations are comprised of video UGC like Reddit and and Quora affiliates dot - Meredith is showing up all over the place Glamour Good Housekeeping it's like getting mentioned there blogs so it's just those two groups.

Lenny Rachitsky: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.

Ethan Smith:Okay, Reddit is one of the most interesting things. It's hugely cited in LLMs and it's probably the number one thing people are asking. Customers are asking me is how do we optimize for Reddit and this goes back to the head of ChatGPT's question about please don't spam my product. And so Reddit is a community where it's, you know, real opinions from people, authentic, and it's heavily managed by the community and the community is very good at managing it. And so the obvious strategy for a growth person is let's make a bunch of automated spam and spam Reddit all over the place and get my product to show up everywhere. That, that's the growth mindset which makes sense, the hustle mindset. So what are people looking at? They're looking at creating hundreds of fake Reddit accounts pretending to be someone that you're not, like I have a single person, I'm gonna make 100 Reddit accounts, I'm gonna auto post comments and then like my own comments and then build a trust score and then shout, say everywhere that 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 then 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's one strategy. The other strategy is the whole purpose of Reddit is to post useful, high quality, authentic comments from real people. So at Webflow 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 wanna 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 not in the growth mindset of I need to scale this to hundreds of comments but you don't actually need 10,000 comments, you know, even five could be great and that scales perfectly well. So the Reddit strategy is the obvious strategy which is just to be an actual user of Reddit, make an account, say who you are, say where you work and give a useful answer.

Lenny Rachitsky:We had the early growth leader from Deal on the podcast a while ago. This is how they grew up and how they grew initially 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. It's so interesting that Reddit is what is keeping ChatGPT from being spammed with stuff like it's not that ChatGPT is stopping the spam, it's Reddit is just really good at that.

Ethan Smith:I think that in a sense ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT 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 there are actual people at ChatGPT who are 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 Reddit and Twitter and Quora because they want user generated content and if it wasn't good content then they would change the algorithm and they wouldn't rank it. So I think that they are policing it in a sense.

Lenny Rachitsky:Got it and all of this is post training search oriented features of these models it's not data they are trained on is that right?

Ethan Smith:I would assume that the so there's the core model and then there's RAG. So the core model is I'm looking at Common Crawl and billions of web pages and then I'm retraining the model and if you ask 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 next word prediction. Then there's RAG and RAG basically means search retrieval augmented generation. So I'm gonna do a search and I'm gonna summarize the search there. There are these two different things and so most of what I'm describing is about the RAG piece and not the core model piece too. To influence the core model is probably extremely hard and maybe you will see the impact a year later and it's probably something, you know, some sort of obscure thing that nobody would wanna do like make a million pages that say best product for X is brand which I don't think most people wanna 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 LLM is probably not going to say your product if it didn't show up anywhere on the RAG. So I think that's where most of the interesting stuff is from an optimization perspective.

Lenny Rachitsky:Cool, I didn't even think about this side of it when we started talking about this but I think that's an important thing to know 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 are important for people to understand to be successful in this world just broadly?

Ethan Smith:First thing is just recognizing that this is related to search so it's LLM plus RAG, it's summarizing a set of search results usually. So LLM plus RAG number one. Number two is topics. So in 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 02/2007, 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 engine optimization each page is targeting hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of questions and so I wanna 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 are other usual 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 likely I'm to show up in Google search. Same with chat, the more 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 follow-up question and subtopic somebody else is not answering you're gonna be more likely to show up. So topics number two. The 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 give us more access to search volume but there's no truth set. So how do we know the questions that people are asking? One way would just be to take up 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. But then I mentioned that the tail is larger and there's parts of the tail that don't exist in search so how do we know what the tail looks like? And one strategy that you can use is what are all the questions people are asking you on your sales calls, customer support, on Reddit? Mine all those questions that exist somewhere else probably those similar those same questions are being asked in chat and so that's another way to find questions. The last is citation optimization or off-site. So again the LLM is summarizing RAG so how do I show up as many citations as possible and you can break up the citations into different groups: MyCite, video, YouTube, Vimeo, UGC, core, core Reddit, tier one affiliates like Dotdash, tier two affiliates, blogs. So it's breaking up all those different citations and having specific strategies for each group.

Lenny Rachitsky:What is Dotdash exactly?

Ethan Smith:Dotdash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with Good Housekeeping, Allrecipes, Investopedia. It's probably the most successful SEO company of all time and it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LLMs as well.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow did not know this. As you talk I think about like if you go to Google, no offense Mister 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 ChatGPT 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?

Ethan Smith: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 get 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 here are recommendations for how to be more typical and then everyone rewrites each other's article. And then one other interesting thing is that the majority of landing pages drive no impact. So we did an analysis where one out of 20 landing pages drive roughly 85% of all your traffic. So 19 out of 20 landing pages drive little to no traffic which means if I wanna 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 rewrite this other person's article because that's cheaper than hiring someone from the New York Times to write 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 right now it's people rerunning 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 ChatGPT ever solve that? Probably. How I would solve that would be 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 expertise authority trustworthiness which actually I don't see having an effect unfortunately but it could. And then I could say well this person's an expert, this person's a certified financial adviser, 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.

Lenny Rachitsky:This algorithm or heuristic you just shared is so interesting because it's helpful for just what is good content say with a newsletter or a podcast info gain and is it typical are you adding something new to the conversation and is this unique. I think it's a really good strategy for just producing great newsletters and podcasts and all that all the content in the world.

Ethan Smith:Yes and ideally did you do original research and do you have some domain expertise and did you mention that in the content.

Lenny Rachitsky:This is a great heuristic for just content in general which is exactly what you want these algorithms to be looking for so the alignment is there. This episode is brought to you by Great Question, the all in one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is I know I should be speaking to customers more but I just don't have the time or the tools. That's exactly the gap Great fills. Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team not just researchers to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions with a prompt as simple as why did users choose us over competitors. Great Question not only reveals what your customers have already shared but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this your roadmap's clear, your team's aligned, you're shipping with confidence and you're building exactly what your customers need. Head to greatquestion.com/lenny to get started. Let's give people an actual actionable plan to start executing on this and winning essentially at AEO. If it's helpful I'll use my newsletter as an example like how would I show up more often in ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever or if it's a B2B SaaS company whatever is easiest let's just talk about how to actually do this.

Ethan Smith:First I would figure out which questions I wanna rank for. How I would figure out which questions I wanna 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 ChatGPT 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 ChatTypeaky other questions. That's step one. Step two is then track them, so put them in an AEO tracker, in an 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. The third would be landing, make your own landing pages. So what are the kinds of landing pages that are appearing? Is it a listicle, is it a category page, is it an article tool page? Just like figure out what page type is seem 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 keywords that are in your SEO topic. Same thing for AEO topic. Then on the off-site, so different strategies for each of those groups. And I would say that depending on the company, paying an affiliate to mention, no, that's pretty easy if you have the money. So if you wanna be the best credit card, you pay Forbes and then you're the best credit card. So that's strategy one, expensive, easy, controllable. The 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 do whatever you want, maybe people view it, maybe they don't, but you can make a YouTube video or a Vimeo video. And the interesting thing with this, especially for B2B, is that YouTube, Vimeo, other video sites, the kinds of things people make videos for are food, traveling, fun, beauty. There's not that many videos about AI powered payment processing APIs as interesting as that is, but it's a great money churn. So if you make a video for these really specific high LTV, maybe non-glamorous keywords, questions, topics, that's actually a big opportunity. And then Reddit, so I mentioned with Webflow 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 experiment design, experiment design and seeing what works. So SEO and AEO are both interesting and that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. 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 that becomes best practice and no one ever did analysis. So 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 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, have 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 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. And then however what I think is hard to hire for 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 basically be your SEO team, please now do answer engine optimization and then marketing community team please help me show up in more citations. Wow, okay.

Lenny Rachitsky: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. 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, yeah, 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.

Ethan Smith: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 keyword tracking tool. There's a hundred of them, they're all the same and you see whether or not what you rank, maybe you rank, hopefully you rank number one now in answers. It's very different but it's related. So if you ask the same question you will have different answers each time. If you ask a quest, there's different answers per run. And so ChatGPT is basically calculating a distribution of all the potential answers that 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 also have question variants so you can ask different versions of the same question and you might show up in one, you might not show up in another. Then there's different surfaces, there's Perplexity, there's Gemini, there's Chatuchiki, there's Medai and so these surfaces have different answers and so you essentially need to create a share of voice for across all these different things and 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? An answer tracking is essentially an evolution of keyword tracking. So there's, we have a page with 60 different answer tracking tools but it's ultimately just like keyword tracking, it's all the same thing roughly. And so pick one of the 60 we have answer tracking, we're building answer tracking, there's 59 other options probably all pretty good, probably all pretty similar but pick one. My general suggestion is pick the one that, pick the cheapest one that does what you 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. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing. I love this term voice share. I never heard that before. Makes sense. The L, like percentage time you're showing up in LMs. Is there an LLM? Is it just like ChatGPT is like Google equivalent now to ChatGPT? How do you recommend people think about say Gemini or Clutter or Perplexity and others?

Ethan Smith:So interestingly there are similar foundational algorithms across all of these. Like they're all using search, they're all using search and they're all using LMs which you know foundational algorithms are all the same. The results are pretty different. So we're doing a study, we're seeing that Google and Bing are not that similar search engines. We're seeing that ChatGPT citations and Google search results are actually not that similar. Perplexity is interestingly similar to more, more similar to Google than Chatuchiki Boutique. We did a study looking at thousands of questions and saw the citation overlap with Google search results was around 35% for Chatuchiki Boutique and Google, so not that much. Perplexity was around 70%. But essentially they're all similar algorithms but with very different citations 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 look across all those. But you do need to look at 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: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 elements?

Ethan Smith:Well the way that I would answer that is I believe AOL was one of the largest search engines early on and Google was not. And so we could ask in 1999 or whatever should we just focus on AOL search 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. I do think that ChatGPT 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 10 but they'll probably be around three or so that you'll wanna, that will win, that you wanna optimize for.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay by the way wanna make it clear I love Claude. I use Claude and ChatGPT equally roughly. I didn't wanna make it sound like ChatGPT is the only product people use. Okay how does this strategy change depending on the kind of company you are? Say your B2B SaaS company or consumer product. Does anything in these seven steps change significantly?

Ethan Smith:Let's take B2B for example. First thing is that the citations that are being mentioned are gonna be quite different so citation optimization will vary quite a bit.

Lenny Rachitsky:Just to clarify what you just said, what do you mean when you say citation strategy is different?

Ethan Smith:Meaning the citations that show up for B2B versus marketplaces are different kinds of citations. So for B2B it might be like TechRadar shows up a ton when I ask questions. I've never read TechRadar but for some reason it shows up all the time. I'm not sure it's great but TechRadar is showing up a ton for B2B 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 Yelp, TripAdvisor, places like that. So the kinds of citations that show up are different. Most of the stuff that I've been talking about is specific to B2B stuff. That's different for commerce. So for most B2B questions the answers are not clickable, there's nothing to click on. And so if you actually wanna measure the impact you cannot just look at last touch referral traffic. You have to see whether or not you showed 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 harder to track for B2B. Also for B2B you're probably deciding which payroll management software to use after 50 touch points with a brand. It's not gonna be you just search for something you suddenly spend a $100,000 on payroll 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 TV for apartments there are actual shoppable cards. Those shoppable cards are showing multiple sellers. Those sellers have rich snippets. Schema is important. The number of views 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 restaurants and hotels and local marketplaces similar there. And then I would say early stage is also different. So I mentioned earlier early stage my recommendation is don't do SEO at all for answer engine optimization. Definitely do AEO and only do citation optimization and long tail. Don't do any of the mid SEO stuff, just get cited and answer really specific questions.

Lenny Rachitsky:It's so interesting that so much of this is just like having showing up as that little tag slash pill in the answer because it's obvious now that I think about it that's the only way someone will get to your site from an LLM. It's just like clicking that okay let me go read this article.

Ethan Smith:Yes but what they will do is they will open a new tab and they will type in the brand name and they will 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: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 don't even know how much and sending me some percent of traffic do 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 LLMs to suck up my stuff and then I'd be like oh yeah you could check it out Morlite newsletter if you want.

Ethan Smith:Yes and I would get the same answer that Brian Balfour gave on your previous episode on this which is that it's not your choice whether to play the game you are playing the game whether you want to or not so you might as well try to show up 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 building a a Webflow app to block training but not indexation or you can 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 make sense to me

Lenny Rachitsky:Such a good point because 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 good 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 is essentially how to 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 just like look at the terms asked almost ChatGPT 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 where are 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 emdash YouTube Reddit Quora sounds like are the core and then run an experiment so you look at this tracker and then you how let me actually ask this 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

Ethan Smith:Yeah so what I would do is I would take a 100 different questions half of them I will intervene half of them I won't or let's say let's take 200 questions so a 100 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 a 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 answer engine optimization so control group is don't touch it at all leave it leave it as it is that's the 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 compare against control group and then and then the stuff that went up when the control group did not worked and the stuff that didn't did not and then reproduce it so reproducibility is very important and 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 a with an academia it needs to be reproducible meaning multiple people have done this study and reproduce 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 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 10 times then it probably works and the stuff that and 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

Lenny Rachitsky:It feels like such a big deal to win at a AEO just coming back to this idea that like people are coming to ChatGPT Collad Gemini looking for an answer if you're that answer I feel like that could just make or break your company it feels like even more important than SEO just getting this right

Ethan Smith:I would say that where I wanna get the most conversions possible how big is the channel the channel is not as big as search the search is definitely larger but it's it's it is a substantial channel now and Webflow they get 8% of their sign ups from from LMs you 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

Lenny Rachitsky: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 discussed topics when it comes to AI and SEO and AEO that we haven't already talked about

Ethan Smith: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 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 is 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 it's 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 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 is 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 $50,000 for keyword tracking you would say well of course that's absurd it's keyword tracking I could write this in a day 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 or commodities that's the second thing the third thing is the the growth curve of the channel and 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 June 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 it's just skyrocketing so you know it it's it's Chattypitty launches people are very interested and that'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 curve is is is also very unusual the the last is that a lot of people do think that SEO and AE are are different and and they're not different 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 you know all these other tools are not not not relevant in reality it's actually there's 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 the core technology is is pretty similar so those are probably the most most surprising things

Lenny Rachitsky: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

Ethan Smith:I think it's 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 LMs more

Lenny Rachitsky:Ethan let me just say I'm learning so much from this conversation what a fun thing I could see it's just like clear how much you love this stuff and it's 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 is never gonna just like just generate all this 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 you can just talk about what you learned from that and how people should think about AI in generating content

Ethan Smith:Yes so I remember when ChatGPT launched and Brian Balfour posted on LinkedIn what do you people think that is gonna happen from ChatGPT and AI and my 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 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 it's not no AI at all but it's not 100% generated with AI I immediately knew that it wouldn't work why did I know that I knew that because I created spam in 02/2007 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 2007 is I and all the other shopping comparison people comparison people scraped all each other's content reviews chopped it up scraped content 100,000,000 search pages snippets and and it worked really well and then it stopped working and then all those companies disappeared I knew that that was exactly what's gonna happen with AI generated content and so from the beginning I've I've not focused on AI generated content many people have and we but I don't know so maybe it does work there's lots of case studies about it working so let's do the study let's do an analysis so we took we looked at both Google and at ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT 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 a random sample of a 100,000 URLs from Common Crawl over the last five years and then we 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 8% so basically the AI detector is very accurate so we took that then we ran it on the content so then what we saw was was around 10 to 12% of content in Google search and in ChatGPT are AI generated 90% 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 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 but purely 100% AI generated does not work so then the second thing that we did was we found that 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 100,000 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 if AI generated content worked then everyone would do it just like in 2,007 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 ChatGPT responses so if Google is a search engine for ChatGPT responses there's no reason for Google to exist just go to ChatGPT which is the exact same thing that happened in 02/2007 Google said I see all these shopping comparison search engines showing up in my search results so I am essentially a search engine for search engines I should be showing the TV in my results I shouldn't be showing others 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 ChatGPT now for ChatGPT let's say that ChatGPT ranks its own derivatives in its citations so then you have this infinite loop of derivatives so I go to ChatGPT I say generate 10 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 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 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 derivatives 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 generate 10 derivatives put that in rank summarize that and then generate 10 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 the LM is summarizing the opinion of many people so if you ask a question like what's the best flavor of ice cream there's not one answer there's thousands of opinions so they all I'm summarizing these many many opinions and there's wisdom of the crowd the wisdom of the crowd basically says that if you take the average of a large group of people their 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 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 100% unassisted AI content works

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm afraid if there's a world where everything is trained on AI and AI is trained on AI and generating AI and then just like nothing is trusted and I love how it's interesting just how much of these incentives are driving this like if ChatGPT 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 were them what would you do over the next few years to keep things high quality and not drive these perverse incentives

Ethan Smith:So I would identify what the perverse incentives might be and ad 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 LLM AI overview you're seeing that with LMs where they're incorporating maps and shopping carousels and it's converging on search so I think it all converge on a single experience so that's the first thing figure out what 2007 Ethan would do to to create spam and and make sure that he doesn't do that like AI generated content or or scrape 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 one 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 want a ocean view and I want a 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 would remember everything about you it 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 autonomous agents so that that's also another very interesting place for someone like me to to to optimize for as well

Lenny Rachitsky: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 if 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 this stuff try to take the first steps down this road of AEO

Ethan Smith:Yes my the most exciting topic which is help center optimization 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 center and usually you would not have an SEO team and say we really want you guys to focus on the help center but in chat since you're there's all these questions about can you do this thing can you fulfill my use case help center is actually a great place to do that and so I think 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 as subdirectories so move it to a subdirectory number one number two is make sure that you're cross linking well so usually you you do not have optimized internal links so link from help center page to help center page make sure there's less cross linking the third is you probably have help center content about the head but the tail you probably don't have any help center content for so an example of this is I was looking for I wanted to track our sales calls and look to see who is 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 looker and the answer is none of them but you could use otter because otter has a zapier integration you could send a zap of the meeting put it into bigquery 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 what are the questions in sales calls what are the questions that you're seeing customer support having pages for that I might even open up to the community anyone can ask anything because the community will then fill on the tail and then answer those and again in many cases there might be nobody talking about this at all so you could be the only citation for this and then win that tail of questions

Lenny Rachitsky:Are there any help desk I don't know system software that are just making this easier yet or you think that's an opportunity for say Zendesk or Intercom

Ethan Smith: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 wanna do would be again open it up to the community make sure that you fill in the tail but probably all those tools should be good for this

Lenny Rachitsky:Well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round got five questions for you Ethan are you ready

Ethan Smith:I'm ready

Lenny Rachitsky:What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people

Ethan Smith:Number one is emotional intelligence and 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 it's very useful when when building relationships and communicating with people to understand their emotions so that's the first one 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 Robert Cialdini does a bunch of books around persuasion but again there's frameworks for how to persuade somebody to sign up by 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 thinking fast and slow persuasion emotional intelligence you can basically take those frameworks and apply it to growth in all kinds of different 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 get 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 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 third recommendation

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed

Ethan Smith:I don't really watch TV but I watch two different groups of things I watch really aggressive sports so I really like Michael Jordan documentary Last Dance I like Lance Armstrong documentaries about how aggressive and confrontational he is and I love watching UFC I like extreme aggression and and intensity the other group of stuff that I like to watch are climbing documentaries so anything that Alex Honnold Jimmy Chan do I watch all that which is the exact opposite of aggressive sports so it's zen being present slow and steady craftsmanship but this is sort of how I approach my work which is extreme intensity and aggressiveness and then the zen craftsmanship being present

Lenny Rachitsky:I love how this explains why people love working with you and why you're good at this is like this competitiveness and also just like the super nerdiness to get really knowledgeable about how this stuff works and then I didn't think about the zen element of it just like staying calm throughout it all

Ethan Smith:Flow flow state

Lenny Rachitsky:Flow what a funny microcosm of of why you're so good at this thank you okay I'm gonna keep going do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love

Ethan Smith: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 this Shure microphone and I think it's like one eighty 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 you know you can have flowers in the background over here some sunflowers so beautiful my my favorite products are my my camera my SLR camera that I use for video calls and my microphone

Lenny Rachitsky:Your background is quite exquisite and 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

Ethan Smith:I there's a 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 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 as intense as i possibly can be about that practice

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay final question i'm curious if there's just like an seo or even aeo win you're just most proud of that you always think about wow i can't believe i pulled that off i i can't believe the impact we had there

Ethan Smith:I i i always like the example of butter lettuce with masterclass because masterclass when when i was first working with them they did not have nearly as much authority as all recipes in martha stewart and we i actually didn't know i actually didn't know if i should take the project because i thought it might be too hard but i did the project and was hard but we were 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 butter lettuce was was my favorite one and i and i like butter lettuce so i can search for butter lettuce and i can get a recipe on masterclass

Lenny Rachitsky:That's amazing i don't know if butter lettuce has been mentioned on this podcast before 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 forget about geo to follow the questions where can folks find you if they wanna potentially work with you guys and how can listeners be useful to you

Ethan Smith: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 real whole whole research team hypothesizing and evaluating those hypotheses so we publish 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 linkedin number one and then number two is we have a a blog which which we call the five percent so slash 5% which stands for 5% of work 5% of landing pages drive almost all the impact so that's sort of the theme this is only useful stuff so our our blog at 5% you could subscribe 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 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 you know as much analysis and research as possible number one then the second one is to help me on linkedin by commenting on my posts and on my comments so you posted most recently the brian balfour episode for which i read a long thoughtful comment and then i got about 25 likes and then i got responses to that and 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 engagement within linkedin and then i get mass distribution so the more people and thoughtful comments so not this is great but you know a long thoughtful comment that stimulates conversation so if people comment on my post then i'm just gonna blow up in linkedin and i might be as big as you someday

Lenny Rachitsky:I love how tactical this ask is it's something brian johnson 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 i love that that you have this in common with brian johnson

Ethan Smith:Yes

Lenny Rachitsky:Also to point people to your domain graphite.io is that the right domain

Ethan Smith:Yep

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing ethan thank you so much for sharing so much with us and for being here

Ethan Smith:Absolutely it's good to be here

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode