Chat Prompts Have Larger Tail Than Search

The long tail of chat prompts is significantly larger than traditional search, with users asking highly specific follow-up questions that have never been searched before. This creates a massive opportunity for companies to win at Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) by targeting these ultra-specific queries.

According to Ethan Smith, while Google search queries average around 6 words, chat prompts in LLMs like ChatGPT average about 25 words. This creates an entirely new landscape of highly specific questions that traditional SEO hasn't addressed. The tail of possible queries is exponentially larger in chat environments because users naturally ask follow-up questions and have conversations with these systems.

This presents a particularly valuable opportunity for early-stage companies and B2B products. Unlike traditional SEO where you need significant domain authority to rank (making it primarily viable for Series A/B companies), with AEO, even brand new companies can immediately start showing up in answers by targeting ultra-specific questions that nobody else is answering.

The implementation strategy is straightforward but requires systematic effort:

First, identify the specific questions in your niche that aren't being well-answered. Look at your customer support tickets, sales call transcripts, and Reddit discussions to find these ultra-specific queries. What detailed use cases, integrations, or feature combinations are people asking about?

Then create content specifically addressing these long-tail questions. Help center content is particularly valuable here - move it from subdomains to subdirectories, ensure good cross-linking between help articles, and consider opening it to community contributions to capture even more of the tail.

For B2B companies, this approach is especially powerful. Webflow saw a 6x higher conversion rate from LLM traffic compared to Google search traffic. This makes sense - users asking highly specific questions about your product category have tremendous intent and are much further along in their decision-making process.

The beauty of this approach is that you don't need to compete for the head terms like "best website builder" where you'd need to be mentioned across many citations. Instead, you can win by being the only source answering questions like "which website builder integrates with my specific CRM and supports custom JavaScript while allowing team collaboration?"

By systematically mapping and creating content for these ultra-specific follow-up questions, you can capture valuable traffic from LLMs that your competitors aren't even targeting yet.