Ethan Smith

Move help centre to a subdirectory, add rich cross-links, and crowdsource long-tail articles to capture support search traffic.

Ethan explains AEO – optimising to appear as LLM answers – and prefers it over GEO because it focuses narrowly on answer quality.

Pair an SEO team for on-site AEO work with a marketing-community generalist for YouTube and Reddit citation outreach.

Track and optimise for the few LLM surfaces with most traffic, expecting about three long-term winners rather than all ten options.

Ethan defines answer tracking as evolving keyword tracking to monitor share of voice and average rank across LLM surfaces by asking each question and its variants multiple times.

Ethan recommends Cialdini’s persuasion frameworks to design growth tests that convince users to sign up or buy.

Chat prompts average 25 words, so create content for ultra-specific follow-up questions to capture the expansive long tail.

By combining SEO pages, YouTube videos and Reddit mentions, Webflow saw 6× higher conversion from LLM traffic than Google search.

Shopping sites scraped 100 M pages in 2007, gained SEO briefly, then vanished after Google penalised automated spam.

For B2B where answers are rarely clickable, combine answer-tracking visibility with post-conversion surveys because last-touch referral misleads.

Ethan advises testing AEO by splitting 200 questions into untouched controls and varied interventions, tracking before-after performance, comparing to controls, and repeating to ensure reproducibility.

Analysis showed 5 % of pages generated 85 % of traffic, demonstrating most pages add little ROI and focus is essential.

Each landing page should target hundreds or thousands of related questions, not a single keyword, to surface in both search and AEO.

Create a named account, state your role and post genuinely helpful answers on relevant threads; even five quality posts beat mass spam.

Ethan notes that long, thoughtful comments on LinkedIn posts trigger higher engagement and broader distribution, making it a key growth lever for personal and brand reach.