The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
Lenny Rachitsky (host), Ethan Smith (guest)
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Lenny Rachitsky and Ethan Smith, The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) explores mastering AEO: Tactical Playbook For Winning AI Answer Engines Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, explains how SEO is evolving into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—the craft of getting products recommended inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Mastering AEO: Tactical Playbook For Winning AI Answer Engines
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, explains how SEO is evolving into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—the craft of getting products recommended inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
He argues AEO is built on the same foundations as SEO (search + content), but with important differences: LLMs summarize many citations, reward breadth of mentions, and have a much longer “tail” of highly specific questions.
Smith shares detailed, practical tactics—on-site content, off-site citations (YouTube, Reddit, affiliates), answer tracking, and experimentation—that are already driving meaningful business results, including Webflow seeing 6x higher conversion from LLM traffic vs Google Search.
He also debunks common myths (e.g., SEO is dead, AI-generated content will win), stresses the danger of pure AI content spam, and highlights emerging opportunities like help-center optimization and early-stage AEO advantages.
Key Takeaways
AEO builds on SEO, but the ranking logic in LLMs is citation-based, not position-based.
In Google, ranking #1 often wins the click; in LLMs, the model summarizes across many sources and tends to favor products mentioned most frequently in citations, so breadth of mention across the web becomes crucial.
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Early-stage companies can win in AEO much faster than in classic SEO.
Unlike SEO, where domain authority takes years, AEO can surface a brand as soon as it’s cited—via a Reddit thread, YouTube video, or blog mention—allowing new startups to appear in answers almost immediately.
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LLM traffic is smaller than search today but dramatically more qualified.
Webflow observed a 6x higher conversion rate from LLM-driven traffic than from Google Search, likely because users arrive after multi-step, high-intent conversations with the model and strongly trust its recommendations.
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Reddit, YouTube, and high-authority affiliates are power levers for AEO.
LLMs heavily cite Reddit and major publishers (e. ...
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Systematic question research and answer tracking are the foundation of AEO.
You need to transform high-value search/paid keywords into questions, use answer-tracking tools to monitor how often you appear across LLMs, and run controlled experiments (test vs control question sets) to identify what actually moves your share-of-voice.
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Purely AI-generated, unedited content does not win in search or AEO.
Graphite’s research found only ~10–12% of top-ranking content appears AI-generated; unedited AI spam is devalued, and widespread use creates a dangerous loop of models training and reasoning on their own derivatives, degrading answer quality (model collapse).
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Help center and support content are hidden AEO gold, especially for B2B.
LLMs answer many deep, feature- and integration-specific questions using documentation; moving help centers to subdirectories, cross-linking aggressively, and expanding coverage to long-tail, real support/sales questions can make your product show up for highly qualified, niche queries.
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Notable Quotes
“Anything can be optimized. You just need to understand the underlying systems and the rules of the game.”
— Ethan Smith
“Everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO.”
— Ethan Smith
“Webflow saw a 6X conversion rate difference between LLM traffic and Google Search traffic.”
— Ethan Smith
“Early stage companies can win. They can win quickly, by getting mentioned as many times as possible by the citations.”
— Ethan Smith
“There’s more AI-generated content on the internet than human-generated content now—and yet, 100% AI-generated content still doesn’t work in search.”
— Ethan Smith
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should a startup with almost no domain authority prioritize AEO tactics in its first 6–12 months?
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, explains how SEO is evolving into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—the craft of getting products recommended inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What practical methods can teams use to systematically collect and convert real support and sales questions into AEO-ready content?
He argues AEO is built on the same foundations as SEO (search + content), but with important differences: LLMs summarize many citations, reward breadth of mentions, and have a much longer “tail” of highly specific questions.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can you distinguish between high-quality, AI-assisted content and low-value AI spam in your own publishing process?
Smith shares detailed, practical tactics—on-site content, off-site citations (YouTube, Reddit, affiliates), answer tracking, and experimentation—that are already driving meaningful business results, including Webflow seeing 6x higher conversion from LLM traffic vs Google Search.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Given that LLMs and search are converging, how might the balance between SEO and AEO investment change over the next three years?
He also debunks common myths (e. ...
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What are the ethical and strategic implications if LLMs start heavily favoring paid affiliate content in their recommendations?
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Transcript Preview
There's this term everyone's hearing about, AEO.
Answer engine optimization. How do I show up in, uh, 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, then Google, they would win if their blue link showed up first. But that's not the case in the LM, 'cause the LM is summarizing many citations. And so you need to get mentioned as many times as possible.
ChatGPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter.
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.
Are the leads that these answer engines driving to companies actually valuable?
Significantly more valuable. Webflow saw a 6X conversion rate difference between LM traffic and Google Search traffic.
A lot of people are saying this as, "Everything is different. Nothing we've done before is gonna work. We have to rethink everything."
There's significant misinformation on AEO. There's news articles about how Google Searches is going to die because there'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 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 and 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, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Mobbin. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Ethan Smith. This episode is brought to you by Orkes, 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. Orkes changes this. With Orkes Conductor, you gain an agentic orchestration layer that seamlessly connects humans, AI agents, APIs, micro-services 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, Orkes accelerates your journey from idea to production. Learn more and start building at orkes.io/lenny. That's O-R-K-E-S.io/lenny. My podcast guest tonight love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. 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 2 or ISO 27001, 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 faster 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 three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny. Ethan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to the podcast.
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