The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
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What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
There's
this term everyone's
hearing about AEO. Answer engine optimization. Just 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. Because 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.
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 LLM traffic and Google search traffic.
A lot of people are seeing 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 Perplexity to get answers to their questions, and this will only be accelerating over time. And even Google has changed. 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, D Script, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycass, Jap RD, and Mobbin.
Check it out at lenny's newsletter.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 agenc 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. Orcus changes this. With Orcus Conductor, you gain an agentic orchestration layer that seems Seamlessly connect 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 AI-driven apps, Orcus accelerates your journey from idea to production. Learn more and start building at Orcus.io slash Lenny. That's O-R-K-E-S.io slash Lenny. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit.
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