Ethan Smith
Ethan Smith is the CEO of Graphite—the leading SEO growth agency—and my go-to expert on SEO. After 18 years of mastering traditional SEO, Ethan has been at the forefront of what is called AEO: answer engine optimization, or, more simply, getting your product to show up in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity answers. He’s discovered that ChatGPT traffic converts six times better than Google search—and most companies are completely missing this opportunity.
AI & Technology Skills
AEO is the strategic process of ensuring a product or brand is cited as the primary answer within Large Language Model responses.
"Answer Engine Optimization is how do I show up in LLMs as an answer?"
LLMs determine the 'best' answer based on the frequency and authority of mentions across the sources they retrieve via RAG.
"The LLM is summarizing many citations and so you need to get mentioned as many times as possible. Usually when you ask something like, 'What's the best tool for X?' The first answer will be mentioned..."
Optimizing for AI visibility is primarily about influencing the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process rather than the underlying model training.
"Most of what I'm describing is about the RAG piece, not the core model piece. To influence the core model is probably extremely hard... I'm mostly focused on the RAG side, because that's the main thin..."
Leadership Skills
In rapidly changing environments like AI search, rigorous A/B testing with control groups is essential to verify what actually works.
"Take 100 different questions, half of them I will intervene, half of them I won't... you definitely want a control group, especially in Answer Engine Optimization."
Marketing Skills
Effective content strategy uses AI for assistance while maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight to avoid search engine penalties and 'model collapse.'
"The future of content is clearly AI-assisted. Clearly, you and I will be using AI to help us write, so it's not no AI at all, but it's not 100% generated with AI."
High-quality content is defined by its uniqueness and the addition of new information to the existing web ecosystem.
"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 e..."
Product Management Skills
Sales and support data are the best sources for identifying the specific, long-tail questions users ask AI engines.
"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 same questions are being asked in c..."