The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

24:11The last is citation optimization or off site. So again, the LM is summarizing RAD. So how do we show that we've put in as many citations as possible, and you can break up the citations into different groups. My site, video, YouTube, Vimeo, UGC, Core Reddit, tier one affiliates, like Dot Dash, tier two affiliates, blogs. So it's breaking up all those different citations and having specific strategies for each group. What is Dot Dash, exactly? Dot Dash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with Good House keeping all recipes, investipedia. It's probably the most successful SEO company of all time.

24:53And it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LMS as well. Well, did not know this. As you talk, I think about like if you go to Google, no offense, Mr. SEO, but if you go to Google these days, it's just like a bunch of unuseful stuff, just like hyper SEO content. Do you think ChattyPT will be able to avoid that fate where it's just a bunch of hyper SEO content that is not what you actually want? probably. And what you're saying with SEO is that everyone's rewriting each other's content, non -experts rewriting each other's content. So I get a content scoring tool which then looks at all the results in Google and it says these are all the things that the other articles are saying.

25:35And then this is what you haven't said yet. So here are recommendations for how to be more typical. And then everyone rewrites each other's article. And then one other interesting thing is that the majority of landing pages drive no impact. So we did an analysis where one out of 20 landing pages drive roughly 85 % of all your traffic. So 19 out of 20 landing pages drive little to no traffic, which means if I want to get ROI, I need to spend a small amount of money on a large number of pages. And so then you get a non -expert to say, rewrite this other person's article because that's cheaper than hiring someone from the New York Times to write your, you know, your, your article about what's the best payroll management software.

26:18But if you knew the few things that would work, the food landing pages that would work, and you wrote them really well, then you could push all that money to that one page, which is what we try to do. But right now it's people rewriting each other's content. So Google has not solved that yet. That's probably a very hard problem to solve. Will they ever solve that? Probably. Will Chachibit ever solve that? Probably. How I would solve that would be 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 else's content?

26:55Potentially Google has eat expertise authority trustworthyness, which actually I don't see having an effect unfortunately, but it could, and I could say, well, this person's an expert, this person's a certified financial advisor, rank them higher. and I'm actually not seeing that, but they could increase the weight of that. So these are all potential solutions, but I'm sure that the reason why it has not been solved yet and why everyone's writing each other's articles is probably just hard to build an algorithm to solve that, but will they ever solve that probably? This algorithm or heuristic you just shared is so interesting because it's helpful for just what is good content, say with a newsletter or podcast, info gain and is a typical.

27:34Are you adding something new to the conversation and is this unique? I think it's a really good strategy for just producing great newsletters and podcasts and all that all the content in the world Yes, and ideally did you do original research and do you have some domain expertise and did you mention that in the content? This is this is a great heuristic for just content in general Which is exactly what you want these algorithms to be looking for so the alignment is there This episode is brought to you by great question the all -in -one UX research platform love by teams at Brex canva into it and more One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just still have the time or the tools.

28:15That's exactly the gap Great Question fills. Great question makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers to recruit participants, run interviews and surveys, test prototypes, and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions. With a prompt as simple as, why did users choose us over competitors? Great question, not only reveals what your customers have already shared, but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this. Your roadmap is clear, your team is aligned, you're shipping with confidence, and you're building exactly what your customers need.

28:51Head to greatquestion .com slash Lenny to get started. Let's give people an actual actionable plan to start executing on this and winning essentially at AEO. So if it's helpful to use my newsletter as an example, like how would I show up more often and chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, or if it's a B2B SaaS company, whatever's easiest, let's just talk about how to actually do this. First, I would figure out which questions I want to rank for. How I would figure out which questions I want to rank for, I would take my search data, I would maybe take my paid search data, like what are my money terms?

29:23What are my competitors' money terms? So if I'm rippling, what is deal .com, bidding all their paid search on? Then I would transform those into questions. And actually, you can just give those keywords to ChatGPT and say, make these into questions, and this is a pretty good job. So take your competitors paid, search data, or mine, or your own, put it in ChatGPT, give the questions. That's step one. Step two is then track them. So put them in an EO tracker, in an answer tracker. Third thing would be who is showing up as citations, and then have a strategy for each of those different groups of citations.

29:59But the third would be landing, make your own landing pages. So what are the kinds of landing pages that are appearing? Is it illistical? Is it a category page? Is it an article? Tool page? Just like figure out what page type is, seemed to be shining up the most. And then you make your own page for that. How do you have your page rank? Answer all the follow -up questions. So what are all the follow -up questions that someone might ask? You could go back to your search data and look for groups and themes of your keywords that are in your SEO topic, certainly for your AEO topic. Then on the off site, so different strategies for each of those groups.

30:37And I would say that, depending on the company, paying an affiliate to mention you, that's pretty easy if you have the money. So if you want to be the best credit card, you pay Forbes, and then you're the best credit card. So that's strategy one, expensive, easy, controllable. The YouTube Vimeo strategy is also actually pretty easy because there's no community saying, I don't like your YouTube video. You make a YouTube video, you do whatever you want. Maybe people view it, maybe they don't, but you can make a YouTube video or a Vimeo video. And the interesting thing with this, especially for B2B is that YouTube Vimeo other video sites, the kinds of things people make videos for our food, traveling, fun, beauty.

31:17There's not that many videos about AI -powered payment processing APIs. As interesting as that is. But it's a great money term. So if you make a video for these really specific, high -LTV, maybe non -glamorous keywords, questions, topics, that's actually a big opportunity. And then Reddit. So I mentioned with Webflow what we did, which is just make a Reddit account, say who you are say we work and give you this answer. That one is a little bit trickier because the community might say, I don't like your answer. So you can't guarantee that your comment is there, but it is easy. So I would do that, that group.

31:58Oh, and then experiment design. Experiment design and see what works. So SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. And the The reason why is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated and that it becomes best practice and no one ever did analysis. So you did all the stuff that I just mentioned. Do an experiment and see if it worked. Maybe half the stuff I said works, maybe half it doesn't. Do your own experiment. Most best practices, most blog posts are not correct. So how do you set up an experiment?

32:38You get your questions, you turn tracking on, give it a couple weeks. Make your changes, have a test group, have a control group. Intervene on the test group, make your changes, see if the chart went up, see if the control group did not, and now you know your particular strategy worked. So I would definitely do experiments, and I would not assume that stuff you read online is correct. And then you need a team. So who's your team? Probably your team is your SEO team or your SEO agency or your SEO consultant. Probably, hopefully, they can do this stuff. And then however, what I think is hard to hire for is the offsite stuff.

33:16So most SEO people are not going to be amazing at creating YouTube videos and Reddit strategy. So you might need a different person for that. That might be a community -generalist marketing person. So basically, be your SEO team. Please now do an essential optimization. And then marketing community team, please help me show up in more citations. Wow. Okay. That is incredibly valuable. Thank you for sharing all that. I imagine some of this is like, you're just giving away a lot of amazing advice for free here. Thank you. First of all, I imagine there's like a layer. There's only so far you can go on your own and so eventually it's like, okay, we really need help.

33:52That's where a team like yours comes in. Let me ask a few questions here to follow up. One is this tracker concept. So what is this tracker? Can track like how often you show up, say, let these, these letters shows up in answers for the questions that I'm targeting? Yeah, so there's answer tracking, which is kind of like keyword tracking. So keyword tracking would be best for both the podcast and you put that in keyword tracking tool. There's a hundred of them. They're all the same and you see whether or not what you rank. Maybe you rank, hopefully you rank number one. Now in answers, it's very different, but it's related.

34:24So if you ask the same question, you will have different answers each time. If you ask a question, there's different answers per run. And so chatGPTs basically calculating a distribution of all the potential answers that would give and depending on when you ask it, it's basically like a weighted random sample. And so you're going to get different answers. You also have question variants. So you can ask different versions of the same question. And you might show up and one, and you might not show up in another. Then there's different surfaces. There's perplexity. There's Gemini and there's ChatGPT, Met AI.

34:57And so these surfaces have different answers. And so you essentially need to create a share of voice across all these different things and create me like a distribution. So how often am I showing up? What's my average rank? And that's answer tracking. So then where do you get answer tracking? And answer tracking is essentially an evolution of keyword tracking. So we have a page with 60 different answer tracking tools. But it's ultimately just like keyword tracking, it's all the same thing roughly. And so pick one of the 60. We have answer tracking. We're building answer tracking. There's 59 other options.

35:32Probably all pretty good. Probably all pretty similar. But pick one. My general suggestion is pick the one that pick the cheapest one that does what you need. Just like keyword tracking, you can only, you know, there's not a premium version of keyword tracking. You rank number three or you don't. So pick the keyword tracker that is the cheapest that does what you want. Same with answer tracking. And so then when I'm doing an experiment, put your answers in, track them, see a chart over time, see your average rank, how often you're showing up, and what's your average rank, and then you make a change, and then hopefully you go up.

36:03Amazing. I love this term, voice share. I never heard that before. It makes sense. The percentage time you're showing up in LLMs, is there an LLM? Is it just like Google equivalent out to ChatGPT? How do you recommend people think about, say, Gemini or Claude or perplexity and others? So interestingly, there are similar foundational algorithms across all of these, like they're all using search. They're all using search and they're all using LMS, which, you know, foundational algorithms are all the same. The results are actually pretty different. So we're doing a study, we're seeing that Google and Bing are not that similar search engines.

36:41We're seeing that chat, GBT, citations, and Google search results are actually not that similar. perplexity is interestingly similar to more similar to Google than that Chatchy B .T. We did a study looking at thousands of questions and saw the citation overlap with Google search results was around 35 % for Chatchy B .T. and Google, so not that much perplexity was around 70%. But essentially they're all similar algorithms, but with very different citations and results. So then look at which surfaces have the most traffic and then track those. You probably don't need to track all of them, but look across all those, but you do need to look at your share of voice at the percent of time you show across all these surfaces.

37:23You need to ask the question multiple times, you need to ask the variance of the question to truly know how frequent you're showing them. Considering that, ChatGPT, they're going to hit something like a billion weekly active users in the near future. Do you need to worry about Claude and Gemini and Prophexidied? Is the traffic they're meaningful. I know it is a lot of people, but how important is it to focus on those other elements? Well, the way that I would answer that is I believe AOL was one of the largest search engines early on, and Google was not. And so we could ask in 1999 or whatever, should we just focus on AOL search and Yahoo search?

38:00Do we really need to worry about Google? And the answer is we don't actually know, it's very early, we don't know who's going to win. I do think the chat you would need for sure is going to be large, will perplexity or clot or these others compete with them? Probably. Just like search, I think that there will probably be multiple winners and probably you'll need to optimize for several. I don't think that you'll need to optimize for 10, but there will probably be around three or so that you'll want to win, that you want to optimize for. Okay. By the way, I want to make it clear, I love clot. I use clot in Chatchet Pt equally roughly.

38:30I didn't want to make it sound like Chatchet Pt is the only product people use. Okay. How does this strategy change depending on the kind of company you are? Say you're a BWB SaaS company or consumer product, does anything in these seven steps change significantly? Let's take B2B for example. First thing is that the citations that are being mentioned are going to be quite different. So citation optimization will vary quite a bit. Just to clarify what you said, what do you mean when you say citation and strategy is different? Meaning the citations that show up for B2B versus marketplaces are different kinds of citations.

39:04So for B2B, it might be like TechRadar shows up a ton when I ask questions. I've never read TechRadar, but for some reason it shows up all the time. I'm not sure it's great. But TechRadar is showing up a ton for B2B for whatever reason. In commerce, it's not going to be that. It's going to be clamor and cosmopolitan. and for marketplaces, it'll be eater and, you know, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and a place like that. So the kinds of citations that show up are different. Most of the stuff that I've been talking about is specific to B2B. Stuff that's different for commerce. So for most B2B questions, the answers are not clickable.

39:43There's nothing to click on. And so if you actually wanna measure the impact, you cannot just look at last touch referral traffic. you have to see whether or not you shut up in the answer with tracking. And then you also need to ask the user, how did you hear about us? Post conversion to actually know the impact. It's harder to track for B2B. Also for B2B, you're probably deciding which payroll management software to use after 50 touch points with a brand. It's not going to be, you just search for something you suddenly spend on $1 ,000 on payroll management software. So that's B2B. Commerce is different.

40:17So commerce actually now has more clickable cards like you would in a Google. So if you ask what's the best TV for apartments, there are actual shoppable cards. Those shoppable cards are showing multiple sellers. Those sellers have rich snippets. Schema is important. The number of user importance. It's actually quite different. You can look at last touch referral traffic to get a good sense about the number of conversions that you're getting for commerce, similar with restaurants and hotels and local marketplaces. Similar there. And then I would say early stage is also different. So I mentioned earlier, early stage, my recommendations don't do SEO at all.

40:58For answer engine optimization, definitely do AEO and only do citation optimization and long tail. Don't do any of the mid SEO stuff. Just get excited and answer really specific questions. It's so interesting that so much of this is just like having showing up as that little tag slash pill in the answer. Because like it's obvious now that I think about it. That's the only way someone will get to your site from an LM is just like clicking that. Okay. Let me go read this article. Yes. But what they will do is they will open a new tab and they will type in the brand name and they'll go to Google and then they'll click on your domain.

41:35And you will think that it was branded Google search when it wasn't or they'll open up a new tab and they will type in your domain and they'll go directly to your domain and you will falsely think that it was direct traffic. What is your coming back to a question and kind of raised at the beginning? So for my newsletter, the fact that they're sucking up all this content, I don't even know how much, and setting me some percentage traffic, do you have any, I don't know, just sense of like, is this good? Is this what I, if you were running my newsletter, would you encourage all these LLamps to suck up my stuff and then I'd be like, oh yeah, you could check it out more like these needs to look after if you want.

42:08Yes, and I would give the same answer that Brian Balfour gave on your previous episode on this, which is that it's not your choice whether to play the game. You are playing the game, whether you want to or not. So you might as well try to show up. If you just say, don't look at any of my data, then you cannot show up and your competitors will. Now, what you can do is you can say, I don't want you to train on my data. So you can index my site, but please don't train on my data. And they have different user agents for that in different bots. So you can just say, and we're building a web flow app to block training, but not indexation.

42:42Or you've just put it in your robots .txt, this training bot not allowed index bot you are allowed. So if you're concerned about that, I would suggest that. I think probably a lot of people will do that. But saying you can index my set at all, that doesn't make sense to me. Such a good point. Because my, I don't know if I have competitors in this exact space, but basically they would drop instead and then I lose all that traffic. Yeah. Such a good point. Okay. Let me come back to the steps you shared just to see if there's something here that's worth diving into a little further. So this essentially had to be more successful showing up in LM responses.

43:17One is to figure out what questions you want to rank for and you could do this by looking at what your competitors are advertising and their paid ads and things like that. Just like, look at the terms asked almost chat you pt or cloud. Turn these into questions. People would ask to find these terms. Then set up a tracker to see just how you're doing today, like how often are you showing up? There's a million trackers, you have a link willing to to check these out. Then you look at who is showing up today, where are they being taken today? Use that to inform landing pages that you create to answer those questions better.

43:49And it's a, you make it very clear that it's important not to just answer that main question, but also follow up questions. Then there's off -site stuff, so get into affiliates like MDash. YouTube Reddit, Cora, Sounds Lake or the Core, and then running experiment. So you look at this tracker and then you, how, let me actually ask this. And the next step is just set up a team, but just to come back to the step. How do you set up an experiment that isn't just like it before after? How do you do a control group situation? Yeah, so what I would do is I would take a hundred different questions. Half of them, I will intervene, half of them I won't or let's say let's take 200 questions.

44:29So 100 other questions, I'm not going to do anything. So that's my control group. And we are seeing a fair amount of variance and answers just without doing anything at all. So you definitely want a control group. And also we're seeing people, you know, people are using LMS more and LMS traffic is going up. So you definitely need to control especially in answer and start organization. So control group is don't touch it at all. Leave it, leave it as it is. That's a control group. Test group would be I'm going to now comment on Reddit threads. So let's test that. I'm now going to make a YouTube Vimeo video, or I'm now going to pay Forbes advisor to say that I'm the best credit card.

45:03Maybe break those up into a few different buckets. Track them, have a couple weeks before, a couple weeks after, compare against control group, and then and then the stuff that went up when the control group did not work and the stuff that didn't did not. And then reproduce it. So reproducibility is very important. And My background is an academic research and it's common to do a study that cannot be reproduced. And so for something to truly be accepted with an academia, it needs to be reproduced, meaning multiple people have done this study and reproduce that thing over and over again. And especially in SEO, it's common for something to change.

45:40And you think that it was this thing that caused it and it's actually not. And you just assume forever that that works. So reproducibility is very important. Try to do that study multiple times, try to get studies from other people and if it works 10 times, then it probably works. And the stuff that comes back to the waste problem, most work is wasted in SEO. Most work is wasted in AEO. So how do you know what's not wasted? You do an experiment. You don't assume that what you read online is true. You do your own experiment. And then you reproduce it multiple times and keep doing the stuff that works and don't do the stuff that doesn't.

46:15It feels like such a big deal to win at AEO. So just coming back to this idea that like people are coming to chat GPT, Klaj, Gemini, looking for an answer. If you're that answer, I feel like that could just make or break your company. It feels like even more and more than SEO, just getting this right. I would say that where I want to get the most conversions possible, how big is the channel? The channel is not as big as search. The search is definitely larger, but it is a substantial channel now. and Webflow, they get 8 % of those signups from LMCU. It's now one of your top channels. So it's large.

46:53It's not the largest channel. It's not the number one channel. Paid is probably the number one channel, but it's definitely a substantially large channel and one worth optimizing for. And as you said, probably growing over time. Yes. Okay, let me zoom out a little bit. And let me just ask you this. What do you think are maybe the most surprising or under -disgust topics when it comes to AI, NSO, and AEO, that we haven't already talked about. The first thing is that there's significant misinformation on AI and on AEO, and it's pretty extreme. It's unusually the percent of misinformation to correct information is pretty substantial.

47:32So one example is every two years, there's news articles about how Google Search is going to die or it is dying because there's a new thing. So that's happening right now with AI overviews and with AEO. Google's going down, which is not true. Before that, it was TikTok search. So everyone is using TikTok now. Gen Z is using TikTok. They're never going to use SCO -S, SCO is going to be dead. And so you really need to focus on TikTok search, which is not false. But it's not untrue, but it's not taking share away from Google is just a new service. And then before that, it was Instagram and then before that, it was Facebook and it was YouTube.

48:09and people do search and discover on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. But it doesn't take away from Google Search. It adds on top of it. These are all new channels. So Google's slice of the pie stays the same. The pie gets bigger. And so misinformation about Google going down. Google is not going down. Google published something recently. Their VP of Search explicitly said, I looked at the traffic that we're sending to publishers, and it is not down as up slightly. So it is not true that Google Search is going down. and most of the news information about that is saying that it's going down. So that's the first surprising thing.

48:44The second surprising thing is tooling. And I've never seen a channel where these extremely expensive tools that essentially do commodity tasks. So imagine if I said, I'm going to charge you $50 ,000 for keyword tracking. You would say, well, of course, that's absurd. It's keyword tracking. I could write this in a day. No one would do that. But for answer engines, it's mysterious and people don't really know how it's working and also the slope of the growth curve is so significant that I'm seeing people spend huge amounts of money on what are essentially, you know, key retracting commodities. That's the second thing.

49:20The third thing is the growth curve of the channel and we did a reforge a EO webinar a year ago And there was excitement and then it died. And there was very little excitement about it. This was in June. And then people didn't really care. They were intrigued intellectually by it, but they didn't care because they didn't see the impact from that. So there's essentially very little interest between July and January. And then suddenly in January, it's just skyrocketing. So it's chattity -be -d launches. People are very interested in that. It's not that interesting for growth people. And then there's this little spike in June.

49:56And then it's like this. which is usually not what you see with a new channel. So the slope of the curves is unusually steep and the shape of the curves is also very unusual. The last is that a lot of people do think that SEO and AU are different and they're not different. I think probably part of that is because it sounds great to say that there's this new channel that's completely different and I'm an expert and I have a tool to sell you and it's totally unique and all these other tools are not relevant. In reality, there's quite a bit of overlap. There is the difference of the citation optimization, the head is different in the tails, but the core technology is pretty similar.

50:40So those are probably the most surprising things. This piece of it January being the inflection point, you mentioned that it was because references started showing up more prominently. Is that the big change? I think it's increase of adoption of LMS by people, so it's just actually growing more. And then the clickability, and I am seeing, you are seeing now this large increase of actual clicks. Probably before you got no clicks, even if you showed up in answers. So the clickability of the answer has increased, especially for things like commerce and local and hotels because they have these rich modules where you can click on stuff and go somewhere, which was not true before.

51:16Then I think people are just using LMS more. Either, let me just say, I'm learning so much from this conversation. What a fun thing. I could see, it's just like clear how much you love this stuff and it's just how nerdy and deep you get into it and it's just fun to talk to someone that's so deep and knowledgeable about all these things. So thank you for sharing all this with us. I'm going to go in a slightly different direction. There's this whole world of AI content, people generating content with AI, generating landing pages, just like, oh my god, SEO is never going to just like just generate all of stuff.

51:46AI is going to make all this stuff easier. You guys did a really big study on how that works, whether it's a good idea to generate content with AI. Can you just talk about what you learned from that and how people should think about AI in generating content? Yes, so I remember when Chatchy PT launched and Brian Balfour posted on LinkedIn, what do you people think that is gonna happen from Chatchy PT and AI and my immediate responses spam? So just lots and lots of spam, especially SEO spam. And then there was a whole industry around AI generated and I knew immediately that it wouldn't work. And the reason why I knew wouldn't work, and when I say AI generate content, I mean automated content with no human in the loop.

52:26So I think that the future of content is clearly AI assisted. Like 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. I immediately knew that it wouldn't work. Why did I know that? I knew that because I created spam in 2007, and I knew that what Google did about it, and how, and I knew the exact same thing was gonna happen. So what I did in 2007 is I and all the other shopping comparison people, comparison people, scraped all each other's content, reviews, chopped it up, scraped content, 100 million search pages, snippets, and it worked really well.

53:01And then it stopped working. And then all those companies disappeared. And that was exactly what's going to happen with AI Generate Content. And so from the beginning, I've not focused on AI Generate Content. many people have. And we, but I don't know, so maybe it does work. There's lots of case studies about it working. So let's do a study, let's do an analysis. So we took, we looked at both Google and at ChatGPT where we took thousands of searches and thousands of questions and we put those searches into Google search. We put those questions into Chat and ChatGPT and then we looked at the citations or the Google search results.

53:41Then we looked at an AI detector. So we used surfer SEOs AI detector. Now, when I tell people this, they say, well, you can't detect AI. So then we evaluated the efficacy and the accuracy of the AI detector. So we did that by generating thousands of AI -generated articles, and it was very predictive. And then we looked at real articles. We did that two different ways. One way is we write real articles. And the other is we took a random sample of 100 ,000 URLs from CommonCrawl over the last five years. And then we looked at the AI detector before ChatchyPT was launched. So it necessarily was content not created by a human.

54:25And then the false positive rate was around 8%. So basically the AI detector is very accurate. So we took that. Then we ran it on the content. So then what we saw was it was around 10 to 12 % of content in Google search and then chat GPT or AI generated 90 % or not. We ran a correlation analysis showing the exact same thing. So we essentially did a very rigorous study showing that AI content does not work. AI assisted content edited is great. We do that sometimes other people do that. That is clearly the future of content so that does work and should work and that's good. but purely 100 % AI generated does not work.

55:02So then the second thing that we did was we found that this was unexpected, but we found that there's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content. So back to the common crawl study, we looked at a hundred thousand different URLs over the past five years, and then you can see this curve where AI generated is now higher than human created. So there's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content, which is kind of disturbing. So then let's say that AI generated content did work. If AI generated content worked, then everyone would do it. Just like in 2007, shopping comparison sites, if I can scrape my content, why would I pay anyone to write it?

55:40I'll just scrape it from you and I'll chop it up. So then everyone will do that. And then it will go from most content as AI generated to almost all of the content as AI generated. Then what will happen if that works is that Google now becomes a search engine for chat GPT responses. So if Google's search engine for chat GPT responses, there's no reason for Google to exist. Just go to chat GPT, which is the exact same thing that happened in 2007. Google said, I see all these shopping comparisons search engines showing up in my search results. So I am essentially a search engine for search engines.

56:13I should be showing the TV in my results. I shouldn't be showing other vertical search engines. So I'm going to get rid of them and I'm just going to illustrate to the product. Same thing will be true for Chatchy BT. Now for Chatchy BT, what let's say the Chatchy BT ranks its own derivatives in its citations. So then you have this infinite loop of derivatives. So I go to Chatchy BT, I say generate 10 articles, I put those articles into the citations, and then I say summarize these citations that were derivative, and then I keep on doing derivatives of derivatives, and then you have an infinite loop of derivatives, and now AI is summarizing itself.

56:48We've, there's a paper about this called Model Collapse. So again, there's the core algorithm, and then there's the rag piece. So the core algorithm, a group did a study showing Model Collapse, which was what if you feed in AI derivatives into the model and train on your own derivatives, train the core model derivatives, and then what happened was you had all these problem solutions, things break very quickly. Okay, so then we did a study on what if you feed derivatives into the rag piece. So generate 10 derivatives, put that in rank, summarize that, and then generate 10 more, and then summarize my summarizations, infinite loop of derivatives.

57:24What happens? And so what happens is there's a wisdom of the crowd. They all are mesomerizing the opinion of many people. So if you ask a question, what's the best flavor of ice cream? There's not one answer. There's thousands of opinions. So they all are mesomerizing these many, many opinions. There's wisdom of the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd basically says, if you take the average of a large group of people, their average response will be better than the best single individual in the group. And so it's better to have more diversity of opinions, wisdom of the crowd. So what happens to the infinite loop of derivatives?

57:58You essentially converge on one opinion. So if you ask, what's the best flavor of ice cream? It will eventually say, it's vanilla and it's only vanilla and there's no other flavor of ice cream. And so that's a simple example, but if you feed in derivatives of derivatives into the model, you will basically take the wisdom of the crowd and that will shrink and you'll have a single opinion on everything, which is really bad. So that's what happens if AI content, 100 % unassisted AI content works. I'm afraid of the world where everything is trained on AI and AI is trained on AI and generating AI and just like nothing is trusted.

58:32And I love how it's interesting just how much of these incentives are driving this like if chat Tbt was Finding this valuable. This is what people do and then just kind of goes off the rails So there's just like some team there that is keeping this from happening How do you think this evolves like if you were them? What would you do over the next few years to keep things? High quality and not drive these perverse incentives So I would identify what the perverse incentives might be and edge and ready content is one of them The second thing is I think that LMS and search are going to converge. You're seeing that with Google Search where they're having LLM AI overview.

59:10You're seeing that with LMS where they're incorporating maps and shopping carousels and it's converging on search. I think it'll converge on a single experience. That's the first thing. Figure out what 2007, Ethan would do to create spam and make sure they doesn't do that. They had generic content or it's great content. That would be the second thing. And the third thing is there's all these other interesting features that use cases that LMS can be great for. So LMS can be great for remembering everything that you've ever asked. It could be good for personalizing stuff specifically to Lenny. One interesting use case that I think will eventually come would be I say plan a trip to San Francisco and decisions are made for you without any intervention.

59:48I have this wonderful EA named Jen and I say Jen I'm going to Miami. Please just do everything for me and she does everything for me. She knows me. She knows my preferences. She knows that I want to ocean view and I want to restaurant with music. She does all that and I don't have to intervene. AI can essentially do that eventually and that would do that because it would deeply understand you. We would remember everything about you would have context, do it have a reasoning and then it would be able to make all these decisions without your intervention which would be autonomous agents. So that's also another very interesting place for someone like me to talk to my esports well.

1:00:24Yeah, I was just gonna say just imagine not even being told this is what you're choosing like Oh, and go check out subscribe to the best news letter out there and you know if you're up there If the good things will happen Wow, what a wild world Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you think would be helpful to folks that are trying to get better at the stuff try to Take the first steps down as road of a EO Yes, my the most exciting topic which is helps in our optimization and support sweet So I mentioned that people in chat are asking follow -up questions. They're looking for tools.

1:01:01Do you have this feature, this use case, this integration? And that frequently can be answered in Help Center. And usually you would not have an SEO team and say, we really want you guys to focus on the Help Center. But in chat, since there's all these questions about, can you do this thing? Can you fulfill my use case? A Help Center is actually a great place to do that. And so I think how can you optimize the help center? So number one is it's frequently on a subdomain for whatever reason subdomains don't work while subdirectories, move it to a sub directory. Number one, number two is make sure that you're cross linking well.

1:01:36So usually you do not have optimized internal links. So link from help center page to help center page make sure there's lots of cross linking. The third is you probably have help center content about the head, but the tail you probably don't have any help center content for. So an example of this is I was looking for, I wanted to track our sales calls and look to see who was in the meeting and what the sentiment was. And I wanted to put that into looker. So I said which meeting transcription tool integrates with looker? And the answer is none of them. But you could use otter because otter has a Zapier integration.

1:02:15You could send a zap of the meeting, put it in a big query, and then do looker on top of that. but there wasn't a help center article about that because it's a very obscure year's case, but it's not a zero use case. And so the tail, there's going to be a bunch of questions in the tail that you may not have help center articles for. So again, what are the questions and sales calls? What are the questions that you're seeing customer support having pages for that? I might even open up to the community. Anyone can ask anything because the community will then fill on the tail and then answer those.

1:02:46And again, in many cases, there might be nobody talking about this at all. So you could be the only citation for this and then win that tail of questions. Are there any help desk? I don't know, systems offer that are just making this easier yet. Do you think that's an opportunity for them to say Zendesk or Intercom? I think probably all of them should work perfectly well. I think that the only thing you need to do is cross -syncing and subdirectory rather than subdimane, which probably most of them do. So I think that they should all work for free. That the main thing you would want to do would be, again, open it up to the community, make sure that you fill in the tail, but probably all those tools should be good for this.

1:03:19Well, with that, we reached our very exciting landing round. Got five questions for Ethan. Are you ready? I'm ready. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people? Number one is emotional intelligence. And people talk about the concept of emotional intelligence, but there's actual research and psychology around that. I believe it was published in the 80s, but there's a really good book that summarizes the foundational research around emotional intelligence. And it's very useful when building relationships and committing, having with people to understand their emotions.

1:03:50That's the first one. And doing growth because growth is getting people to use your stuff. And so if you have frameworks to inform how people will use your things, then you can be a more effective growth person, which brings me to my second book, which is Chailedini's persuasion book. Robert Chailedini does a a bunch of books around persuasion. But again, there's frameworks for how to persuade somebody to sign up by something. And so he breaks down his framework for that. And again, it's based on psychology. And I think especially in growth, there's all kinds of psychology research and behavioral economics research to inform tests.

1:04:25And if you just read, thinking fast and slow persuasion and emotional intelligence, you can basically take those frameworks and apply it to growth in all kinds of different ways. And then the last is how to measure anything. So how to measure anything is about measuring things that are not immediately obvious to measure. They give this example of they wanted to measure how good an orchestra conductor was and they could survey or they could see the number of standing ovation for each orchestra conductor and the more standing ovation probably means it's this better one and that you don't need to survey people.

1:04:57But much of growth and business is things that are not immediately obvious for how to measure but anything could be measuring. So that's my third recommendation. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? I don't really watch TV, but I watch two different groups of things. I watch really aggressive sports. So I really like Michael Jordan documentary last dance. I like Lance Armstrong documentaries about how aggressive and confrontationally is. I love watching UFC. I like extreme aggression and intensity. The other group of stuff that I like to watch are climbing documentaries.

1:05:34So anything that Alex Honol, Jimmy Chin, do I watch all that, which is the exact opposite of aggressive sports. So it's Zan being present, slow and steady craftsmanship, but this is sort of how I approach my work, which is extreme intensity and aggressiveness, and then the Zan and craftsmanship being present. I love how this explains why people love working with you and why you're good at this, is like this competitiveness and also just like the super nerdiness to get really knowledgeable about how this stuff works. And then I didn't think about the Zen element of it just like staying calm throughout it all.

1:06:13Flow, flow state. Flow, what a funny microcosm of why you're so good at this. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna keep going. The favorite product you recently discovered that you really love. This camera and this microphone. So I got a Sony mirrorless SLR, I forget which one, but getting a Sony or sorry, getting a mirrorless SLR with a wide angle lens really transforms your video calls. And then I have this at this sure microphone. And I think It's like 180. This dramatically improves the quality of my video call. And I like to design things and you can design your video calls. And you can make them amazing.

1:06:56You can have flowers in the background over here, some sunflower. So my favorite products are my SLR camera that I use for video calls in my microphone. Your background is quite exquisite. And I didn't mention that, but it looks beautiful. OK, two more questions. Do you have a life motto that you find really useful in work or in life? I, there's the outliers book about 10 ,000 hours. And the themes there are, you don't have to be the smartest. You have to be sufficiently smart. Number one, number two is focused practice. So it's not just trying hard. It's doing it in an intentional focused way.

1:07:37And the third thing is lots of practice. So you're not going to master any, no one can master anything because they're a genius. They master it because they spend a significant amount of time practicing and they practice in an intentional way. And so my motto is essentially a combination of those things, which is that I'm not going to necessarily win because my brain is the largest brain. Or that I try the hardest, it's because I'm going to be the most intentional about my practice and I'm going to be as intense as I possibly can be about that practice. Okay, final question. I'm curious if there's just like an SEO or even AEO win.

1:08:13You're just most proud of that you always think about, wow, I can't believe I pulled that off. I can't believe the impact we had there. I always liked the example of Butter lettuce with masterclass because masterclass, when I was first working with them, they did not have nearly as much authority as all recipes in Martha Stewart. And we actually didn't know. I actually didn't know if I should take the project because I thought it might be too hard. But I did the project, and it was hard. But we were able to rank really competitively and way better than I expected. And I think it's probably because of all these specific little execution details.

1:08:48But Butter lettuce was my favorite one, and I like Butter lettuce. So I can search for Butter lettuce and I can rest beyond MasterCost. That's amazing. I don't know if Butter lettuce has been mentioned on a spot cast before. Ethan, this was incredible. This was everything I was hoping to be. I feel like we've just leveled up everyone's knowledge what the hell is happening with SEO and a EO? Forget about Geo. To follow the questions, we're gonna focus on you if they wanna potentially work with you guys. And how can listeners be useful to you? So where you can find me, number one, is on LinkedIn.

1:09:18I spend lots of time on LinkedIn, and I publish original, so we do original research. We have a whole, whole research team hypothesizing and evaluating those hypotheses. So we publish all the studies that I mentioned, we publish on our site, and I publish them on LinkedIn. So, follow me on LinkedIn, add me on LinkedIn, send me a message. LinkedIn number one. And the number two is we have a blog, which we call the 5%, so slash 5%, which stands for 5 % of work, 5 % of landing pages drive almost all the impact. So that's sort of the theme. This is only useful stuff. So our blog of 5%, you could subscribe to our email and to our studies.

1:09:56And then how can people be useful to me? So I spent time thinking about this. And there's two ways people can help me. The first way is that there's not that much research around what works in AEO. And I would love to know what people are testing and what the results are and what works. So people doing studies and publishing that or sending it to me, I would love, as much analysis and research as possible. Number one. Then the second one is to help me on LinkedIn by commenting on my posts and on my comments. So you posted most recently, the Brian Balfour episode, for which I wrote a long thoughtful comment, and then I got about 25 likes, and then I got responses to that.

1:10:38And so I've been commenting on other people's LinkedIn posts, and I've been writing these long LinkedIn posts. And when people comment, it boosts engagement within LinkedIn, and then I get mass distribution. So the more people and thoughtful comments, so not this is great, but a long thoughtful comment that stimulates conversation. So if people comment on my post, then I'm just blow up and LinkedIn and I might be as big as you someday. I love how tactical this ask is. It's something Brian Johnson, I noticed this is really good at on Twitter, the longevity guy. He just replies to tweets in a really funny way and feels like that's a big growth channel for him.

1:11:13So I love that. You have this in common with Brian Johnson. Yes. Also just to point people to your domain graphite .io. Is that the right domain? Yep. Amazing. Ethan, thank you so much for sharing so much of this and for being here. Absolutely. It's going to be a... Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com.

1:11:50See you in the next episode!