#2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you

0:00Hey there, Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner, and this is a new series for me. It's called The Next New Thing. Here's what's up in this interview, then an intro, then we'll get right to it. Want to get people to come to your website, download your app, buy from your business? Well, here's a guy who runs an SEO company who tells you don't start with SEO. Instead, start with AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. In fact, I spent about an hour with him where he's going to walk you through how you can get to be the first result when people ask about your business to chat GPT, perplexity, Claude.

0:34What else is out there? Let's get into it.

0:40I feel like a lot of people think that this is just too premature to start thinking about how to get into AI answers. Give me an example of what you've been able to achieve for a real customer, one that we know. yeah so the way that i think about timing is i it's it's a good time when the channel is large enough to be impactful so what is the quantity of conversions or the quantity of traffic that you can get and since january the channel has been growing dramatically if if you asked me a year ago we started playing around with answer engine optimization in june of last year and people were intellectually curious about it, but they weren't prioritizing or spending money on it because it wasn't profitable channel because it wasn't big enough.

1:25And so it's now for sure, the size of the conversions is substantial. And therefore, I think the timing is good. So Web Flows is one example that we worked with. And there are not that many examples because we're still pretty early. So Web Flows is an example. 8 % of their signups come from LMs. Got it. All right. And this is because of you. this is a team effort and um uh we were in we were part of that team i think so it was because of us let's break that down there's stuff that you do for seo and then there's stuff that you do for aeo that you weren't already doing for seo and those are two different things and so a lot of what you do for seo actually helps with aeo without trying to so the stuff that works really well for SEO that we work with the Webflow team on is a bunch of use case landing pages and templates, like how to build a website, how to build a website for designers or restaurant websites.

2:26So templates, use cases, how to do X type pages. And this is all the same stuff that you would do if you wanted search engine optimization to be increased, but also that you might do for your customers, right? You're trying to show them how Webflow is used by restaurants, et cetera. Okay. And so you're saying some of that just naturally will feed into traffic from chatbots. So I would say most of the signups from LLMs were from SEO work that we had already done or were doing. In addition to that, we did things specifically for a for engine optimization that we would not have otherwise done for SEO.

3:06And so those are mostly offsite optimizations. So if you search for best website designer and Webflow's URL ranks number one on Google, that's a big win. And if in chat you say, what's the best website builder and Webflow's URL is the number one citation and nobody else mentions Webflow, then they won't win. And so for these popular questions, the way to win is not just a page on your site, it's pages off of your site. and so off-site is that that's one of the there's two differences with answer engine optimization and seo is uh off-site and the long tail and so for off-site we uh the webflow team and we worked to get them mentioned on other platforms and so there's earned and owned off-site so uh owned off-site would be webflow has a youtube channel and there's tons of videos about how to use Webflow.

4:04And then Webflow can also engage in Reddit threads. So there's a lot of the Reddit threads either asking about how to use Webflow or asking about how to do things that Webflow can do. And so we collaborated with the Webflow team, the Webflow team themselves. So Reddit's an interesting thing. When you ask growth people really any question about how do I optimize a channel, they immediately anchor to scaling things and to using products in ways that they're not supposed to use them. So as soon as you say, how do we optimize Reddit, the growth person says, well, I need to do hundreds of threads, hundreds of comments and not use it as a real user, because I'm using it as a real user, then not a growth person.

4:43That's just, you know, I'm just a real person. So I need, I need to do something that I'm not supposed to do. And so the immediate strategy would be, well, let's create a bunch of Reddit spam with hundreds of fake accounts, where we're all liking each other, and we're creating karma, and we're upvoting each other's comments, we say, Hey, you should really consider using Webflow. So instead, we helped identify citations on Reddit that were part of the questions that Webflow wanted to win. And then people at Webflow then said, Hey, I'm Vivian. I work at Webflow. I'm a real person. Here's, here's some useful information that answers your question.

5:19So that's what actually worked. And then similar on YouTube, how to use Webflow. So those are things that, you know, YouTube, They were already doing that, but we could sort of configure the YouTube strategy to be a bit more specific for AEO. The Reddit stuff probably we would never have done for SEO. But then we did a bunch of stuff for SEO that just helped for free in an engine optimization. But that's generally what worked. So if I'm understanding you right, Ethan, you're saying you go into perplexity, chat GPT, Claude, et cetera. You do a search or you ask a question that your users might ask.

5:51You then find a Reddit link as the source. you click over and you say, I'm going to go and answer it too. Or one of the people at Webflow will go in and answer. And what they'll do is say, I work at Webflow, so they're fully open about it, and give a detailed answer. And that's one thing that you all did as a consistent rhythm to your day. And then the second thing, if I'm understanding you right, is just posting YouTube videos, which I wouldn't have thought would help. Does YouTube videos help with Gemini? Does it help with Claude? Does it help with ChatGPT? Where does it work? it generally so lms the the classes of domain types of domains that are cited frequently video and ugc are huge instagram tiktok linkedin i am not seeing x that much and then video and and youtube shows up a lot and the less entertaining your product is the better the more interesting video is and the reason why i say that is because video is made to be entertaining and entertaining categories like food travel beauty uh are the most crowded and the least entertaining things are the least crowded so website builders is moderately entertaining we work with a lot of sass companies like payroll management software is not entertaining at all so these are not crowded and so the less less entertaining and more niche your product but high ltv your product is video is the most interesting uh so uh and it shows up a lot and there are all these ai adjacent channels so there's answer engine optimization and then there's stuff that's next to answer engine optimization which is reddit affiliates video, LinkedIn, Instagram.

7:39And a lot of these have not been optimized. And actually each has its own unique special strategy that's completely unrelated to answer engine optimization, but it's adjacent to it. So actually to do answer engine optimization really well, I think it's not doing pure answer engine optimization. It's doing all of these other channels, but doing YouTube and Reddit with the intention of helping you on answer engine optimization. But as a result, you show up in LMs. You show up within YouTube. You show up within Google search because there's a YouTube video about payroll management software showing up in Google search.

8:12You get the video on the landing page and then you get free views there. And so it creates this loop. How important is it that the LinkedIn post, the Instagram post, et cetera, has a lot of views already? It seems like there's a correlation, but it's not just ranked by number of views. So if you look, if you, If you ask a question about payroll management software website builders, the videos that are appearing are typically the most viewed, but you won't see it where it's just literally sorted by number of views. There's other signals. I don't know exactly what they are. It's probably traditional search authority, like number of backlinks and shares and things like that.

8:51But it definitely does matter. What I will say is that for many questions, the number of views is not millions or hundreds of thousands. It's hundreds or a few thousands. So it's still something that you could win without being an influencer. You also told me before we got started that for Webflow, help center content was useful. And that just means that if they're, I don't know what they're using, Intercom, Help Scout, what are they using? Not actually sure what they're using, but yeah, help. So the two things that are different with answer organization and SEO are the head and the tail. and a tail is larger and longer in chat the average i think the stat roughly was 20 average of 25 words per uh prompt an average of three to six for search something along those lines so chat is significantly uh more specific and part of that's because search is made people know that they need to translate their intention into a short keyword because they know that the search engine won't understand their actual full intention.

9:58So they don't act, they don't speak in conversational ways and they don't be, they don't get so specific that they know that the search engine will fail. Whereas chat can, you can be very specific. So you could ask a question like, what's the best website builder that has this integration and integrates with Shopify and also has this feature and is, you know, has support for Korean language. You would never ask, you never put that in search, but you know, but that's what you want. And you with that in chat and the chat can interpret that and give you an answer and help center and people have many questions about i want a product that fulfills my use case and help center is actually a great place to do that because help center is you talking about how your product works and what it does when it does not do and so help center optimization is not something you would focus on for seo but you would for answer engine optimization because that's where you have all this information about what your product does.

10:50And so do I now need to create all these different answers? Isn't the AI smart enough to grab three different answers, combine them and say, here's what my user needs? Yes, you do not need to create millions of pages for every single question. You need to generally answer the question. So an example of that would be which for Rippling, I want a payroll management software that has these different features, like attendance tracking and time tracking and offboarding and this. So Rippling has a page for each persona, HR, IT, finance, and all of the use cases and features that they have, but there's one page for each.

11:35So it's not that you need one page for every single use case and every single question. It's grouping and theming them. And the AI is indeed smart enough to just find the answer. So you don't need an explicitly verbatim exact match for every single question. So going back to that hypothetical example you gave earlier, a site builder that integrates with Shopify, has a set of features that we didn't get into, and also supports Korean language. One page could say, here are all the languages that we support. Another page can say, here's a list of all the features. And then another could say, this is a list of integrations and including Shopify, maybe even have a Shopify only page.

12:11and the AI is smart enough to grab all three, connect it together and give it to the user. Yes. Okay. All right. So help center, what about how two articles on the site that's helpful or is help center enough? The more the better. An interesting thing when you search for, when you search for Rippling and Pave, or sorry, when you search for which payroll management software integrates with Pave, there's multiple articles that show up saying rippling there's a rippling pave integration page i believe there's a pave rippling integration page on pave.com and i believe there's a help center article another example is a meeting note transcription that works with zoom and otter shows up with a feature a zoom feature page a help center article saying how to do this and i believe there's a page on Zoom, but basically there's multiple pages and all of these are getting Otter to show up.

13:15And so it's, I wouldn't say that, you know, the more, the better forever, but I would do multiple versions, help center article, how to do X article, paying the company that you're integrating with and ask them to do both of these things. I told you before we got started that I was a little concerned about us using Webflow as the first example because Webflow has a giant team. They have a lot of resources. What does this mean for somebody who doesn't have a giant team? Is it not possible? It's actually the most interesting, one of the most interesting channels for small companies with limited resources.

13:47And the reason why is because in search engine optimization, when early stage companies ask me for help and what their strategy should be, I tell them to not work on SEO because they're not going to perform. You need enough authority to be able to perform in search. And a lot of other channels are pretty crowded. So it's especially hard, the cold start problem with the early stage startups. And this is one of the most interesting channels. And the reason why is because you can do offsite optimization with no brand. So if I am a brand new payroll management software company, and I want to compete with large incumbents, if I'm making viral YouTube videos and a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow.

14:33So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand. It's actually one of the most interesting channels. One of my friends and listeners created Your 360 AI. It just launched. And essentially what it does is it will ask you some questions using like a voice. It seems like it's an 11 Labs voice. Understand what you're trying to learn about your leadership and management style. Then it'll go and contact the people who work with you, who you told it to, and have a conversation with them to understand how they're working with you and get the answers to the things you're wondering about.

15:13And basically it comes back to you and it summarizes what you could do to be a better leader, better performer at your job. If he wanted to do this, to start to rank, this is not a very sexy topic, right? There are not a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do 360 feedback. What would you recommend for someone like him? Yeah, that's exactly what I would do. And this is not entertaining. And so I would do exactly what I just mentioned. So I would create a YouTube video about the various use cases of my product. So there's 360 reviews, there's like how to give difficult feedback, how to receive difficult feedback.

15:48it's like what are all the problems that your product is a solution for and i would make videos on each of them then i would try to become a real reddit user and there's probably threads of people asking about management and how to uh how to get how to get 360 feedback or 360 feedback is helpful because it solves the problem of not getting feedback generally like 360 feedback is a particular design solution for the problem which is i need feedback from my team about how i'm performing. So like, what are all those problems and solutions? Find Reddit threads about those. Be a real person, say who you are, give useful information.

16:26Don't say, check out my product. Just say, Hey, I'm Ethan from, uh, 360 review.ai or whatever here, you know, here, here's how I would approach it. Uh, I would do that. And the time to impact might be very fast. And actually product hunt is probably another interesting channel where a brand new product can quickly go viral there and that might actually get picked up in the office as well. Okay. That is huge. All right. Now that I understand what's possible, let's talk about some of the myths. And the first thing that I was thinking is SEO is basically dead. In fact, here's why I was thinking that because I know that you disagree with it.

17:02It's not so much that people aren't using search engines. They're going to use it for a long time. There's some people using the white and yellow pages, I think. It's not that it's dead that it doesn't work. It's just that there are killers like you out there who are so good at it, I can't compete. What do you say about the SEO is death worry that I have? Yeah, so there's a few different, let's break it down into a few different arguments. So argument one is what you just said, which is it's too hard. It's crowded. And I mean, I do think that it's hard. I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger.

17:38wait until you're you know series a or later maybe series b and later because it's it's it's hard like maybe you could get a little bit of impact but you're not going to get millions of visits if you're a small company but if you're a big company you can do really well it's you know it's a massive channel it's uh i think it's the second largest channel after paid advertising so uh i think it's 5x at least 5x lms maybe 10x depending on the the category so it's way bigger than than an AEO. So it's a massive channel. But yeah, I mean, it is hard. So depending on how big you are, you should decide whether or not it's too hard.

18:13But it's not that I am so good. It's that authority is you need enough of sufficient authority to compete on competitive terms. But if you have that, then you can be competitive. So it's not so crowded that no one can do it. It just depends on who. So that's argument one. Argument two is that SEO or sorry, search is being used less and people using chat instead of search. And that's simply not true. There's clear data showing that that's not true. Similar web, I have data showing that the overlap, basically everyone who uses chat GPT uses Google, nearly all of them, I think it's like 90 % plus or something.

18:53So people are not using it instead of search. Just like they're not, a lot of people use TikTok to search and Instagram to search. Like if you're looking for travel ideas or restaurants, a lot of people use TikTok and Instagram, but that doesn't mean that they no longer use search. That's just another channel that gets added. Same with chat. It's another channel that gets added. The slice of the pie for Google search stays the same. The pie just gets bigger and there's new slices added. And chat GPT is another slice to the pie. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Let's then talk about the other thing that you told me was a myth, which is that they're different.

19:28You kind of dispelled some of that, right? You're saying a lot of the work that we do for SEO helps out with AEO, answer engine optimization. The other thing that you told me before we got started is LLM.txt is not used. Are you saying that we're talking about that thing that you can put on a site that says, don't crawl my site, and the LLMs are supposed to respect it and say, okay, I'm not going to take that data in. They're not paying attention to what you're saying. So there's robots.txt and then there's llms.txt. Robots.txt is to say, don't crawl my site. And as far as I know, everyone respects that, including llms.

20:09Lms.txt is different. So llms.txt is an interesting case study in how myths spread, how misinformation spreads. So lms.txt was an idea from a blogger, I forget their name, where they said, this might be a good idea. Like, we should send structured data to LMS. And that is a good idea. Actually, there's all this stuff recently about MCP. And MCP is basically, how do you send structured information to LMS? I think it's Jeremy Howard from Answer AI is what I just saw. I think so. I think so, yeah. And ironically, he does not have his own. There's not an LMS.txt on his site. Okay. But so it was a good idea that he proposed.

20:55And then other people saw the idea. And then they repeat it to each other. And they say, hey, have you heard of LMS.txt? Like, no, I haven't heard of that. And then eventually, you're like, yeah, I've heard of that from five people. and then that i heard about it becomes it must be true because i've heard about it if you're an idea enough times it becomes a fact and then people start looking for evidence that it works even though it doesn't work and then you're like well it got crawled my alms.txt got crawled so it must be working but of course any page on your your contact page gets crawled the fact that it gets crawled doesn't tell you anything about whether or not this is an accepted structured protocol for sending information to LMS.

21:36Then Google, John Mueller at Google said, I don't know of anyone who uses this. But still, if you hear enough times about this idea, then it is a fact. And so that's why this is still a myth that most people believe. And if you ask ChatGPT if it uses LMS.txt, it will tell you that it does not. At least the chat says it doesn't. And I get it. People are concerned that their stuff is going to be crawled, but I'm the opposite. I want more of my stuff to be crawled. I want more of my information to be out there. I want more traffic coming over to me because of it. And frankly, even if I don't get traffic, I just want people to be able to use and benefit from what I'm doing here.

22:16And I think most people are in that boat, but I can understand some companies saying no. So the intention of lms.txt is to get more traffic and to send information about it. It's not to blog. It's to send more information to the LLM so that you get more traffic, but it doesn't work. People generally don't know how answer engine optimization works. And so that's why they're grasping at straws, trying to come up with ideas. And if those ideas sound like they might make sense, and they get repeated enough times, those myths become facts. And lms.txt is one of many examples of false information and myths.

22:51Okay, so how do you know if something works? They're not telling you what you should be doing, right? And you're trying to get an advantage over anyone else who might have any publicly available information. How do you, Ethan, know if you've done a thing that you got a result because of the thing that you do? And how do you get that iterative process fast enough so you can keep iterating? The way that you know anything is true is with a scientific method. So you come up with a hypothesis, you test it, and you reproduce it. So how do you come up with hypotheses? You come up with hypotheses by doing analysis.

23:26So you do analysis and you say something like best website builder. It seems like these sites are ranking. Maybe the reason why is for this. It seems like YouTube is appearing. So analysis, pattern match, YouTube videos are showing up, red threads are showing up. Hypothesis, adding a YouTube video will show up in citations and will cause me to become an answer and to rank better within the answer. So then you set up an analysis. You take a control and a test group. So for Webflow, there's 100 topics or 100 questions we want to rank for. For 50 of those, we're not going to do anything. And for 50 of them, we're going to do something.

24:07We're going to add YouTube videos for those 50. I'm going to set up tracking for all 100 for, let's say, for two weeks, four weeks, so that I have a baseline. And then for these 50, I'm going to add YouTube videos. And for these other 50, I'm going to do nothing at all. and then I'm going to see if the ones with YouTube videos showed up. So did the YouTube video appear in the citations and did my answer go up? And then I look at that. The reason why the control matters is because LMs are growing a lot and charts are just going to naturally go up because they're growing a lot. So if you don't have a control, you don't know whether or not you caused an effect.

24:43But the way that you know anything to be true is with the scientific method and AEO is no exception. And so we're looking at maybe four weeks to get a result. Do things, right, right? I'm looking at your face to try to get a sense of it, yeah? I would probably do two weeks pre and I would do four weeks post, so six weeks total. And then don't things change so fast that by the time you get your result, the whole thing could have shifted? No. No, they're not changing that much. No. And, you know, there's models and there's – I wouldn't say that they're dramatically changing. Maybe they're – like when is there a new model?

25:25Every six months or so? I see. So, you know, if there's – like GPT-5 and 4 are different. And so I would say that you would get noisy data. Same with Google Search. Google Search changes their algorithms as well. But, you know, again, if you have a control in a test group, then you'll know whether or not it was the new model or whether or not it was something that you did. I wouldn't say that the models are changing so much that, you know, a YouTube video worked before and it didn't work. I wouldn't expect that the underlying strategy to wildly change within six weeks. It's possible, but, you know, the new models come out, I think, every six months or so.

26:06I heard you say on Lenny's podcast that affiliate mentions help. Affiliate are basically people you pay. With Google, you have to disclose that and it's not as effective to get them to link. What is it like for LLMs? It does work in Google. If you search for the best credit card in Google, you'll get a bunch of affiliate sites. Right. And that's been true for a long time. And it works in all M's. TechRadar is a good example. TechRadar shows up a huge amount. It's one of the most cited domains in all M's. And you'll see a snippet at the top saying we're an affiliate site and it does really well.

26:43There's no evidence that a paid-for mention does worse than a non-paid-for mention. Okay. So then am I going after sites and offering to pay them affiliate commission just so I can get links? Yes. Mentions. Just get them to mention. Doesn't need to be the whole structured data thing that I would need otherwise. The more the better, but just a mention is sufficient. Okay. Quora, Stack Overflow, those communities, all helpful. Go in and respond to as many questions as possible. Yes. Depends on your category, but yes. How can I tell which questions I should be targeting? Like what are the top asked questions?

27:19Yeah, there's what would be great is if ChatGPT gave us a ChatGPT search console, like Google search console. I said, here's the search volume for these prompts, but they don't do that. I don't anticipate they'll do that soon. I think they'll eventually do that as they build out ads, but they don't give you that information. So there's a couple of ways to do this. The first way is what I would suggest, which is to use search data. And so if I'm a brand new company, I would start with the keywords that I want to rank for and then make them into questions. How I would pick the keywords would probably be which keywords would I want to pay the most for.