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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
There's this term everyone's hearing about, AEO.

**Ethan Smith** (0:02)
Answer Engine Optimization. How do I show up in LMS as an answer?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:05)
It feels like such a big deal to win at AEO.

**Ethan Smith** (0:09)
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 LMS, because the LMS is summarizing many citations. And so you need to get mentioned as many times as possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:21)
Chat GPT is driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter.

**Ethan Smith** (0:25)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
Are the leads that these answer engines driving to companies actually valuable?

**Ethan Smith** (0:41)
Significantly more valuable. Webflow saw a 6x conversion rate difference between LLM traffic and Google search traffic.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
A lot of people are seeing this as everything is different. Nothing we've done before is going to work. We have to rethink everything.

**Ethan Smith** (0:52)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
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 Loveable, Replet, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JAPPRD 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, microservices, and data pipelines in real time at enterprise scale. Visual and code-first development, built-in compliance, observability, and rock-solid reliability ensure work flows evolve dynamically with your needs. It's not just about automating tasks. It's orchestrating autonomous agents and complex work flows 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 dot I-O slash Lenny.
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