Ethan Smith
CEO and Founder, Graphite. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveacademic@ethan_l_s ↗LinkedIn ↗graphite.io ↗
Ethan Smith is the founder and CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth agency. He advises companies like MasterClass, Robinhood, and Notion on search and answer engine optimization strategies.
2shows
4appearances
90statements
15resolved
11supported
1contradicted
73%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Ethan Smith said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Smith: AEO software tools are defenseless commodities
“Who's unique and special? And the answer is no one. If, because it's impossible to be unique and special, And the reason it's impossible to be unique and special is because these are not hard to build. These are commodity. These are easy to build relatively co…”
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
Smith: Startups should ignore SEO until Series A or B
“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. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it…”
Smith: Over 90% of ChatGPT users still use Google
“Similar web I have data showing that the overlap Basically everyone who uses ChatGPT uses Google. Nearly all of them. I think it's like 90, 90% plus or something. So people are not using it instead of search.”
Smith: TechRadar Is Among Most Cited LLM Domains Despite Affiliate Disclosures
“TechRadar is a good example. TechRadar shows up A huge amount. It's one of the most cited domains in LMs. And you'll see a snippet at the top saying we're an affiliate site and it does really well. There's no evidence that a paid for mention does worse than a …”
Smith: Half of newly published internet content is AI-generated
“We just posted an original piece of original research showing that half of the content published on the internet is generated by AI.”
Smith: Early-stage startups can rank in AEO immediately through citations
“That's not the case for answer engine optimization because 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, like a, you know, a brand new …”
Smith: Google's E-E-A-T signals show no observable effect on rankings
“Potentially Google has eat expertise, authority, trustworthiness, which actually I don't see having an effect unfortunately, but it could.”
Smith: Google VP confirmed publisher referral traffic is up slightly
“Google published something recently. Their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our, the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it is not down. It's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down.”
Smith: Only 10 to 12% of Google and ChatGPT results are AI-generated
“It was around 10 to 12% of content in Google search and in ChatGPT are AI generated. 90% or not.”
Smith: There is more AI-generated content online than human-created content
“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 100,000 different URLs over the past five years. And then you can see this curve where AI generated is now higher th…”
Smith: Google treats non-SEO traffic as a core authority signal
“Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into the first signal I'll…”
Smith: Companies need 1,000 daily non-SEO visits before prioritizing SEO
“I'll put the domain in, I'll look at the total traffic and I'll want to see at least I would say 1000 visits a day, roughly for non SEO. At least you have five visits that that that's very little. And then the second thing I'll look at is the number of referri…”
Ethan Smith: AI should assist SEO research workflows, not autonomously generate articles
“Where AI is really useful is actually all the other stuff that I talked about. So if you think about the workflow of creating content and start with, what should I be writing about? What are the subtopics? So like, 300 different keywords. What are the sub them…”
Smith: Winning AI search requires offsite citations, not just on-domain pages
“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 yo…”
Ethan Smith: Winning AEO requires optimizing YouTube and Reddit, not pure AEO
“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.”
Smith: Startups can win AI search visibility quickly via multi-channel offsite content
“If I'm making viral YouTube videos and you know, a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow. So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand.”
Smith: The llms.txt protocol does not work
“So the intention of LMS.txt is to get more traffic and to send information about, it's not to block, it's to send more information to the LMS so that you get more traffic, but it doesn't work.”
Ethan Smith: AI is only the second-biggest shift in SEO history
“That was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change. And then this is prob…”
Smith: Top LLM answers are determined by citation frequency, not ranking
“Usually when you ask something like what's the best tool for X, the first answer will be mentioned at the most in the citations. So that's very different from Google.”
Smith: Startups should not do SEO until Series A or B
“When startups come to me and ask me for SEO help, my first response is don't do it at all. Spend your time on something else. Cause you're not going to be able to grow SEO early on as a in search because you don't have enough domain authority and it takes a wh…”
Smith: Webflow LLM traffic converts 6x higher than Google search
“So Webflow, we saw a six X conversion rate in difference between LLM traffic and Google search traffic.”
Smith: Authentic, transparent Reddit participation beats automated spam for LLM citations
“So the strategy is find a thread that is a part of a citation that you want to show up in, say who you are, say where you work, and then give a useful piece of information, and that works really well. And that sounds simple if you're not in the growth mindset …”
The other half of the tape: Ethan Smith's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Yuriy Timen 5Jonathan Becker 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 6
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ethan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Graphite | 3 | 68 | 43% 3/7 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 MIXERGYLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Graphite | 1 | 22 | 100% 8/8 | full record on Mixergy → |