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: Dotdash Meredith is probably the most cited source in LLMs
“Dot dash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with good housekeeping, all recipes, Investopedia. It's the, it's probably the most successful SEO company of all time. And it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LMs as well.”
Smith: Majority of SEO and AEO best practices are incorrect
“SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. And the reason why is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated and everyone, and then it becomes bes…”
Smith: ChatGPT citation overlap with Google is only 35%, Perplexity is 70%
“We did a study looking at thousands of questions and saw the citation overlap with Google search results was around
35% for ChatGPT and Google. So not that much perplexity was around 70%”
Smith: AEO traffic is falsely attributed to branded search and direct visits
“What they will do is they will open a new tab and they will type in the brand name and they will go to Google and then they'll click on your domain and you will think that it was branded Google search when it wasn't. Or they'll open up a new tab and they will …”
Smith: LLM answer volatility requires control groups in AEO testing
“We are seeing a fair amount of variance in answers just without doing anything at all. So you definitely want a control group.”
Smith: Feeding AI derivatives into RAG collapses output diversity into single opinions
“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.”
Smith: Help center subdomains perform worse than subdirectories
“It's frequently on a subdomain for whatever reason, subdomains don't work well to subdirectories. So move it to a subdirectory.”
Ethan Smith: SEO growth is driven by programmatic and editorial content, not bug fixing
“Technical SEO is mostly internal link architecture and a few other things and bugs, but that's not how you grow. The way that you grow is with programmatic and with editorial SEO.”
Ethan Smith: Editorial SEO has overtaken programmatic SEO in traffic generation
“Editorial SEO is more and more actually driving more traffic than programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO used to be almost all SEO when I started and editorial SEO has overtaken that.”
Smith: Higher user engagement increases Google search rankings immediately
“Your engagement will be higher and your entire engagement will cause you to rank higher and it'll cause you to rank higher right away. So it's not only a way to be robust against algorithm changes. It's a way to rank higher right now.”
Smith: New SEO initiatives should launch before testing in month six
“If you're starting from zero and nothing exists, then you shouldn't be testing things. It should be launching things. Should be testing things once things have launched. So testing is something I would do at like month six or later. The beginning should be aro…”
Smith: Smaller sites can outrank high-authority competitors via focused topical authority
“And this is actually a great way where earlier companies can actually rank, even if their competitors have way more domain rank than they do. Because again, Google's saying for a fintech site, maybe you don't have as much authority as Investopedia, but you're …”
Smith: Google builds semantic topic graphs dynamically, not via curated taxonomies
“I think people over, overestimate the amount of expert curated taxonomies that Google uses, and it's actually a lot of Algorithmic dynamics, definitions of a graph that are generated constantly. And again, they change.”
Smith: SEO architecture requires a flat link graph, not a hierarchical tree
“You don't want a hierarchical tree structure. You actually want a very flat graph.”
Smith: Fixing internal link distribution typically yields a 25%+ traffic lift
“Consistently we'll see if you don't have good link spread, fixing it has significant opportunity, typically, 25% plus opportunity, even like a hundred percent opportunity sometimes if your links are really under optimized.”
Smith: Most Webflow LLM signups came from existing SEO work
“So I would say most of the signups from LMS were from SEO work that we had already done or we're doing.”
Ethan Smith: LLMs frequently cite YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn, but rarely X
“It generally, so LMs, 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 YouTube shows up a lot.”
Ethan Smith: Video marketing works best for unentertaining, high-LTV B2B products
“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 are the most crowded and the least entertainin…”
Ethan Smith: LLM video citations require only hundreds of views, not millions
“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 pretty, it's still something that you could win without being an influencer.”
Smith: Help center optimization is critical for AEO, unlike SEO
“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 …”
Smith: AEO does not require verbatim exact-match pages for every query
“Yes, you do not need to create millions of pages for every single question. You need to generally answer the question... It's grouping and theming them. And the AI is indeed smart enough to just find the answer. So you don't need it explicitly verbatim exact m…”
Smith: Search volume is 5x to 10x larger than LLMs
“I think it's five X, at least five X LMs, maybe 10 X, depending on the category. So it's way bigger than AEO.”
Ethan Smith: AEO testing requires control groups because LLM growth inflates baseline metrics
“The reason why the control matters is because LM's 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.”
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 → |