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: ClearScope will launch the first AI content optimization tool
“I believe by the time this podcast gets published, ClearScope will show the first optimization tool.”
Smith: AI referral traffic surged in January from adoption and clickable UI
“Companies that we work with started in January and it started one because of more adoption, but two is because the answers became a bit more clickable. You have maps, you have shopping carousels, you have clickable cards. So I think the clickability of the ans…”
Smith: Everything that works in SEO works in AEO
“Everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO.”
Smith: Google intentionally tuned search algorithms to rank Reddit, Twitter, and Quora
“Google has specifically configured their search algorithm to rank Reddit and Twitter and Quora because they want user generated content. And if it wasn't good content, then they would change the algorithm and they wouldn't rank it.”
Smith: LLMs will not recommend products absent from RAG search results
“And I think also the LLM is, is probably not going to say your product if it didn't show up anywhere on the RAG. So I think that's where most of the interesting stuff is for, from an optimization perspective.”
Smith: High-LTV B2B video content offers major AEO opportunity
“YouTube, Vimeo, other video sites, the kinds of things people make videos for are food, traveling, fun, beauty. There's not that many Videos about AI powered payment processing APIs as interesting as that is, but it's a great money turn. So if you make a video…”
Smith: Buy the cheapest answer or keyword tracking tool available
“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 th…”
Smith: Webflow gets 8% of signups from LLMs
“Webflow, they get eight percent of those signups from LMS.”
Smith: Community-generated help content captures long-tail LLM citations
“I might even open up to the community. Anyone can ask anything because the community will then fill in the tail and then answer those. And again, in many cases, there might be nobody talking about this at all. So you could be the only citation for this and the…”
Smith: Non-SEO Website Traffic Acts as a Domain Authority Signal
“Your non SEO traffic is actually an authority signal.”
Ethan Smith: SEO addressable market must include audience competitors, not just product rivals
“There are product competitors and audience competitors. So for something like I'm at a WeWork right now. So for WeWork, I could look at the traffic for other, you know, rental office companies, or I could look at companies that are ranking for the kinds of thi…”
Smith: Effective SEO requires integration with core product changes
“To do SEO well, I think it needs to fit into a broader product context and a lot of what's effective in SEO is actually making core product changes.”
Ethan Smith: Editorial SEO is viable for every company, programmatic is not
“Editorial SEO is always an opportunity for every single company. If there's a addressable market and programmatic SEO is sometimes an opportunity.”
Ethan Smith: Dotdash is probably the most successful editorial SEO company
“Dash is a conglomerate of many different publishers, like Allrecipes and Investopedia, and they consistently over and over again perform really well. They're probably the most successful editorial SEO company.”
Ethan Smith: Video transcripts fail to rank for instructional queries against articles
“So for masterclass, you type in how to poach an egg and you see that all the results are articles with a recipe. That's a very clear correlation that if I want to rank, I need a page like this. So with masterclass is an interesting example. They have classes a…”
Ethan Smith: Product pages cannot rank for comparative category queries
“And so an example would be a best cameras. So you'll have a category page and a listicle page typically. So you could have one or one or the other, but you will need one of those. If you have a product page, you're not gonna rank.”
Smith: Pogo-sticking back to search results is a negative ranking signal
“So you clicked on my page, then you went back and you clicked on somebody else. That's a very bad signal. So that's engagement on google.com.”
Ethan Smith: Creating individual pages for every keyword variation no longer works
“You don't want a page for every single keyword. So when I started in SEO, you would have a category page for every single keyword. And so I was at a shopping site. We had ten million plus pages. So every single way that you could possibly search for a product …”
Smith: A single web page typically ranks for 200 to 2,000 keywords
“And so there's typically about any given page is typically going to rank or be able to rank for about 200 to 2000 different keywords.”
Smith: Aggregate topic search volume is at least 10x single keywords
“And so if you think the, if the search volume for best cameras is a thousand, the topic of best camera is probably a 100,000. So it's probably 10 X at least the search volume of the keyword.”
Smith: MasterClass outranked Food Network by closing topic content gaps
“And part of why Masterclass early on was able to outrank Food Network, who has way more, who had way more authority in, in food is because other companies had these gaps. They were not looking at all 400 keywords and they didn't talk about health benefits and …”
Smith: SERP overlap determines whether keywords should share a page
“You can basically put in five year plan template, five year plan examples, and you can look to see how much overlap of the results are there. So the, if the results are completely different for those two keywords, you should probably have two different pages, …”
Smith: SEO results take six to nine months, faster for authoritative sites
“It depends, but usually I'll say six to nine months. But it's a function of how much authority you have and how much existing SEO traction you have. The more authority you have and the more traction, the faster it is. So if a company like Netflix makes a chang…”
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 → |