Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Opinion
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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 …”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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%”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
