Smith: AI referral traffic surged in January from adoption and clickable UI
Ethan Smith · The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Sep 14, 2025 · at 7:57
Graphite CEO Ethan Smith explains when and why companies began experiencing dramatic growth in referral traffic from LLMs.
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“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 answers increased and then the adoption increased and that was around January.”
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