Smith: Top LLM answers are determined by citation frequency, not ranking
Ethan Smith · The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Sep 14, 2025 · at 11:18
Graphite CEO Ethan Smith explains how LLMs aggregate multi-source citations to choose which product to recommend first.
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“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.”
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