Opinion
Smith: AEO software tools are defenseless commodities
“Who's unique and special? And the answer is no one. If, because it's impossible to be unique and special, And the reason it's impossible to be unique and special is because these are not hard to build. These are commodity. These are easy to build relatively co…”
Insight
Smith: Startups should ignore SEO until Series A or B
“I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it…”
Assertion Supported
Smith: Over 90% of ChatGPT users still use Google
“Similar web I have data showing that the overlap Basically everyone who uses ChatGPT uses Google. Nearly all of them. I think it's like 90, 90% plus or something. So people are not using it instead of search.”
Assertion Supported
Smith: TechRadar Is Among Most Cited LLM Domains Despite Affiliate Disclosures
“TechRadar is a good example. TechRadar shows up A huge amount. It's one of the most cited domains in LMs. And you'll see a snippet at the top saying we're an affiliate site and it does really well. There's no evidence that a paid for mention does worse than a …”
Assertion Supported
Smith: Half of newly published internet content is AI-generated
“We just posted an original piece of original research showing that half of the content published on the internet is generated by AI.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ethan Smith: 8% of Webflow's signups come from LLMs
“Eight percent of their signups come from LMs.”
Insight
Smith: Winning AI search requires offsite citations, not just on-domain pages
“And if in chat you say, what's the best website builder and Webflow's URL is the number one citation and nobody else mentions Webflow, then they won't win. And so for these popular questions, the way to win is not just a page on your site. It's pages off of yo…”
Insight
Ethan Smith: Winning AEO requires optimizing YouTube and Reddit, not pure AEO
“So actually to do answer engine optimization really well, I think it's not doing pure answer engine optimization.
It's doing all of these other channels, but doing YouTube and Reddit with the intention of helping you on answer engine optimization.”
Insight
Smith: Startups can win AI search visibility quickly via multi-channel offsite content
“If I'm making viral YouTube videos and you know, a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow. So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand.”
Assertion Supported
Smith: The llms.txt protocol does not work
“So the intention of LMS.txt is to get more traffic and to send information about, it's not to block, it's to send more information to the LMS so that you get more traffic, but it doesn't work.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
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.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Nov 2030
Smith: ChatGPT Will Eventually Offer Prompt Search Volume Data Through Ads
“I don't anticipate they'll do that soon. I think that they'll eventually do that as they build out ads, but they don't give you that information.”
Prediction Held up
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.”
Assertion Supported
Smith: Chat prompts average 25 words versus 3 to 6 for search
“The average, I think the stat roughly was average of 25 words per prompt and average of three to six for search, something along those lines. So chat is significantly more specific.”
Disclosure
Ethan Smith helped popularize '10 Best' title tags and app download interstitials
“I would say I also played a significant role in the 10 best, the 10 best X for Y title tags Like, 15 years ago. And I also played a substantial role in the download interstitials that said, sorry, you can't use the mobile website, you have to download the app.…”
