Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 4/5

Smith: AEO software tools are defenseless commodities

Ethan Smith · #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you · Nov 11, 2025 · at 34:19

Ethan Smith, SEO and AEO expert at Graphite, explains why emerging Answer Engine Optimization software products lack defensibility.

0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 commodity tools with no technical defensibility or algorithm defensibility”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Ethan Smith

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…”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 17:29 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
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.”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 18:42 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
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 …”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 26:31 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
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.”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 42:14 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ethan Smith: 8% of Webflow's signups come from LLMs
“Eight percent of their signups come from LMs.”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 1:41 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
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…”
Ethan Smith Nov 11, 2025 ▶ 3:21 #2285 AEO: How to make ChatGPT promote you
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, about 40 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.