The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Sep 14, 2025 1h 11m 25 insights Episode Page ↗
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and SEO expert, discusses Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), the new SEO for LLMs like ChatGPT. He shares tactical advice on how companies can get their products to show up more often in AI answers, emphasizing the significant conversion rate difference from LLM traffic.
Actionable Insights

1. LLM Traffic Highly Valuable

Prioritize optimizing for LLM traffic as it yields significantly higher conversion rates (6x observed) due to primed user intent from conversational interactions.

2. Leverage Diverse Citations

To rank high in LLM answers, aim to be mentioned across various citation types like Reddit, YouTube videos, and blogs, as LLMs summarize many sources.

3. Optimize for Long-Tail Questions

Map out and answer highly specific, long-tail questions that users ask in conversational AI, as this ’tail’ is larger and offers new opportunities compared to traditional search.

4. Mine Customer Questions

To discover long-tail AEO opportunities, analyze questions from sales calls, customer support, and community platforms like Reddit, as these reflect real user queries.

5. Authentic Reddit Engagement

For Reddit optimization, engage authentically by creating an account, identifying yourself and your company, and providing genuinely useful answers to relevant threads.

6. Create Niche Video Content

Produce YouTube or Vimeo videos for niche, high-value, and potentially ’non-glamorous’ B2B keywords or topics, as there’s less competition and high opportunity for citation.

7. On-Site Product Detail Answers

On your website, create content that thoroughly answers specific follow-up questions about your product’s use cases, features, integrations, and languages to improve AEO.

8. Run AEO Experiments

Design AEO experiments with a control group (questions you don’t optimize) and a test group (questions you apply AEO strategies to) to accurately measure the impact of your efforts.

9. Track AEO Performance

Use AEO tracking tools (an evolution of keyword tracking) to monitor your ‘share of voice,’ average rank, and how often your content appears in LLM answers across different platforms.

10. Prioritize Reproducible Results

Ensure your AEO strategies are reproducible by running experiments multiple times and verifying results, as many online ‘best practices’ are not rigorously tested.

11. Form a Dedicated AEO Team

Assemble a dedicated AEO team, potentially combining your existing SEO team with a community or generalist marketing person skilled in off-site strategies like YouTube and Reddit.

12. Optimize Help Center

Optimize your help center content for AEO by addressing specific product features, use cases, and integrations, as users frequently ask these questions in chat.

13. Help Center Subdirectory

Ensure your help center is hosted on a subdirectory (e.g., yourdomain.com/help) rather than a subdomain (e.g., help.yourdomain.com) for better AEO performance.

14. Improve Help Center Cross-Linking

Improve internal linking within your help center pages to enhance content discoverability and relevance for LLM summarization.

15. Community-Driven Help Center Tail

Actively solicit and incorporate community questions and answers into your help center to cover the long tail of specific, obscure use cases.

16. Early-Stage AEO Focus

Early-stage companies should focus on AEO as they can win quickly by getting cited immediately, unlike traditional SEO which requires domain authority over time.

17. Traditional SEO Still Relevant

Continue applying traditional SEO best practices, such as creating high-quality landing pages for high-volume keywords, as they also contribute to AEO success.

18. Avoid LLM Spamming

Avoid spamming LLMs with low-quality content or automated tactics, as platforms like ChatGPT actively police and penalize such behavior.

19. Optimize for Multiple LLMs

Don’t solely focus on one LLM (e.g., ChatGPT); optimize for several prominent answer engines like Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, as the landscape is still evolving.

20. Block LLM Training, Allow Indexing

If concerned about LLMs training on your data, configure your robots.txt to allow indexing for answers but block specific training bots, ensuring your content appears without being used for model training.

21. No 100% AI-Generated Content

Do not rely on 100% unassisted AI-generated content for AEO, as it typically performs poorly; instead, use AI as an assistance tool with human oversight and editing.

22. Develop Emotional Intelligence

Develop your emotional intelligence by studying foundational research, as it’s crucial for building relationships and effective communication in both personal and professional life.

23. Learn Persuasion Frameworks

Study persuasion frameworks, such as those by Robert Cialdini, to understand psychological principles that can inform effective growth and marketing strategies.

24. Master Measurement Skills

Cultivate the skill of measuring seemingly unquantifiable aspects in business and growth, as anything can be measured with creative approaches.

25. Embrace Focused Practice

Achieve mastery by engaging in intentional, focused, and intense practice over a significant period, rather than relying solely on innate talent or general effort.