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“The way you win the most popular questions is by getting other websites to say that you’re the best.”  Our CEO, Ethan Smith, shared his AEO knowledge with Similarweb in a past Adweek webinar. One key takeaway: how to win AI answers through both offsite and onsite strategies. ➣ Onsite: optimizing your website, landing pages, and help center. ➣ Offsite: optimizing for affiliates, YouTube (earned/owned), Reddit… Watch the video to learn more – full recording in the comments.

With +76% YoY growth in visits, LLMs are now part of how people search, learn, and inform their buying decisions. If you’re evaluating how AI is reshaping user behavior and what that means for your strategy, you’ll find this report by Similarweb useful. Check Ethan Smith’s participation and the full report with insights from industry leaders: bit.ly/similarweb-report

Join Marcos Ciarrocchi, our co-founder, for a deep dive into how brands are getting discovered inside AI. If you want to understand how ChatGPT decides what to recommend, this session is for you. 🗓 Tuesday, Dec 2 ⏰ 1 PM PST / 4 PM EST Register here 👇 https://lnkd.in/eCgqeT67

What role does video play in AEO? Ethan Smith shared his thoughts with Vimeo on how to win with video in the LLM space. Key takeaways: ⦿ AEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. SEO continues to supply the credible pages that LLMs pull from, while AEO shifts the goal from ranking to being cited. ⦿ LLMs create impact faster. Utility-first videos or help docs can show up in AI answers within days. This helps smaller brands that may not have high domain authority. ⦿ Utility-first video is a major citation driver. Short videos that clearly answer a question, even with low view counts, can be surfaced by LLMs across platforms like ChatGPT, Google Search, and others. This works especially well in less-crowded, “non-entertaining” niches where specific questions don’t have many existing answers. For example, “how to generate a compliance report using X tool”. ⦿ Help centers, FAQs, and knowledge hubs become acquisition channels. When each question-based page includes a concise explanation, a matching short video, and clear structure, LLMs can more easily understand and cite the content. This supports citations not only for the initial query but also for related follow-up questions in a thread. ⦿ Earned media and structured data strengthen AEO impact. Repeated, authentic mentions on platforms like Reddit increase the chances of LLMs citing your brand, while schema markup helps AI models interpret your pages and videos more accurately. ⦿ Video plays an important role as AI chat evolves. LLMs currently use metadata around videos to understand them, and they will soon parse transcripts directly. Starting now helps build a video library that can be cited as models become better at reading and summarizing video content. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/e-qse_nz

Join Ethan Smith in this Surfer webinar on how to make your brand appear in AI answers. What you’ll learn: • Which brands are dominating AEO and why • How LLMs decide which brands to recommend • What drives visibility inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity • A practical guide you can implement the same day 🗓️ November 20th | 1 PM EST 👉 Reserve your spot bit.ly/surfer-graphite

AI search is changing the game for marketing teams. Join Ethan Smith and Alex Halliday, CEO of AirOps, for a live webinar where they'll share: * What drives visibility in AI search + how to position content so LLMs cite it * How AI search is changing discovery with data on trends shaping what's next * How to measure performance and track visibility across AI search platforms 🗓️ November 19 | 4 PM EST 👉 Reserve your spot: https://lnkd.in/ehDNeWKX

AEO, GEO, or AI SEO: We need to pick a name. There’s no alignment on the most appropriate name for LLM optimization. We at Graphite, AthenaHQ, and Surfer joined to share our arguments and seek to help alignment by debating which name is most appropriate. Read the full debate and vote: bit.ly/aeo-vs-geo-vs-aiseo Here are the debated names: 1/ AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) 2/ GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) 3/ AI SEO (AI Search Engine Optimization) Which one makes the most sense for you, and why?

Join Ethan Smith and Similarweb in this Adweek Webinar on how brands can benchmark and grow their visibility in AI search. Here’s what you’ll learn: 🔹 How consumers are using AI tools to discover brands 🔹 Which companies ChatGPT cites, links to, and recommends most 🔹 What types of prompts and content drive citations 🔹 How to optimize your brand’s presence for AI-driven discovery See where your brand stands — and how to stand out. 📅 Date: Wednesday, Nov 5th 🔗 Sign up: bit.ly/aeo-adweek-webinar

Ethan Smith participated in a Clearscope webinar where he talked about the AEO strategies we’ve been testing. Here’s an example 👇

What Should We Call AEO, GEO, AI SEO? * The field focused on optimizing your brand's presence in LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Meta AI is burgeoning. * Since this is a new field, there is not yet alignment on the most appropriate name. A common start of conversations on this topic is, "AEO, GEO, AIO...whatever it's called?" * Linguistic Conventionalism: Ultimately, the name of a concept and its definition are determined by a group of people reaching a collective agreement. * Motivation: It is helpful to align on a single name to describe marketing for LLMs, as well as a shared set of frameworks and concepts to describe this field. * Debate: To accelerate alignment on a name, I partnered with AthenaHQ and Surfer to debate which is the most appropriate name. * Clickbait: I typically avoid polls and debates as they tend to be clickbait. In this particular case, I do think we need to pick a name, and this is a useful way to accelerate alignment. Poll: Below is a brief summary of each of our arguments. Our more detailed arguments can be found here, along with a poll for people to vote for their preferred name. We will report the winning name. bit.ly/aeo-geo-aiseo Why AEO - Ethan @ Graphite * The discipline at hand is optimizing your brand or product to appear in text-based AI chat such as ChatGPT. "Answers" most closely describe this. * AEO has no strong alternative association, whereas GEO is associated with geography. * Why Not GEO: "Generative" may refer to the generation of images and video, or the generation of avatars and worlds, which is materially different from optimizing for text-based answers. * Why Not AI SEO: It implies that AI is newly used in search, but AI has been a part of search for over a decade. Why GEO - Alan Yao 🏛️ @ AthenaHQ * GEO names what we actually optimize: a generative, tool-using engine that plans, routes, calls functions, and now even transacts. * In agentic flows, success means getting the engine to select your tool, call your API with the correct arguments, cite your source, and return or execute the result. * Why Not AEO: Perplexity brands itself as an “answer engine.” That means “AEO” bakes one vendor’s positioning into the field’s name. * Why Not AI SEO: It conflates a distinct discipline with legacy SEO and risks being perceived as a bolt-on rather than a new optimization surface. Why AI SEO - Tom Niezgoda @ Surfer * SEO has always adapted to new search behaviors. "AI SEO" emphasizes continuity and evolution, rather than starting from scratch. * Assistants don’t replace search—they extend it. AI models still retrieve, rank, and synthesize information just as search does. * Why Not AEO: It is too narrow. It ties the field to “answers” when assistants increasingly deliver plans, comparisons, tool calls, and transactions—not just text snippets. * Why Not GEO: It is too abstract. “Generative” risks diluting the focus on discovery and overlaps with fields like image or video generation.