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

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting a product or service to appear in the answers generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. This represents the second biggest shift in search since Google began penalizing spam, moving beyond traditional SEO by focusing on summarization and new data inputs.

While many believe this new landscape requires a complete reinvention of strategy, the reality is more nuanced. Everything that works in SEO also works in AEO, but AEO introduces additional layers and opportunities.

AEO vs. Traditional SEO: A New Set of Rules

The fundamental difference between SEO and AEO lies in the definition of “winning.”

• SEO Goal: In traditional search, winning means securing the first blue link for a target keyword. For a query like “best website builder,” the company in the #1 position wins.
• AEO Goal: In an LLM, the model summarizes multiple sources (citations). The winner is the brand that is mentioned most frequently across all citations, not necessarily the one ranked first. This creates a different competitive dynamic.

This shift has significant implications, particularly for startups. Traditional SEO is a long game, often taking years to build the domain authority required to rank. In contrast, AEO allows for immediate impact. A new company can get mentioned in a Reddit thread, a YouTube video, or a blog post and start appearing in LLM answers the next day.

The High Value of AEO Traffic

Traffic originating from LLMs is proving to be exceptionally valuable. Webflow, for example, observed a 6x higher conversion rate from LLM traffic compared to traditional Google search traffic. This is likely because users have already engaged in a detailed conversational process with the LLM, building significant intent and clarifying their needs before clicking a link. The user arrives highly primed and qualified.

A Playbook for Winning at AEO

Optimizing for answer engines requires a structured approach that combines on-site and off-site tactics.

1. On-Site Strategy: The Long Tail is Back

On-site AEO builds on traditional SEO principles but with a renewed focus on the “long tail.” Prompts in chat interfaces are significantly longer and more conversational than search queries (averaging around 25 words vs. 6 for Google). This creates an opportunity to answer highly specific questions that have never been searched for before.

• Help Center Content: Your help center can become a high-ROI asset. These pages are perfectly suited to answer detailed questions about features, use cases, integrations, and product capabilities. To optimize them, ensure they are in a subdirectory (not a subdomain) and are well-interlinked.
• Answering All Follow-up Questions: A single page should aim to answer a core question and all potential follow-up questions and subtopics. The more comprehensively a page covers a topic, the more likely it is to be used as a citation.

2. Off-Site Strategy: Citation Optimization

Since AEO is a game of mentions, appearing in a diverse set of high-quality citations is critical.

• YouTube and Vimeo: Video content is a powerful and underutilized lever, especially in B2B. There are few videos on niche topics like “AI-powered payment processing APIs.” Creating content here is a significant opportunity as there is less competition.
• Reddit: Reddit is a heavily cited source in LLMs because its community-driven moderation ensures authenticity. The key to a successful Reddit strategy is not spam, but genuine engagement.

  The strategy is find a thread that is a part of a citation that you want to show up in. Say who you are, say where you work, and then give a useful piece of information. That works really well.

• Affiliates and Media: Getting mentioned in articles on major media sites (like those owned by Dotdash Meredith) or by paying affiliates can be an expensive but effective and controllable strategy.

3. Measurement and Experimentation

Unlike SEO, where Google provides keyword volume data, there is no “truth set” for AEO.

• Tracking Share of Voice: Use AEO tracking tools to measure your “share of voice”—how often you appear in answers across different LLMs, for various question phrasings, and over multiple runs (as LLM answers can vary).
• Running Controlled Experiments: Most online “best practices” are not based on data. It’s crucial to run your own experiments.
  1. Select a group of target questions.
  2. Divide them into a test group and a control group.
  3. Intervene on the test group (e.g., add Reddit comments, publish a YouTube video).
  4. Measure the change in share of voice against the control group after a few weeks.
  5. Focus on strategies that are reproducible and demonstrate a clear impact.

The Pitfalls of AI-Generated Content

The rise of LLMs has led to an explosion of purely AI-generated content, but this strategy is ineffective for AEO and SEO.

• Lack of Originality: Studies show that AI-generated content makes up only 10-12% of top search results and citations. These systems are designed to reward information gain and originality, not content that is a rewritten amalgamation of existing sources.
• Model Collapse: If LLMs were to rank their own derivatives, it would create an “infinite loop of derivatives,” where the AI is summarizing itself. This leads to a phenomenon called model collapse, where the diversity of opinions (“wisdom of the crowd”) shrinks to a single, converged viewpoint, destroying the value of the summary.

While purely automated content fails, AI-assisted content creation, where a human provides expertise, research, and editing, is clearly the future.

• Tags:
• LLM
• ChatGPT
• Feature
• AEO
• Answer Engine Optimization
• SEO
• Content Strategy
• Growth Marketing