Andrew Warner: Hey there, freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner and this is a new series for me. It’s called The Next New Thing. Here’s what’s up in this interview, then an intro. Then we’ll get right to it.

Wanna get people to come to your website, download your app, buy from your business. Well, here’s a guy who runs an SEO company who tells you don’t start with SEO instead start with a EO answer engine optimization. In fact, I spend about an hour with him where he’s gonna walk you through how you can get to be the first result when people ask about your business to chat.

GPT, perplexity, clawed, what else is out there? Let’s get into it.

I feel like a lot of people think that this is just too premature to start thinking about how to get into a, into AI answers. Gimme an example of what you’ve been able to achieve for a real customer. One that we know.

Ethan Smith: Yeah. So the way that I think about timing is I, it’s, it’s, uh, a good time when the channel is large enough to be impactful.

So what is the quantity of it? Conversions of the quantity of traffic that you can get. And since January, the channel has been growing dramatically. If, if you asked me a year ago. We started, uh, playing around with answer engine optimization in June of last year and people were intellectually curious about it, but they weren’t prioritizing or spending money on it because it wasn’t profitable channel ’cause it wasn’t big enough.

And so it’s now for sure the, the, the size of the conversions, uh, is substantial and therefore I think the timing is good. So Webflow is, is one example that we worked with and there are not that many examples because we’re still pretty early. So Webflow is an example. 8% of their signups come from. Lms.

Andrew Warner: Got it. All right. And this is because of you.

Ethan Smith: This is a team effort and, um, uh, we were in, we were part of that team, I think. So it was because of us. Let’s break that down. There’s stuff that you do for SEO and then there’s stuff that you do for a EO that you weren’t already doing for SEO, and those are two different things.

And so a lot of what you do for SEO actually helps with a EO without. Trying to, so the stuff that works really well for SEO, uh, that, that we work with the Webflow team on. Is, uh, is a bunch of use case landing pages and templates, like how to, how to build a website, how to build a website for designers or uh, restaurant websites.

So templates, use cases, uh, how to do X type pages.

Andrew Warner: And again, this is all the same stuff that you would do if you wanted search engine optimization, uh, to correct, be increased, but also it that you might do for your customers. Right. You’re trying to show them how Webflow is used by restaurants, et cetera.

Okay. And so you’re saying some of that just naturally will feed into traffic from, uh, chatbots?

Ethan Smith: So I would say most of the signups from LLMs were from SEO work that we had already done. Okay. Or we’re doing, uh. In addition to that, we did things specifically for a, uh, for engine optimization that, that we would not have otherwise done for SEO.

And so those are mostly offsite, uh, optimizations. So if you search for best website designer and web flows, URL ranks number one on Google, that’s a big win. And if. In chat, you say, what’s the best website builder and web flow’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 your site. And so offsite is that, that’s one of the, there’s two differences with engine optimization and SEO is, uh, offsite and the long tail. And so for offsite, we, uh, the Webflow team and, and we worked to get them mentioned on other platforms.

And so there’s earned and owned offsite, so. Uh, owned offsite would be, Webflow has a YouTube channel and there’s tons of videos about how to use Webflow. And then Webflow can also, uh, engage in Reddit, uh, threads. So there’s a lot of the Reddit threads either asking about how to use Webflow or asking about how to do things that Webflow can do.

And so, uh, we collaborated with the, with the Webflow team, the Webflow team themselves. So Reddit’s an an interesting thing when you ask. Growth people, really any question about how do I optimize a channel? They immediately. To scaling things and to doing, using products in ways that they’re not supposed to use them.

So as soon as you say, how do we optimize Reddit? The growth person says, well, I need to do hundreds of threads, uh, hundreds of comments and not use it as a real user because I’m using it as a real user, that I’m not a growth person. That’s just, you know, I’m just a real person, so I need. I need to do something that I’m not supposed to do.

And so the immediate, uh, strategy would be, well, let’s create a bunch of Reddit spam with hundreds of fake accounts where we’re all liking each other and we’re creating karma, and we’re upvoting each other’s comments and we say, Hey, you should really consider using Webflow. So instead, we helped identify citations on Reddit that were part of the questions that Webflow wanted to win.

And then people at Webflow then said, Hey, I’m Vivian, uh, I work at Webflow. I’m a real person. Here’s, here’s some useful, uh, information that answers your question. So that’s what actually worked. And then similar on YouTube, how do use Webflow? So those are things that, you know, YouTube, we, they were already doing that, but, you know, we could configure the YouTube strategy to be a bit more specific for a o the Reddit stuff probably we would never have done for SEO.

Mm-hmm. But then we did a bunch of stuff for SEO that just helped for free, uh, in engine optimization. But, um, that, that’s generally what worked.

Andrew Warner: If I’m understanding you right, Ethan, you’re saying you go into Perplexity chat, pt, Claude, et cetera, you do a search or you ask a question that your users might ask you then find a Reddit, uh, Reddit link as the source.

You click over and you say, I’m gonna go and answer too. Or one of the people at Webflow will go in and answer, and what they’ll do is say, I work at Webflow. So they’re fully open about it and give a detailed answer. And that’s one thing that you, that you all did as a consistent. Uh, rhythm to your day.

And then the second thing, if I’m understanding you right, is just posting YouTube videos, which I wouldn’t have thought would help. Does YouTube videos help with Gemini? Does it help with Claw? Does it help with chat? GPT? Where does it work?

Ethan Smith: It generally, so, lms, the, the classes of domain, uh, types of domains that are cited frequently.

Video and UGC are huge. Instagram, TikTok. LinkedIn, uh, I am not seeing X that much. And then video and, and YouTube, uh, shows up a lot. 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, uh, are the most crowded and the least entertaining things are the least crowded. So website builders is moderately entertaining. We work with a lot of SaaS companies, like payroll management software is not entertaining at all.

Mm.

Ethan Smith: So these are not crowded. And so the less, less entertaining and more niche your pro, but uh, high LTV your product is video is the most interesting.

Uh, so, uh, and it shows up a lot. And there are all these AI adjacent channels. So there’s answer, answer optimization. And then there’s stuff that’s next to answer engine optimization, which is Reddit, affiliates video, LinkedIn, Instagram. And a lot of these have not been optimized. And actually each has its own unique special strategy that’s completely unrelated to answer engine optimization, but it’s adjacent to it.

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, uh, on ential optimization. But as a result, you show up in lms, you show up within YouTube.

You show up within Google search because there’s a YouTube video about payroll management software showing up in Google search. You get the video on the landing page, and then you get free views there, and so it creates this, this, uh, loop.

Andrew Warner: How important is it that the LinkedIn post, the Instagram posts, et cetera, has a lot of views already?

Ethan Smith: It seems like there’s a, it seems like there’s a correlation, but it’s not just ranked by number of views. So if you look, if, if you ask a question about. Uh, payroll management software, website builders. The videos that are appearing are typically. The most viewed, but you won’t see it, where it’s just literally sorted by number of views.

There’s other signals. I don’t know exactly what they’re, it’s probably traditional, you know, search authority, like number of back links and shares and things like that. But it definitely does matter. Uh, 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 thousand. So it’s still pretty, it’s still something that you could win without being an influencer.

Andrew Warner: You also told me before we got started that for Webflow Help Center content was useful, and that just means that if they’re, I don’t know what they’re using, Intercom Help scout.

What are they using?

Ethan Smith: Not actually sure what they’re using, but, uh, yeah. Help. So the, the, the two things that are different with answer generalization and SEO are the head and the tail and the tail is larger and longer in chat, the average, I, I think the stat roughly was 20 average of 25 words per, uh, prompt and average of three to six for search.

So something along those lines. Mm-hmm. So chat is significantly, uh, more specific and part of that’s because search is made. If, if people know that they need to translate their in intention into a short keyword because they know that the search engine won’t understand their actual full intention, so they don’t act that they don’t speak in conversational ways and they don’t.

Be, they don’t get so specific that they know that the search engine will fail. Whereas with chat can, you can be very specific. So you could ask a question like, what’s the best website builder that has this integration and integrates with Shopify and also has this feature and is, you know, has support for Korean language.

You would never ask, you never put that in search, right? But you know, but that’s what you want. And you can put that in chat and the chat can interpret that and give you an answer and. Help center and people have many questions about, I want a product that, that, that fulfills my use case and help center is, is actually a great place to do that because Help center is you talking about how your product works and what it does and what it does not do.

And so help Center optimization is not something you would op focus on for SEO, but you would for answer engine optimization because that’s where you have all this information about what your product does.

Andrew Warner: So do I now need to create all these different answers? Isn’t the AI smart enough to grab three different answers, combine them and say, here’s here’s what my user needs.

Ethan Smith: Yes. You do not need to create a pa millions of pages for every single question you need to generally answer the question. So an example of that would be which, which, uh, for rippling, uh, I want a payroll management software that has these different features like, uh, uh. Attendance tracking and, and, um, time tracking and offboarding.

And this, so rippling has a page for each persona, h uh, hr, it, finance, and all of the use cases and features that they have. But there’s one page for each. So it’s not that you need one page for every single use case in every single 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, uh, exact match. For every single question.

Andrew Warner: So going back to that hypothetical example you gave earlier, a site builder that integrates with Shopify has a set of features that we didn’t get into and also supports Korean language. One page could say, here are all the languages that we support.

Another page can say, here’s a list of all the features. And then another could say, this is a list of integrations and including Shopify, maybe even have a Shopify only page. And the AI is smart enough to grab all three, connect it together, and give it to the user.

Ethan Smith: Yes.

Andrew Warner: Okay. Alright, so help center, uh, what about how to articles on the site that’s helpful or is help center enough?

Ethan Smith: The more, the better. An interesting thing when you search for, when you search for, uh, rippling and pave Integr, or sorry, when you search for which payroll management software integrates with Pave. There’s multiple articles that show up saying rippling. There’s a rippling pave integration page, I believe there’s a Pave Rippling integration page on pave.com, and I believe there’s a help center article.

Another example is a meeting note transcription that works with Zoom.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: And Otter shows up with a feature, a Zoom feature page a, a help center article saying how to do this. I believe there’s a page on Zoom, but there ba basically there’s multiple pages and all of these are getting auto to show up, and so it’s as, it’s, I wouldn’t say that, you know, the more, the better forever, but I, I would do multiple versions, help center article, how to do X article, ping the company that you’re integrating with and ask them to do both of these things.

Andrew Warner: I told you before we got started that I was a little concerned about us using Webflow as the first example because Webflow has a giant team. They have a lot of resources. What does this mean for somebody who doesn’t have a giant team? Is it not possible?

Ethan Smith: It’s actually the most interesting, uh, one of the most interesting channels for small companies with limited resources.

And the reason why is because. In search engine optimization. When early stage companies ask me for help and what their strategy should be, I tell them to not work on SEO because they’re not gonna perform. You need enough authority to be able to perform an in search.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: And a lot, a lot of other channels are pretty crowded.

So it’s, it’s, you know, especially hard, the cold start problem with, with the early stage startups, and this is one of the most interesting channels. And the reason why is because, uh, because you can do offsite optimization with no brand. So if I am a brand new. Uh, payroll management software company, and I want to compete with large incumbents.

If I’m making viral YouTube videos and, uh, you know, a TikTok video and, 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. It’s actually one of the most interesting channels.

Andrew Warner: One of my friends and listeners created your 360 ai. It just launched and essentially what it does is it will ask you some questions using like a, a voice. I, it seems like it’s an 11 labs voice. Understand what you’re trying to learn about your leadership and management style. Then it’ll go and contact the people who work with you, who you told it to, and have a conversation with them to understand how they’re working with you and get the answers to the things you’re wondering about.

And basically, it comes back to you and it summarizes what you could do to be a better leader, better performer at your job. If he wanted to do this to start to rank, this is not a very sexy topic, right? There are not a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do, uh, 360 feedback. What would you recommend for someone like him?

Ethan Smith: Yeah, that, that’s exactly what I would do. And, and this is not entertaining, and so I would do exactly what I just mentioned. So how do you, so I would create, I, I, I would create a, a YouTube video about the various use cases of my product. So there’s 360 reviews. There’s like how to give difficult feedback, how to receive difficult feedback.

It’s like, what are all. Problems that your product is a solution for, and I would make videos on each of them. Then I would try to become a real Reddit user, and there’s probably threads of people asking about. Management and, and how to, uh, how to get, how to get 360 feedback or 360 feedback is helpful because it solves the problem of not getting feedback.

Generally, like 360 feedback is a particular design solution for the problem, which is I need feedback from my team about how I’m performing. So like, what are all those problems and solutions? Find Reddit threads about those. Be a real person. Say who you are. Give useful information. Don’t say, check out my product.

Just say, Hey, I’m Ethan from. Uh, 360 review AI or whatever here, you know, here, here’s how I would approach it. Uh, I would do that and the time to impact might be very fast. And actually Product Hunt is probably another interesting channel where a brand new product can quickly go viral there and that might actually get picked up in the ELs as well.

Andrew Warner: Okay. That is huge. Alright. Now that I understand what’s possible, let’s talk about some of the myths. And the first thing that I was thinking is SEO is basically dead, in fact. Here’s, here’s why I was thinking that. ’cause I know that you disagree with it. It’s not so much that people aren’t using search engines, they’re gonna use it for a long time.

There’s some people using the, the white and yellow pages. I think it’s not that it’s dead, that it doesn’t work. It’s just that it, they’re killers like you out there who are so good at it. I can’t compete. What do you say about the SEO Is death worry that I have?

Ethan Smith: So there’s a few different, let’s break it down into a few different arguments.

So argument one is what you just said, which is it’s too hard, it’s crowded.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: And I, I mean, I do think that it’s hard, uh, I think it’s hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when a, when a startup asks me what they should do in seo OI 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’s, it’s, it’s hard. Like may, maybe you could get a little bit of impact, but you’re not gonna get millions of visits if you’re a, a small company. But if you’re a big company, you can do really well. It’s, you know, it’s a massive channel.

It’s, uh, I think it’s the second largest channel after paid advertising.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: So, uh, I think it’s five x at least five x lms, maybe 10 x depending on the, the category. So it’s way bigger than. A EO. Uh, so it’s a massive channel, but yeah, I mean, it is hard. So depending on how big you are, you should decide whether or not it’s, it’s too hard.

But it’s not that I am so good. It’s that authority is you need enough sufficient authority to compete on competitive terms. Uh, but if you have that, then, then you can be competitive. So it’s not so crowded that no one can do it. It just depends on who. So that’s argument one. Okay. Argument two is that, uh.

SEO is, or sorry, search is being used less and people are using chat instead of search.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: And that’s simply not true. There’s clear data showing that that’s not true. Uh, similar web, uh, I have data showing that the overlap, basically everyone who uses chat, GBT uses Google, uh, nearly all of them. I think it’s like 90, 90% plus or something.

So people are not using it instead of search. Yeah, just like they’re not a lot of people, uh, use TikTok to search and Instagram to search. Mm. Like if you’re looking for travel ideas or restaurants, a lot of people use TikTok and, and Instagram, but that doesn’t mean that they no longer use search. That’s just another channel that gets added.

Same with chat. It’s another channel that gets added. They, they, the slice of the pie for Google search stays the same. The pie just gets bigger and there’s new slices added and chat. GBT is another slice to the pie.

Andrew Warner: Alright. Fair enough. Let’s then talk about, the other thing that you told me was a myth, which is that they’re, they’re different.

You kind of dispelled some of that, right? You’re saying a lot of the work that we do for SEO helps out with a EEO and sir, engine optimization. Um, the other thing that you told me before we got started is LLM TXT is not used. Are you saying that we’re talking about that, that thing that you can put on a site that says, don’t crawl my site, and the LLMs are supposed to respect it and say, okay, I’m not gonna take that data in.

They don’t, they’re not paying attention to it. You’re saying,

Ethan Smith: so there’s robots txt. Yep. And then there’s LLMs txt. Robots do TXT is to say, don’t crawl my site. And as far as I know, everyone respects that, including lms. Uh. LMS txt is different. So LMS txt is an interesting case study in the How Myths Spread, how Misinformation spreads.

So LMS T XD was an idea from a blogger, I forget their name, where they said this might be a good idea.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: Like how we should send structured data to lms and that is a good idea actually. You know that there’s all this stuff recently about MCP and MCP is basically, how do you send structured information to, to lms?

Andrew Warner: I think it’s Jeremy

Ethan Smith: Howard

Andrew Warner: from Answer AI is what I just saw. I

Ethan Smith: think so. I think so. Yeah. And, and ironically, he does not have his own, there’s not an LMS TXT on his site.

Andrew Warner: Okay.

Ethan Smith: Uh, but so it was a, it was a good idea that he proposed and then other people saw the idea and then they repeat it to each other and they say, Hey, have you heard of LMS txt?

Like, no, I haven’t heard of that. And then eventually you’re like, yeah, I’ve heard of that from five people.

Andrew Warner: Mm.

Ethan Smith: And then that I heard about it becomes. It, it must be true because I’ve heard about it. If, if you hear an idea enough times, it becomes a fact, and then people start looking for evidence that it works, even though it doesn’t work.

And then you’re like, well, it got crawled. My alms txt got crawled, so it must be working. But of course, any page on your, your contact page gets crawled. The fact that it gets doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not this is a, an accepted structured protocol for sending information to lms, then Google, uh.

John Mueller at Google said, I don’t know of anyone who uses this, but still, if you hear enough times about this idea, then it is a fact. And so that’s why this is still a myth that most people believe. And if you ask chat gt if, uh, it uses, uh, Elms txt, it will tell you that it does not.

Andrew Warner: Oh,

Ethan Smith: at least the chat says it doesn’t.

Andrew Warner: And, and I, I get it. People are concerned that their stuff is gonna be crawled, but I’m the opposite. I want more of my stuff to be crawled. I want more of my information to be out there. I want more traffic coming over to me because of it. And frankly, even if I don’t get traffic, I just want people to be able to use and benefit from what I’m doing here.

And I think most people are in that boat, but I can understand some companies saying no.

Ethan Smith: 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, to the LM so that you get more traffic and, but it doesn’t work. People generally don’t know how answer engine optimization works, and so that’s why they’re grasping at straws, trying to come up with ideas and those, if those ideas sound like they might.

Makes sense and they get repeated enough times. Those false, uh, those myths become facts. And LMS txt is one of many examples of, uh, of, of false information and myths.

Andrew Warner: Okay? So then how do you know if something works? They’re not telling you what you should be doing right, and you’re trying to get an advantage over anyone else who might have any publicly traded or publicly available information.

How do you, Ethan know if you’ve done a thing that you got a result because of the thing that you do, and how do you get that iterative process fast enough so you can keep iterating?

Ethan Smith: The way that you know anything is true is with a scientific method. So you come up with a hypothesis, you test it and you reproduce it.

So how do you come up with hypothesis? You come up with hypothesis by doing analysis. So you do analysis and you say something like, best website builder seems like these sites are ranking, maybe that the reason why is for this. Like it seems like YouTube is appearing so hypothesis, so analysis. Pattern match.

YouTube videos are showing up, red threads are showing up. Hypothesis. Adding a YouTube video will, uh, show up in citations and will cause my answer to, will cause me to become an answer and to rank better within the answer. So then you set up, uh, an analysis, you take a control, and uh, and a test. So for Webflow, there’s a hundred topics or a hundred questions we wanna rank for, for 50 of those, we’re not gonna do anything, and for 50 of them, we’re going to do something.

We’re gonna add, add YouTube videos. For those 50 I’m gonna set up tracking for all 100. For, let’s say for two weeks, four weeks, so that I have a baseline, and then for these 50 I’m gonna add YouTube videos. And for these other 50, I’m gonna do nothing at all. And then I’m gonna see if the ones with YouTube videos, uh, showed up.

So did the YouTube video appear in the citations and did my answer go up? And then I look at that. The reason why the control matters is because. LMS 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.

But you know, the, the, the way that you know anything to be true is with the scientific method and, uh, AEOs no exception.

Andrew Warner: And so we’re looking at maybe four weeks to get a result, do things, um, um Right, right. I’m looking at your face to try to get a sense of it. Yeah.

Ethan Smith: I would probably do two weeks pre and I would do four weeks post.

So six weeks total.

Andrew Warner: And then don’t things change so fast that by the time you get your result, the whole thing could have shifted?

Ethan Smith: No.

Andrew Warner: No, they’re not changing that much.

Ethan Smith: No. And you know, there’s, there’s models and there’s. I wouldn’t say that they’re dramatically changing. Maybe they’re ch like when is there a new model every six months or so.

Andrew Warner: I see.

Ethan Smith: So, you know, if there’s like GPT five and four are different and so, uh, I would say that you would get noisy data. It’s same with Google search. Google search changes the algorithms as well. But you know, again, if you have a control in a test group, then you’ll know whether or not it was the new model or whether or not it was, uh.

Something that you did. I wouldn’t say that the models are changing so much that, you know, a YouTube video worked before and it didn’t work. Uh, uh, I, I wouldn’t expect that the, the underlying strategy to wildly change within six weeks, uh, it’s possible. But, you know, the new models come out I think every six months or so.

So

Andrew Warner: I heard you say on Lenny’s podcast that affiliate mentions help affiliate are basically people you pay. With Google, you have to disclose that and you have, and it’s not as effective to get them to link. What is it like for LLMs?

Ethan Smith: Uh, it does work in Google. If you search for the best credit card in Google, you’ll get a bunch of affiliate sites, right?

And, um, that’s been true for a long time and it works in lms, uh, TechRadar is a good example. TechRadar shows up a huge amount. It’s one of the most cited domains in lms. You’ll see a snippet at the top saying we’re an affiliate site and it does really well. There’s no,

Andrew Warner: I see.

Ethan Smith: There’s no evidence that a paid for mention does worse than a non-paid for mention.

Andrew Warner: Okay, so then am I going after sites and offering to pay them affiliate commission just so I can get links?

Ethan Smith: Yes. Mentions,

Andrew Warner: just get them to mention. Doesn’t need to be the whole structured data thing that I would need otherwise.

Ethan Smith: The more, the better, but just a mention is sufficient.

Andrew Warner: Okay. Uh, Cora Stack overflow, those communities all helpful.

Go in and respond to as many a, as many questions as possible.

Ethan Smith: Yes. Depends on your category, but yes.

Andrew Warner: How can I tell which questions I should be targeting? Like what are the top ask questions?

Ethan Smith: Yeah, there’s, there’s, what would be great is if Chat PT gave us a chat, GPT search console, like Google Search Console and said, here’s the search volume for these prompts.

But they don’t do that. 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, they don’t, uh, give you that information. So there’s a couple ways to do this. The first way is what I would suggest, which is to use search data. And so if I’m a brand new company, I would start with the keywords that I wanna rank for and then make them into questions.

How I would pick the keywords would probably be, which keywords would I want to pay the most for. So either I’m already doing paid search and I use my paid search keywords, or I look at my competitor’s paid search keywords. So those are the money terms. So if I’m, uh, you know, if I’m a a rippling competitor, I would go look at Gusto deal and rip.

And, uh, see what, what are they doing for paid? Search you the top paid search search keywords and then just make them into questions. Mm-hmm. The other option is to use, uh, subsets of. Real data, first party data through browser extensions or ISPs and things like that, or like, there’s a, you know, a bunch of LM companies that might sell you actual real data.

Like there’s many, many chat bots you could buy for, you know, chat. GBT won’t sell you their data, but maybe a less popular lm we’ll sell you their data and then you’d have a subset of data. It’s kind of like doing a poll for who’s gonna, who’s gonna win the presidency. You ask a thousand people. Hopefully your sample’s representative and you say, this is the average, this is what I think 300 million people are gonna do.

The, the, the trick though, or the the, uh, difficulty though is when you’re polling for who’s gonna win to be president, that your sample needs to be representative, and it’s hard to get a representative sample. Same with s It’s hard to get. A truly representative example of the whole world or, or of the United States.

Also, the, uh, I mentioned that the tail is larger and longer. So that means that having these subsets of data, the smaller the subset, the less it’ll tell you about the tail. Now, if you had. First party data from everyone then, or for half of the world let’s say. That would be great and then you would have very accurate information.

But you know, it comes down to what’s the size of the sample that you’re going after and how representative of it it is

Andrew Warner: Uhhuh.

Ethan Smith: I’m skeptical that there’s enough information to do that really well, which is why I say I would just use search data for now and then wait for chat GBT to give you the real data.

Andrew Warner: Are there any chatbots that are making their data available, that are selling it? I

Ethan Smith: think so, uh, I, I think I talked to one that was considering doing that. Uh, so I think, I think that there are, I mean, there’s all these chatbots that are not monetizing well.

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Ethan Smith: And they need to monetize. I wouldn’t say that there’s a known marketplace for chatbots selling their data, but I think that they would sell it to you.

But, you know, if I’m working with a, a chat bot that is made for. Uh, dating, let’s say. Mm-hmm. Like my, my AI girlfriend. I don’t think that that’s gonna tell you.

Andrew Warner: Right.

Ethan Smith: Course. I don’t think that’s gonna be useful for Webflow to know what, what they should be doing. And I think a lot of these chat bots are very specific applications.

So again, it goes back to is this a representative sample?

Andrew Warner: I imagine it might be one of these like iPhone apps that somebody built that people have on their phones. Is that right?

Ethan Smith: That would, that would be representative.

Andrew Warner: But I guess at this point everyone has chat, GPT and Gemini. Why do they need a third, a third one of these, or perplexity?

The majors are all, are all over.

Ethan Smith: Usually the other ones that are used a lot are, are, uh, application specific, like my AI girlfriend or my AI doctor, or my AI

Andrew Warner: customer support person, AI SAS partner, or my AI business coach. Got it. And then if I find one that’s specific to my industry, then I can go and buy their questions and I’ve got something that’s related, at least to me.

Alright, I got you on this. Okay. Um, you said that there isn’t a search console available. What, what tools are available right now? Could you gimme a list of some that are useful?

Ethan Smith: I have a list of 60 tools on our website. So if you search for a EO tools, you’ll probably get our page with 60 plus of these tools.

Andrew Warner: The one that’s right at the top of your, your site.

Ethan Smith: Yes.

Andrew Warner: Okay.

Ethan Smith: And, uh, they are all useful and they, they all do tracking. So, uh, some of my favorites are Peak AI and Scrunch and Surfer and Athena. I, I actually, uh, know all of them personally. I have no financial relationship with any of them, but they’re all really good tools.

And then there’s 56 other good tools. So I would pick one of those. These all do. Answer tracking. None of them do optimization yet. So there are tools that will start to do optimization and, uh, I believe by the time this podcast gets published mm-hmm uh, clear scope will show the first optimization tool.

So clear scope, uh, pioneered. Uh, content scoring for search, where you take a keyword like website builder and then it gives you a, like a grammarly report, but it’s, it’s for SEO like include these terms. This is how your page is gonna perform in search. And, uh, you get a B minus and if you add these words and you’ll get an A plus, the exact same thing can be true for lm.

So we can have a content scoring tool, so then they’re launching that, uh, imminently and so that’ll be their first. Content scoring optimization tool for ai. And then you’re gonna see that probably a bunch of people are gonna copy them as they copied their SEO version of that. They’ll copy the AI version of that.

But, um, so there’s tracking tools, uh, there’s, there’ll be content scoring tools. There will probably be other tools, like there might be tools, uh, around finding questions. We actually have a tool to find questions. Uh, it’s like. Medium quality. ’cause you know, we’re using search data, but those are the three classes of tools.

But today there’s tracking tools and then soon there will be these find me questions and then optimize my content.

Andrew Warner: Alright, I see the tools, it’s in a different site section of the site and it really is an overwhelming list of tools. Um, and also the, the funding rounds, it’s not the one that I thought earlier that’s linked to at the top.

All of them. Is there anything that you’re going to daily that like you can’t live without? Give, give people some recommendations?

Ethan Smith: I think all of them, all their core use cases you can’t live without. So

Andrew Warner: all

Ethan Smith: six core, uh, well, they all have the same, uh, feature sites. I see.

Andrew Warner: You’re just saying, look, pick these use cases and then here are the different tools that exist for them.

Ethan Smith: Yes, there are 60 tracking tools. There are no tools that. Do a a lot else. Soon there will be 60. Content scoring tools. As soon as Clear scope launches their content scoring, there will, everyone else will have that as well. And then maybe, I’m not sure on the, tell me which questions maybe people will, will build that, uh, but for sure everyone’s gonna have content scoring.

But I think the answer to your question is, who’s unique and special? And the answer is no one if, because it’s impossible to be anything special. And the reason it’s impossible, 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 or brand defense, maybe brand defensibility.

Um, but there, but all of these things are easy to build and so that’s why. They’re everyone copied clear scope on their SEO content scoring and why they will copy them on their, uh, LM content scoring.

Andrew Warner: All right, tell me if I’m wrong here. To me, it feels like this is a big opportunity for an agency to be built, SEO mature industry tough competitors like you.

It’s really hard for people to get in a EO newer, you can go after smaller companies that don’t have enough money and presence to go for SEO yet. You can deliver results though, it will take a couple of months for it to start to show up. So they have to, you have to maybe sign a three month agreement minimum with your client.

What do you think of that as a, as a business right now to launch?

Ethan Smith: Great. That’s, that’s the business I’m building and specifically because I think it’s great. So the reason it’s great is be because of what you mentioned, which is that it’s a new channel and there’s no one’s mastered at a, I mean, I wouldn’t even say that I have mastered it.

I’m, I’m, I’m in the early stages of mastery, but I, I have, I’m not a master yet. I, I have many good ideas and a few case studies. Uh, so eventually I have more case studies and then I’ll have mastered it. But I haven’t, and I don’t think anyone has. And so I think it’s a very interesting space for services and again, not just.

Answer engine optimization, but all of those adjacent channels, Reddit, LinkedIn, Cora, like there’s no Cora agency, there’s not many Reddit agencies. There’s, there’s no one who’s great at making use case B2B YouTube videos. So there’s all this greenfield stuff that would be, uh, that companies need that are very impactful and no few to, uh, no one are masters of that.

So I think it’s especially interesting, which is exactly why I’m building that.

Andrew Warner: So wait, the vision that you’re saying is, look, someone should create a Quora only agency, and all they do is they sign a B2B client and they go to Quora and they answer all the questions in their name as possible with as thorough response as possible.

Am I right? That’s one.

Ethan Smith: Uh, not only Quora, I would do, I would do all of those things, Cora. So I think the

Andrew Warner: YouTube,

Ethan Smith: yes.

Andrew Warner: Quora

Ethan Smith: Reddi. Yeah. If you just do Quora, that’s extremely niche and probably, and companies don’t wanna work with 10 agencies. They wanna work with one. So, and the interesting agency that I would build and that I am building, is there’s international optimization and these five other things.

So we’re gonna do all of those things

Andrew Warner: and they all connect to each other. And the five other things are this user generated content. There is creating pages. What else is there?

Ethan Smith: There’s UGC. Mm-hmm. There’s video. Affiliates?

Andrew Warner: Mm.

Ethan Smith: I would say outreach. Um, depending on the category, there might be some domain specific stuff, like for engineers, stack Overflow, uh, w would be interesting, but, but yeah, it’s, it’s probably like four core ones.

And then depending on the category there, there’d be a fifth one.

Andrew Warner: There’s a company called Taco I interviewed Chirag, the co, the founder of the company. They’re operating at sub 15,000 a month. Is there an opportunity for someone listening to us to say, I’m gonna create a similar company? I’m gonna charge 10,000 a month and I’m going to do all these, maybe not all the things that you just talked about, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, as a way of getting into answers in LLMs.

Is that, is that a million dollar business idea?

Ethan Smith: For sure. Yeah. You, you could definitely build an agency with, with smaller deals, sizes, and it could be bigger than us. Uh,

Andrew Warner: interesting.

Ethan Smith: The, the number one problem that we had when I was starting is it’s hard to get things launched because. Every company has resource constrained.

And the number one reason why, why things wouldn’t work was not that the idea was wrong, but it’s that the idea did not get implemented. And that’s just because companies are resource constrained. Everyone’s resource constrained. And so we solve that by, we do everything. And so then we have a whole team where, where we can design, implement, right?

Do an do analytics, like everything from top to bottom and that, and then you have to have a whole team for that. Uh, now that not every company needs. To hire and, you know, rent an entire team. They have their own team and uh, and. You know, then you could have a consultant giving the strategic advice, and then you have to implement it.

Or you would say, well, you know, I don’t need to do all five of these things. I could just do Reddit, or I could just do YouTube. And that’s totally fine. There’s tons of companies, uh, most companies don’t, uh, were too expensive for, uh, so, you know, the, the, the market potential is actually larger for. Someone who has a smaller offering than, than what we have.

And uh, and for sure there’s an opportunity there. It’s just, you know, you, you run the risk of perhaps not everything gets implemented, but that, that’s totally fine.

Andrew Warner: Why, why you and not so many other people who try to do this in SEOI? I have, I’ve asked a few people in your space and I said, why Ethan? One thing that came up a lot was Ethan’s so fricking good at getting media.

He’s good. For some reason, people like talking and writing about you. Right. That’s a big thing.

Ethan Smith: So I just started doing marketing for our company in January.

Andrew Warner: Prior of

Ethan Smith: this year? To that Of this year.

Andrew Warner: Oh, didn’t you do Lenny’s podcast like two years ago?

Ethan Smith: I did Lenny’s podcast, I think it was two or three years ago.

Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: But I didn’t do that much. I, um, and before Lenny’s podcast, we, we built the agency before Lenny’s podcast, uh, five years ago.

So it’s, it’s been around for five years. Yeah. And so all of our early deal, we, we’ve never done any sales. So we, uh, we’ve never done any outbound sales and all of our deals early on were. Uh, referral based. So it’s just people that I know or people asking who’s good at something. And so that they, that was caused by getting, doing really good work and getting, uh, great outcomes.

And then people refer. And, uh, so then I finally did marketing in earnest starting in January. It’s a lot of work to do marketing because there’s traditional marketing and then there’s the marketing that I, we do traditional marketing is mediocre content and that does well, but I don’t wanna do mediocre content and I cannot.

I cannot hire someone to do my thought leadership for me, I have to personally

Andrew Warner: mm-hmm.

Ethan Smith: Do this. And it’s very challenging to write a 5,000 word article about how to do answer engine optimization. And so then I just didn’t do that until January. So then I said, I’m just going to spend my weekends writing out all of my ideas into content, and hopefully it does well, and then it did better than I expected.

So, uh, the, the marketing is only. Like the marketing in earnest has only been around for for 10 months. So phase one is just do really good work and then people will tell others about it. And then phase two is, describe the ways that you did that great work and then market it.

Andrew Warner: What’s been the ways that you’ve been describing it?

I see you on LinkedIn, you’ve got posts. A lot of the posts are kind of referring back to things that you’ve done in other places, like a blog post, like your most recent Lenny podcast. Where, where else are you writing and posting this stuff that’s actually useful.

Ethan Smith: I write. Playbooks and studies on our site.

So we do how, like, how to do answer optimization or how to do internal links, how to do topical authority. So we have long posts on our site and then we have, uh, studies. So the studies we have there, there’s almo, very little studies in our category. I think AFS and SCM Rush both do, uh, pretty good studies, but there’s not a lot of original research and so we just do original research.

Like we just posted an original piece of original research showing that half of the content, uh, published on the internet is generated by ai and no one had looked at that. So we post that on our site and then I write about that in LinkedIn posts. And then I do webinars like this one. Uh, and that’s it.

And I just started using Reddit. So I’m starting to comment on Reddit threads, but I’m like two weeks in

Andrew Warner: personally going in and doing that.

Ethan Smith: 100% of the time. I never, I, no one ever, uh, does that on my behalf. ’cause I just, I could, I could delegate mediocrity, but, and that, and mediocrity works, but I, that’s not what we do.

And so I have to personally do it.

Andrew Warner: In fact, I asked you if you can give people an artifact, something they can actually go and use afterwards. And you said, I wanna create something original for you. And so you said, I want to create an a EO roadmap for your listeners. What’s the a EO roadmap?

Ethan Smith: I will, I’ll, I’ll answer a different question, then I’ll answer that questions.

So, the biggest problem in SEO is wasted time. Most things don’t work, and so most of your time is on things that are true, but zero impact. And so we did a webinar with Reforge about the 5%. And so there’s a few things that are very impactful in SEO. And so we built a roadmap out of what are the, what are the few things that are impactful for SEO and only do those things.

And then I think we, we want to build that for answer engine optimization. Now, how do we know what’s impactful is to do a bunch of experiments and have a bunch of case studies, and we only have a few, we don’t have 50 case studies, so I think I know what, uh, what’s, what are the few impactful things. And so those impactful things are just do SEO, like do all the things that you do for SEO number one.

Number two is, uh, the head, which is, uh, owned offsite. So Reddit, uh, YouTube. Affiliates. It’s like, do that. And then the tail, which is help center. And so what I think my roadmap would be is step one is what questions should I care about? So I start with my search or paid search keywords that I care the most about.

Step one, step two, make them into questions three is track. Uh, put them in any of the 60 tools that I mentioned and track them and then figure out what’s being cited. And then when you figure out what’s being cited, do citation optimization. Uh, probably it’s going to be some mix of Reddit, YouTube affiliates, maybe some other stuff for your category.

And then I would build strategies for each of those. And then I would do t