The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
Ethan Smith of Graphite reveals Webflow’s 6x LLM conversion rate and lays out a 7-step AEO playbook for getting products cited in ChatGPT and other LLMs.
- Webflow sees 6x higher conversion rate from LLM traffic vs. Google search; LLMs now drive 8% of Webflow signups.
- Early-stage startups can win AEO immediately via Reddit threads, YouTube videos, or blog mentions — unlike SEO, which requires years of domain authority.
- In LLMs, ranking #1 in citations does not win the answer; a brand must appear across the most citations in the summary.
- ChatGPT citation overlap with Google search results is only ~35%; Perplexity overlaps ~70% with Google — each surface requires separate tracking.
- Graphite study: only 10–12% of pages cited in Google and ChatGPT are AI-generated; purely automated content does not rank in either.
- AEO traffic spiked in January 2025 due to rising LLM adoption and more clickable answer modules such as maps and shopping carousels.
- Help-center content on a subdirectory (not subdomain), cross-linked and expanded to cover long-tail questions, is an underrated high-ROI AEO lever.
- Google’s VP of Search confirmed publisher referral traffic from Google is up, not down — the SEO-is-dying narrative is misinformation repeated every two years.
2025-09-14 · Watch on YouTube
