The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product

Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and a long-time SEO practitioner, explains Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), the practice of getting products mentioned in LLM answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and similar tools. The conversation covers how AEO differs from classic SEO, tactical levers like landing pages, YouTube, and Reddit, how to track and experiment, and the risks of AI-generated content.

01Key learnings

• Everything that works in traditional SEO also works for AEO, so start with landing pages targeting high-volume keywords before adding AEO-specific tactics.
• In LLM answers you win by being mentioned across many citations, not by ranking first, so pursue multiple third-party mentions rather than a single top link.
• Early-stage companies can win in AEO quickly, since a single citation from a Reddit thread, YouTube video, or blog can get you mentioned immediately, unlike SEO's domain-authority lag.
• Map the long tail of conversational follow-up questions by mining sales calls, support tickets, and competitor paid-search terms converted into questions.
• On Reddit, have real team members disclose who they are and where they work, then post genuinely useful answers instead of running spam account farms.
• Run controlled experiments with test and control question groups, track answer share-of-voice across surfaces, and reproduce results before trusting best practices.
• Pure AI-generated content is unlikely to work long term; AI-assisted, human-edited content with original research and expertise is the sustainable approach.
• Don't block LLM indexing entirely; block only training bots if concerned, otherwise competitors will be cited in your place.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.