The rise of LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity is causing a fundamental shift in user behavior, moving from keyword-based search to conversational, answer-seeking queries. This transition necessitates a new marketing discipline, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which focuses on getting a brand featured within AI-generated summaries.
Leads originating from LLM answers are proving to be exceptionally valuable, converting at much higher rates than traditional search traffic. For example, Webflow found LLM traffic converted 6x better than Google search traffic and now accounts for 8% of its signups, making it a top acquisition channel.
Winning in AEO requires different tactics than traditional SEO. The goal is not to rank #1, but to be mentioned as frequently as possible across all sources the LLM cites. This makes platforms like Reddit and YouTube, which are heavily indexed by LLMs, critical channels for optimization.
The emergence of answer engines is expanding the total market for search rather than simply stealing share from Google. Users are asking longer, more complex questions (25 words on average vs. 6 on Google), representing a new type of search behavior.
The internet is now saturated with more AI-generated content than human-generated content, according to Common Crawl data. This creates a risk of 'model collapse,' where LLMs trained on their own synthetic output lose accuracy and originality, degrading the quality of answers over time.
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