I got curious about something when GrowthAssistant’s cofounder said this:

If they closed ~ $1 million in business from LLMs, how do companies show up in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity/etc?

To find out, I asked Jesse for an intro to an AEO agency he trusts (AEO = Answer Engine Optimization), so I could interview the founder and get the playbook for our AI podcast.

That’s how I met Ethan Smith, of Graphite, the agency that Webflow, Rippling, Notion and other companies trust.

The unexpected message I got from him is that AEO is so nascent that it’s easier than SEO. He told me his agency goes through these 4 steps to rank his clients. And that anyone can do it, even without hiring his agency.

Ethan’s 4-Step AEO Playbook

Step 1: See what customers are asking

Start with search or paid search keywords you already care about. Then convert them to questions.

Example:

• Paid keyword: “website builder for designers”

• Target LLM question: “What’s the best website builder for a freelance designer who wants visual control and doesn’t code?”

These become the questions you want to show up for.

Step 2: Check your current visibility on LLMs

Use any tracking tool (they mostly do the same thing today):

• Peec AI

• Scrunch

• AirOps

Track:

• Prompts in your category

• Which sources LLMs cite today

• Whether you appear at all

Step 3: Publish answers where LLMs look

Ethan told me to notice the difference between search and LLMs.

Google checks with sites LINK to you

LLMs check what sites SAY about you

With that in mind, he told me he helps LLMs find more conversations about his clients.

Easy offsite wins:

• Create YouTube tutorials (LLMs love these)

• Reddit answers (get your team to answer)

• Community QA (Quora, StackOverflow)

• User-generated content (Esp LinkedIn, but also TikTok, Instagram)

But also publish on your site:

• Use-case landing pages (e.g., “Website builder for restaurants”)

• Template pages

• Help center articles (very important for long-tail prompts)

• Integration pages (“Works with Shopify” etc.)

Step 4: Test like a scientist

AEO is still young. There’s no fixed approach yet.

So treat everything like an experiment:

• Pick 50 target questions

• For 2 weeks see if you show up in the LLM answers

• Add 1 type of content (e.g., YouTube tutorials or Reddit answers)

• Track again for ~4 weeks

• Compare the test vs the control to see if results came from your actions, not just model growth

A real example:

A reader of this newsletter, Jared Goralnick, launched Your360 AI, a tool to help teams get anonymous feedback.

I asked Ethan what Jared should do.

Ethan’s playbook for Jared:

• Publish 5 YouTube videos (“How to give hard feedback” etc.)

• Answer management-related questions on Reddit

• Build integration + use-case pages

• Submit to affiliate lists / Product Hunt

Catch the full interview⬇️

You can get it (and all our AI interviews) on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and pretty much anywhere.

~Andrew