Ethan Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. I want to come back to this question of, "Is this good that ChatGPT is sucking all my content and giving people answers, and then sending me some percentage of that?" But let's not get into that yet. I want to talk about just what kind of impact you can have on having your stuff show up in ChatGPT. So I had the head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, on the podcast recently. I asked him, "What do you think of all this stuff, AEO, GEO?" He's like, "Don't worry about any of that. Just write awesome stuff, great quality content. It'll figure it out. It'll find the best stuff." I imagine you very much disagree. I imagine you have seen real impact getting your stuff proactively into these answer engines. Talk about just the kind of impact you've seen and just your reaction to that? Yeah. I agree and disagree, but the way that I think about it is anything can be optimized. You just need to understand the underlying systems and the rules of the game, and if you do that, then you can optimize anything. You can optimize algorithms, you can optimize people, anything could be optimized. What I think he probably meant by that, he probably meant two things. One is, "Please don't spam my product." And two is, "If you do, I will see it and I will stop you from doing that." So it's not a long-term, robust strategy to create spam, just like it wasn't a long-term, robust strategy to create spam on Google. Eventually, Google was going to say, "Huge shopping comparison sites are making 100 million auto-generated search pages and I don't like it, and I'm going to get rid of the whole category." So same thing with ChatGPT, anything can be optimized, but if you're spamming it, they'll see that. And they'll have a whole team looking at that and then they'll change your algorithm to prevent you from doing that. What kind of impact have you seen? You've done work with a lot of companies, we'll talk through a few examples. Maybe share one to give us context just like how much can you impact this sort of thing where you show up in, say, ChatGPT more often?…

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