Ethan Smith: prediction

Transcript context

…Okay, wow. So you're saying if you can get to number one, when you ask ChatGPT, "What's the best website builder?" And Webflow's at the top, that doesn't actually drive them as much traffic as simply being mentioned most often across the summary? Yes. And part of why that's interesting is because when startups come to me and ask me for SEO help, my first response is, "Don't do it at all. Spend your time on something else because you're not going to be able to grow SEO early on in search." Because you don't have enough domain authority and it takes a while to get domain authority, and only once you have domain authority can you rank. And so for Google, it's usually something that you do Series A, Series B or later. You don't do it as soon as you start because can't win early on. That's not the case for Answer Engine Optimization, because you can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow and start showing up immediately. You can have a Reddit thread, you can have a YouTube video. You can be mentioned on a blog, like a brand-new YC company launches, everyone's talking about them. They could show up in an answer tomorrow as a result of that. So early-stage companies can win, they can win quickly. And they can win quickly and anyone can win quickly, by getting mentioned as many times as possible by the citations. So that's what's different about the head. What's different about the tail is that the tail is larger in chat than in search. So the average number of words, I think, Perplexity said this to somebody else, said that it was around 25 words, where versus Google words it's around six words. So the tail is just much, much larger. People are asking lots of follow-up questions. The tail, the prompt essentially, the question you're asking?…

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