Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm really excited about it because in the same way that I find it dystopian to talk to everything through a chat bot, I also find it dystopian to not have amazing new high quality content out there. And for that reason, I talked a little bit earlier about search and have that solved a really important user problem early on because you had this knowledge cutoff thing and you suddenly could talk about anything. Very obvious in retrospect. A, it wasn't just a user problem, it was an ecosystem problem where the original ChatGPT, it didn't have outlinks, it would just answer your question, it would keep you in the product. And even if you wanted to keep reading or go deeper, there was no way for us to drive traffic back to the content ecosystem. And I've been really excited about what we've been doing in search, not just because it gives people more accurate answers, but because it allows us to surface really high quality content, like this podcast, to people who want to see it. And of course there's so many interesting questions about, well in the Google era, there was the search engine optimization and there was clearly understood mechanisms of how to show up and get more traffic. So I get a lot of questions from people, like, "What is the equivalent of that? The AI era, if I'm Lenny and I want to 10X the traffic to my podcast, what do I actually need to do?" And the truth is we don't have amazing answers there simply because the way to appeal to an AI model ideally is the same way that you would appeal to a real user, because the model's supposed to proxy the interest of the user and nothing else. At least that's how I want our product to work. And for that reason, my advice is super lame, which is make really high quality content, which is not as actionable as I think people making content would ideally like. And I think this is why we have more work to do because maybe there's a better mechanism or protocol that we could come up with. But I'm excited this is driving meaningful traffic for you, and I hope that other people making great content start to feel this way because, again, it's a very new scenario. There's two acronyms people have been using for this specific skill of AI driven SEO. I think one is AEO, which is answer engine optimization. The other is GEO. I forget the G one. Generative... Yeah, I don't know.…

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