Best Practices to win at Answer Engine Optimization (AEO

(Guy) Good afternoon!

Welcome to Best Practices for Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO.

Today we hope to share with you some data driven examples

of some of the things we're seeing.

And one of the biggest challenges we all face as marketers

showing up in LLMs.

Please interrupt, ask questions throughout.

If we're running short on time, we'll pause them till the end.

But we hope you walk out of today with some concrete things you can do

back in the office to take back brand narrative control and drive more traffic.

Let's start with a bit of context on why we're up here to begin with.

Ethan.

Yes, I am Ethan.

I'm the CEO of Graphite.

And we’re an AI-powered Growth Agency.

So we specialize in SEO and AEO and we work with Webflow.

It's one of our partners.

And, yeah, excited for this session.

And my name is Guy Yalif.

I am a former CMO and most recently CEO

and co-founder of an AI website personalization company

that Webflow bought a year and change ago that's now Webflow Optimize.

And by coincidence, both of us have been in search

in one form or another for 17 years.

And hope to bring some of those mistakes and learnings here today.

Let's dive in.

If I were to go to ChatGPT and ask them about your brand today, what would it say?

Would it share the carefully crafted words

you and your team have spent so much time creating?

Would it say the things that you've ensured or said consistently?

Or would you give some bland description or be wrong?

Or, and I know this does not apply to anyone in this room, to other people,

but if you had some out of date content on your site,

or other people had added a content about you, would it reflect that?

LLMs are now the gatekeepers to our brands,

how people get to know about them, how they engage with them,

and it's because they are useful.

ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months, faster

than any other product in history.

95% of marketers that Forrester surveyed said, yeah,

I'm going to use an LLM as part of my buying process this year.

And in research, we published

this week, marketers are paying attention.

91% of marketing leaders, 93% of marketing practitioners,

in a survey of about 500 people said, AEO is going

to be really important to my business in the next couple of years.

And at the same time, only 25%

of the practitioners said, I really understand what this thing is.

So there is a lot of opportunity.

It is early innings in this new medium,

and it's a

moment in which we are a bit in a perfect storm.

We're losing control of our brand narrative, as we were talking about.

As our words get reformulated,

it's completely normal for an LLM to confidently present us

as a list of features rather than our key value props.

Columbia did a study of ChatGPT.

This was a few months ago.

I'm betting this is better now, but they said, hey, 40% of the citations

pointed to the wrong place, and 20% of the time there weren't citations.

Second thing, and Ethan and I have vigorous debates about this,

which we won't debate this time, but organic traffic is trending down,

being found 15, 20, 25%, not the headline grabbing 80% you hear sometimes,

but organic traffic is trending down, not surprisingly,

Google's head of search, she came out and said, no, no, that's not true.

Organic clicks are relatively flat.

And she did two things.

One, she included AI overviews in her count.

I think that's legit. That's organic.

And the other thing she did was say, hey, sites with authentic user

voices and educational content, they're getting more traffic.

And so she talked about basically some traffic mix shift.

Third piece of this perfect storm.

We're all using the same LLMs.

We all sound alike to our buyers. We're all the best.

We're all the leader. We're all the first.

Which causes all of them to tune out.

It's like the early days of search.

It is a new medium.

This creates real opportunity for all that growth,

all the LLM searches are less than 2% of total search share.

And there's a silver lining.

Just like we talked about in the keynote at Webflow, we see 8% of our self-serve

signups coming from AI search,

and that traffic converts six times

better than unbranded organic search.

Additionally, it's grown.

In the last year, AI search as a percentage of total unbranded search

went from basically 0 to 42% of that total.

It's had a real impact for us.

Others, Ahrefs and Semrush, prominent SEO firms, found the conversion rates

4.4x to 23x better, and they found that, LLM visitors,

they were further down the funnel.

They visited 50% more pages when they came to your site.

So how do you manage this?

Our suggestion, our mental model is that you should

tackle AEO in four categories.

And lots of people talking about this.

I believe this is a reasonable way for you to assess where you are,

structure your work and set up next steps to level up.

You start with content where you go from counting keywords

to answering questions fully,

and then ensuring you have really relevant content that's personalized.

At a high level, 2. Technical.

You go from on page SEO to

getting some structure on your site to help the LLMs understand

what's the structure of your site, what's the meaning of your site,

and then automating that on super fast sites.

In authority you go from backlinks which still matter.

to increased importance for plain text mentions on other sites.

Now it matters more for you to be on that top ten list for the sites

that LLMs are citing to mention you, and then you want that pointing

to visually stunning, emotionally evocative experiences. Why?

Because that's a signal to the LLMs that you have authority.

You know, perplexity has a browser today, ChatGPT is rumored to have one

that will give them excellent signal on what's authoritative, good content.

And fourth

is measurement, where we go from trying

to get our words to rank in Google.

That concept doesn't exist with LLMs and so we go count mentions.

And then as we mature further, we count share a voice.

We pick a basket of questions, Ethan can talk more about that.

And and say, hey, how often did we show up?

And was the sentiment positive?

That's a high level.

We're now going to go

into specific examples to help stimulate your thinking and give you ideas

for when you go back to the office.

In each of these four categories.

And then we're going to wrap with how you can action this for your brand directly.

To start that,

I'm going to turn it over to Ethan to talk about the baskets of questions.

(Ethan) Thanks, Guy.

As Guy mentioned, there's SEO and AEO

and how LLMs work is frequently they start with a search.

And so, perplexity you type in what's the best website builder?

Perplexity does a search, and then they summarize the results of that search.

And so.

AEO is sort of an evolution of SEO.

There's a lot of similar parallels.

And so we can take all of the,

strategies from SEO and then evolve them and apply them to AEO.

And so the first is topics.

And when SEO started, it was based on keyword targeting,

where you would target a single individual keyword like best enterprise CMS.

And then SEO evolved into topics and topics are clusters of many,

many keywords.

So for best enterprise CMS, you might be targeting 500 keywords in

Google search, and you might be targeting 5000 questions in LLMs.

And so a topic is essentially a cluster of all the different ways

where you could ask, what's the best, enterprise CMS?

And you'll also see that there's

a lot of follow up questions and more specific questions.

And chat is built for conversations where a search is built

for getting you the answer immediately.

So Google's goal is when you type in best enterprise

CMS, you immediately get the answer and you leave and you're done.

Whereas chat is built for many follow up, conversations.

So the chat knows about you and, you know, you ask best enterprise CMS

and you can say, well, which of them

which enterprise CMS has had this feature, this integration or this language.

And so there's all these follow up questions,

which is probably also why we see such a difference in the conversion

rate, which is because the user’s very primed during that conversation.

And so, AEO topics are groups of all these thousands

of different ways that you can ask,

you know, the similar concept, which is best enterprise CMS.

This is an example with perplexity where we say best enterprise CMS.

And again you'll see it's doing a search.

And then the answer is a summary of those search results.

And then we can break it up into onsite and offsite.

And this is somewhere with SEO.

So for SEO there's on site

SEO where you do keyword research and you build landing pages around that.

You have relevant content, and there's offsite,

which is, for SEO, it's link building.

Now for AEO, that's different, but it's an evolution of SEO.

So this is an example with Rippling where,

we took the the target personas for Rippling are the director of HR,

the director of IT, the director of finance.

So there's all these different personas that Rippling is trying to target.

Because when you're picking your payroll management software and your HR software,

there's all these people involved in that decision.

It's a group decision.

And so, we created content around what question

or what features and use cases does the director of HR, want to see.

And, great idea that I learned from Guy is,

how do you know what questions the director of HR has about your product?

And there's no actual, ChatGPT doesn't tell you question volume for those things.

And so how do we get all these followup questions?

Guy's idea was, you know, mine all of your sales calls and summarize because,

your sales team knows what questions people have about your software.

So mine all your, questions from sales calls and group those, or look in Reddit

and see what questions

Reddit people have, about Rippling or about payroll management software

and then come up

with all those different questions and then have a feature and use case page.

And this is probably different from what you would do for SEO.

For SEO, you would probably have dedicated landing pages for each of these, like,

employee database management, payroll management.

These would be separate pages in an SEO, whereas

for AEO, the question really just wants to be able to find the answer.

So you can actually group all of these, features and use cases.

And so in this particular case,

we take each persona and we create dedicated landing pages for all of the use

cases of Rippling for HR, all the features for HR,

and if you ask for

best payroll management software, this would be part of

the answer is and then Rippling is more likely to show up.

Similarly, people have questions about integrations.

So with Webflow or with Notion or Zapier, there's all kinds of integrations

with Webflow.

And and those are the kinds of questions people have.

And so we created integration specific landing pages.

So what are the best integrations to extend Webflow CMS.

And this is pretty similar to the feature use case page, but it's a bit different.

other things we've worked on are languages and regions.

So people want to know, does Webflow work in Korean?

Does does does Rippling are they supported in Argentina?

And so you can break up and especially for B2B

break up these four different groups, which is features and use cases,

pages, integration pages, and language and region pages.

And over to you Guy.

(Guy) I'll cover this one.

So if you only do two things to begin

on AEO, you’d answer questions and create some structure for the LLM

to understand metadata, to understand the structure and meaning of your site.

Here's an example of our team.

Vivian leading our SEO team in partnership with Ethan's team, creating FAQs.

She went to a half dozen top pages about our products and services

and products and created FAQs in them.

You see that on the left and then she created schema,

which how many people in this room know what schema is?

Worth covering?

So this is a way

some small companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex came together

a few years ago and said, here's metadata to tell us the structure of the page.

It's notionally a little bit like Facebook's open graph.

So it's like, here's

a blog page, here's a bio page, here's a product page, here's an event page.

She created that for those FAQs and did some additional nesting.

That's worked out beautifully.

In two weeks after she did this, half of the additional citations

that we got, more than half came from these FAQs across all of Webflow

And SEO traffic to these pages was up 24%.

And so you actually can have a meaningful impact

in AEO sooner

than it would typically take to build authority in SEO.

(Ethan) Yeah. And that's also interesting because, if you asked, “what's the best restaurant

in New York?” a year ago, you would get a no click answer

and you would get text and in chat, and now you're starting to see maps.

Or if you ask, “what's the best television for apartments?”

A year ago, it would be all text.

There be nothing to click on.

And now you see rich, commerce carousels.

So essentially what we're seeing is, ChatGPT and Perplexity

are starting to merge.

Some of the changes that Google has at Google has had for years

merge that into, into chat.

Google also used to be 10 blue links, and then they added maps

and shopping carousels and all these rich modules.

And so we're seeing, LLMs start to do that.

And part of why this is such an interesting, fast

growing category is because they've made this change.

They made this change around January,

where they started having these rich modules in chat.

And that comes from schema.

And so again, back to the best TVs for apartments.

If you see that, you'll see a carousel. You'll click on

a particular TV, you'll see a product

card, reviews and all that stuff is coming from schema.

So let's talk about offsite.

Okay. So this is a big difference with SEO and AEO.

This is the biggest difference

which is that

when we showed the Perplexity example the LLM is summarizing search results.

And so even if your URL is the number one URL in the citations, that doesn't mean

that you're going to win.

You need to be mentioned many times,

and the more times that you're mentioned, the better.

And especially for competitive questions like what's the best enterprise CMS?

Webflow can't win by just having a single URL on Webflow rank.

Whereas in Google ranking number one would be sufficient.

So here we need to get mentioned a lot.

And this is different from SEO.

So this is an example with Reddit.

Reddit is huge.

I think they’re the top three citation domain on ChatGPT and Perplexity.

It's Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit.

So it's huge.

I think it's over 10x increased traffic on Google as well.

So Reddit is blowing up.

As any good growth person would do, you start by optimizing Reddit with spam.

because we need to scale.

So we scale with automation.

So you create hundreds of Reddit accounts and then you, you know, sign them up

and then you all like each other's posts and you give each other

karma and comment on it and like, let's do that.

And we're seeing that

that's not working with Reddit and, you know, which is good, which is good.

so I created a Reddit account and I even I created useful content

talking about answer engine optimization, and even I got my own comment buried.

what is Reddit for?

Reddit is for actual people to say who they are and give you some information.

So what if we did that?

And one could say, well, that doesn't really scale, but it does scale.

So this is an example with Webflow

where somebody is asking a question about Webflow.

We have another example.

You know, as a frontend developer, what CMS would you advise on.

So the team at Webflow is creating accounts and saying this is my name.

This is where I work.

I work at Webflow.

Here's a useful piece of information.

Surprisingly, that works.

And so

how to optimize for Reddit is to use Reddit as Reddit was supposed to be used,

which is real, authentic people giving useful answers, to each other.

And again, that does scale.

You don't need a thousand different Reddit

threads to say that you're the best product.

You, you know, even five or 10.

These are two.

You don't need to scale to thousands to optimize for Reddit.

Ethan, can I add two things to that? Please.

Two things to keep in mind if you're going to engage on it.

One, and both of these also sound weird, but then I'll explain...

lurk thoughtfully.

And by that I mean pick the sub-Reddits

you want to be part of and watch their norms.

They each have different norms and like corporate speak, equals death.

On Reddit they self-police very actively.

And the second is don't lie.

And I don't actually mean not lying. Assume you're not lying.

I mean be ready to admit when you screwed up, when something broke,

when you're not good at something, those things are valued.

And if you're not ready to do those things,

my humble suggestion would be don't engage in that medium.

Does that resonate? That resonates.

And the way that I think about this is imagine if we worked at Webflow,

and then we showed up to somebody's dinner party and we didn't know anyone

and we started going person by person, saying, you should check out Webflow.

That would be weird.

And, Reddit has all these subcommunities that have their own culture

and don't just show up, start saying, you guys should really be thinking

about Webflow.

Read the room, try to figure out how people are communicating with each other.

Try to be authentic, like go slowly, you know, introduce yourself to people

at the dinner party and then talk about how wonderful Webflow is.

YouTube is huge.

So one of the largest sources of citations is UGC in video.

YouTube is a huge, cited source Vimeo, Reddit, Quora,

and the interesting thing about YouTube is you don't have a community saying I do

or I don't like your stuff.

You don't need the community to approve you making a YouTube video.

Anyone can make a YouTube video.

And so this is another way where, you can create content for,

“what's the best enterprise CMS?” or, “what's

the best parallel management software?” The other interesting thing with video is

that video is typically historically

for entertaining things like travel and food and, beauty.

It's not for, you know, manipulating CSS and, payroll.

You know, paying people in Argentina, like people don't spend their weekends,

looking about how to send, crypto to Argentina.

But, a lot of people are searching for that.

And so these less entertaining categories, like B2B categories

are ones where YouTube, and video hasn't really been fully optimized.

And so it's especially an interesting, opportunity to create this, video content

for these high LTV, B2B categories, because there's just not that many.

And so it's easier to win.

Affiliates.

if you want to be the best credit card, you just have to pay Forbes

to say that you're best credit card and then you become the best credit card.

you know, affiliates are also huge and affiliates are huge on Google as well.

So Forbes, Business Insider,

there's hundreds of these, TechRadar.

It's expensive.

It's not, you know, it's not inexpensive.

Chase is there because they're probably paying Forbes a ton of money.

but it works.

So depending on whether or not what category you're in, affiliates can work.

And especially most of the tier one affiliates have an efficient market

where showing up is really expensive.

But some of the tier two, tier three smaller affiliates do show up in,

in citations, and they probably are underpriced.

And probably people also don't know which citations

are showing up for the questions that they want to rank for.

So If you're a payroll management software company,

it doesn't matter showing up on Forbes necessarily.

It's the specific URL on Forbes that is part of the citations

for the question for payroll management software.

And most people haven't actually done the homework to figure out the exact URL.

And so if you know the exact URL that's in the citation for the question

that you care about, you did all that work,

you got this information advantage, then you can, you know,

pay more efficiently for that affiliate.

So I think if you just do the extra work to figure out

which affiliates actually matter for you, you can do really well.

And, the more citations, the better.

So if you ask something, what's the best payroll management software?

You'll see here, It's too small, but Rippling is number one

because it's been mentioned multiple times.

It's been mentioned more than Gusto and more than Deal.

And if Gusto becomes mentioned more Gusto becomes number one.

So the more citations, the better.

Similar to to SEO, the more backlinks, the better,

the more mentions and citations, the better.

(Guy) Technically, we

want to help the LLMs understand the structure and meaning of our site.

So I'm going to touch on three things we mentioned in today's keynote.

The single most important thing you could do

is to add schema to your site.

As Ethan was talking about,

both of us have seen examples for that to have impact in days,

and now you can point Webflow at a page which will crawl the page.

Think which is the right schema?

Is this a product page? This? Is this an event page?

And then auto fill it out for you.

You can then of course edit it there.

You could do that on a page.

You could do that across the entire site.

And it really matters.

88% of sites do not have schema today, but 73% of top

Google results have schema, have some structured data.

Google themselves said, hey, rotten tomatoes.

They took 100,000 pages.

They added structured data.

They didn't say if it was schema specifically.

Those 100,000 pages got 25% more organic traffic

than pages that Rotten Tomatoes had that didn't have that.

So this can be a big impact.

I was candidly, really fired up that we were able to announce this today.

Next, you could, if you go to the next one, ensure that your site is accessible.

Not only is that the right thing to do, LLMs use it heavily.

And so you can, as you saw in the keynote this morning for an individual image

or your whole site, have our AI which is context aware

auto generate all text and you can say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, and edit

so that you've got human in the loop always, but it saves you a bunch of time.

And the last one, if you don't mind flipping

the next one, is traditional SEO metadata.

It is surprising that even today, 25% of top

pages do not have SEO metadata on them.

This is like super low hanging fruit, and this is another one that you can use

Webflow’s AI to go auto generate for you for a page, for a site,

and you can then edit as you would like.

And the hope is that this helps you activate these earlier

because there's so much opportunity here, you will be ahead of others

that aren't doing this and reap the benefits back over you.

(Ethan) Thank you. Yeah.

And we for our agency.

So we work with companies

like Notion and Rippling and we help build their SEO strategies

and the thing that I see the most is that it's

not about the ideas, it's about getting things launched quickly.

And every company that I've ever worked with has limited resources.

We don't have enough engineering and so that's why we

when we work with companies and we build we build stuff in Webflow.

And then there are these other things that we wanted to do that we would get stuck.

So one of those and we have built an app,

we built a Webflow app just to go as fast as we possibly can,

which is especially important right now because everyone's interested in AEO.

So the faster you can go, the faster you can take advantage of this.

So we built a Webflow app for that.

This was from last year for SEO, and we're updating it for answer

engine optimization.

So this allows you to bulk update title tags

which is the single most important feature on your page.

If you could do one thing to get fast

impact is just make your title tags better and make them more keyword rich.

The second thing is a robots builder.

So, an interesting thing with

AI is people don't necessarily people want control of their information.

They want control over their data.

They don't necessarily want all the LLMs to take all their information and create

learning models and displace them.

And so people want to have the option

whether or not they want LLMs to be able to train on their data.

And so we built a robots builder where it makes it really easy.

You could just say, yes, you can train, but index but don't train.

So if you index I could show up

I can I can still benefit from LLMs, but I don't want you to train on my data.

Or you could say I don't want you to look at my site at all.

Or you could say, do whatever you want, train on all my data.

But, this is hard because you have to set all these different user agents,

so it's very complicated. It takes a long time.

So this allows you to just click a couple buttons and say,

yes, index my stuff, send me traffic, but don't train on my data.

And then the last thing is tracking.

So, Guy mentioned that tracking is very important.

And, there's a whole suite of tools that do answer tracking.

So if you want to type in, what's the best, CMS for, designers,

you want to figure out whether or not you're appearing.

And a lot of times the answers are zero click.

So you don't actually know whether or not your

you don't actually know the whether or not you drove conversions by showing up.

If, if Webflow shows up on that answer, you're probably

opening a new tab and typing in Webflow and then going direct via Google.

And you would think that it was direct

branded search actually came from the answer.

And so, tracking is actually much harder with with LLMs.

And so we built this tracker

similar to other trackers, but you can essentially put on

all the different questions you want to win.

And you can see over time how do you perform.

So this is live.

And also we're giving all Webflow users three months free of answer tracking,

as of today.

(Guy) Thank you. Awesome.

We can help you do each of these things.

We have been helping all of us create

visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging experiences forever.

And so you can then use that to create on brand 1:1 personalization.

You can localize natively or with your own tools.

In the technical side,

you will have a blazingly fast site from 350 different places around the world,

with 99% of the static content served at the edge

will help you auto generate structure.

We'll help you be at the cutting edge.

We were the first CMS to support in MCP.

We didn't talk about it today, but we support LLMs text.

With authority, you can point people to that super engaging site.

And finally, on measurement, we help you with content analytics and experiment

analytics so that you can point your efforts in the right direction.

If you were going to take one screenshot

today, I would humbly suggest it's this one.

This is those four categories and five levels of maturity

so that you can go back to your team and assess how are we doing?

What's the next thing for us to do to go improve in AEO?

And while in some sense no one actually knows,

just like no one actually knows exactly what's happening in Google.

This is a very well researched, very thought out thing

that we agree on, that we think is actionable for you.

And if, if you don't mind going to the next slide,

You want an automated assessment specific

to your site, please go to this URL.

If you use that QR code and we wrote a long, you know,

thousand line prompt that will go look at your site,

go look at Reddit, at LinkedIn, at a bunch of other places and see, hey,

how did you perform to give you an assessment of where you are

and what you can do next.

We have about six minutes left out of our 35.

We then wanted to open it up for questions from the audience.

Given how hot a topic this is.

Say it and then we'll repeat it for the recording.

And please, first question.

For the backlink component,

how are affiliate and nofollow backlinks going to be taken into account for LLMs?

Ethan you want to start?

(Ethan) I'll tell you what I think.

So what I think is that the models are not,

are considering the mentions and affiliates with equal.

That's what I think.

Google has nofollow tags, or you can put nofollow tags on those affiliate links.

And then Google says, okay, we're not going to include this in

my domain rank, although actually nofollow links do count.

Now the question is do

nofollow links count for the order of the citations in ChatGPT?

I don't know the answer to that.

I would guess that they probably count somewhat, but they.

But I think a more direct answer to your question is

if a citation mentions your company and it's a nofollow link, does it count?

It seems like it does count because I'm seeing those citations in chat.

So essentially know that since the citations are in chat

that they are being considered.

So it seems like they are being considered,

I think that they're considered equal.

And and one other example

is, TechRadar is showing up a ton as a, as a citation domain.

And it's, you know, it's all affiliates, it's all pay to play.

So it seems like it's, it's equal to non affiliate sites.

(Guy) I agree completely, nothing to add.

Question?

Question was when you're talking about adding FAQs

to your key pages, are you talking about literally like interspersing them

throughout the page and your H1, H2 and so on, or having an FAQ section?

What we tried, what Vivienne and Ethan's team tried

was to create a section at the bottom.

So you've got the whole page

and you've got a section at the bottom that takes similar content,

may flesh it out a bit more, and then puts schema around that.

And most of the other experiments I've been hearing people do has been that

rather than because

you still want the site to be super human readable and useful, folks

are going to want to hear your story told your way forever.

That's not going to change.

We have always built sites for humans

and machines because we were doing SEO.

Now we're more thinking about that more as we think about LLMs,

but we still need this to be there even as the role changes.

Ethan, anything you'd add or change?

(Ethan) Yeah, I would add to that.

I think it depends on the type of an FAQ.

And, for the Rippling example

that I showed you, people had questions about what features

do you have for for HR?

And it's fine to answer some of those in the body,

and maybe there's some follow up questions that you can do for FAQs.

So I think both work.

But yeah an easy way to do that is list out

some of the questions that you want answered at the bottom of the page.

(Guy) And you made me think of one other thing.

As you reach higher levels of maturity,

those may be triggers for you to then say, I'm going to go somewhere else,

own this cluster of keywords at every stage of the funnel, right?

Like like what is an HR system and multiple levels of altitude.

And then you richly

have a higher probability of being similar or whatever questions somebody asked.

So the content machine wants to be fed.

Question.

There was a question over there please.

Awesome question.

To repeat for the recording and those listening in, with search,

we get first party data

from Google Search Console, from Semrush, from Ahrefs in LLMs.

Where do we find that?

So we avoid the sort of talking in our own echo chamber.

Ethan you want to start that?

(Ethan) Yeah. So, the answer is find indirect, sources of data to suggest what might be true.

So for Google,

we know what's true as you mentioned, because we get it directly from Google,

from Search Console, from from their ads API.

So Google says this keyword has this amount of search volume.

So it's a, you know, it's first,

primary source.

And then for our answers,

ChatGPT is not handing over volume for their questions yet.

At least I'm not sure if they ever will, but, but but today they're not.

So then you need to find indirect indications of what that might be.

So the second best indication of what that might be would be ISP and browser

extension data, which is not readily accessible of similar web does that.

But they're not selling that, at least not in a way that anyone can buy that.

But that's probably the second best source.

Although that's not readily available yet.

Then beat what are other indirect sources.

So I actually think search data is pretty good.

If you, you know, for the example that I gave with website builder does

things people are searching for, probably pretty similar in nature to,

to what they're asking.

So I think Google search

data is actually a pretty good indication of question volume.

But it doesn't tell us about the, the, the tail of all the follow up questions

like I mentioned.

And so I think Reddit is a really good source.

Where how does Rippling know

what questions people have about payroll management software?

You could probably go to Reddit and see what questions

people are asking on Reddit. That's a good indication.

And then Guy’s idea of see what people are asking live in your sales

calls, get transcripts and figure out the all the follow up

questions customers are asking.

I would use all those.

So until we get data directly

from ChatGPT and Perplexity, I would use these indirect sources.

(Guy) I'll add two things.

And then we're at time.

So Ethan and I will be around for the rest of the afternoon.

But the two things I would add are, one

another indirect source could look at where the bots are crawling.

Go look at where

you are getting attention on your site, whether or not the training bot,

if it's one of the bots that will tell you,

but the inference time bot and also where where's the traffic coming from?

The humans that have clicked that is an indirect source.

And the other one is, I respectfully see it

the other way that I think it's inevitable that ChatGPT will give us

the equivalent of a search console.

I think there's too much money sitting there.

We love this conversation.

We would love to continue with Ethan.

Thank you for being up here together, sharing your insights.

We hope this was useful.

to add to that, like the getting the answer quickly the average

as we all learn to speak Google the average queries for words.

The average Elo on query today is 23 words.

So the essence point like we have a much deeper conversation with more context.

Yes. And then the other difference is this chain of follow up questions

and refinements.

And so, when you're creating content and when you're doing question research,

you want to make sure that you're grouping them properly.

And, you create content that answers all these questions.

And so schemas are very powerful.

We also did a test with medium where we added.

I think somewhere it was about 25% increase.

And that happens within days because SEO, you know, frequently takes time.

But adding schema, something that can drive a fast impact.

Hello.

Good afternoon!

Hi everybody.

Welcome to Best Practices for Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO.

Today we hope to share with you some data driven examples

of some of the things we're seeing.

And one of the biggest challenges we all face as marketers

showing up in LLMs.

Please interrupt, ask questions throughout.

If we're running short on time, we'll pause them till the end.

But we hope you walk out of today with some concrete things you can do

back in the office to take back brand narrative control and drive more traffic.

Let's start with a bit of context on why we're up here to begin with.

Ethan.

Yes, I am Ethan.

I'm the CEO of Graphite.

And we’re an AI-powered Growth Agency.

So we specialize in SEO and AEO and we work with Webflow.

It's one of our partners.

And, yeah, excited for this session.

And my name is Guy Yalif.

I am a former CMO and most recently CEO

and co-founder of an AI website personalization company

that Webflow bought a year and change ago that's now Webflow Optimize.

And by coincidence, both of us have been in search

in one form or another for 17 years.

And hope to bring some of those mistakes and learnings here

today.

Let's dive in.

If I were to go to ChatGPT

and ask them about your brand today, what would it say?

Would it share the carefully crafted words

you and your team have spent so much time creating?

Would it say the things that you've ensured or said consistently?

Or would you give some bland description or be wrong?

Or, and I know this does not apply to anyone in this room, to other people,

but if you had some out of date content on your site,

or other people had added a content about you, would it reflect that?

LLMs are now the gatekeepers to our brands,

how people get to know about them, how they engage with them,

and it's because they are useful.

ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months, faster

than any other product in history.

95% of marketers that Forrester surveyed said, yeah,

I'm going to use an LLM as part of my buying process this year.

And in research, we published

this week, marketers are paying attention.

91% of marketing leaders, 93% of marketing practitioners,

in a survey of about 500 people said, AEO is going

to be really important to my business in the next couple of years.

And at the same time, only 25%

of the practitioners said, I really understand what this thing is.

So there is a lot of opportunity.

It is early innings in this new medium,

and it's a

moment in which we are a bit in a perfect storm.

We're losing control of our brand narrative, as we were talking about.

As our words get reformulated,

it's completely normal for an LLM to confidently present us

as a list of features rather than our key value props.

Columbia did a study of ChatGPT.

This was a few months ago.

I'm betting this is better now, but they said, hey, 40% of the citations

pointed to the wrong place, and 20% of the time there weren't citations.

Second thing, and Ethan and I have vigorous debates about this,

which we won't debate this time, but organic traffic is trending down,

being found 15, 20, 25%, not the headline grabbing 80% you hear sometimes,

but organic traffic is trending down, not surprisingly,

Google's head of search, she came out and said, no, no, that's not true.

Organic clicks are relatively flat.

And she did two things.

One, she included AI overviews in her count.

I think that's legit. That's organic.

And the other thing she did was say, hey, sites with authentic user

voices and educational content, they're getting more traffic.

And so she talked about basically some traffic mix shift.

Third piece of this perfect storm.

We're all using the same LLMs.

We all sound alike to our buyers. We're all the best.

We're all the leader. We're all the first.

Which causes all of them to tune out.

It's like the early days of search.

It is a new medium.

This creates real opportunity for all that growth,

all the LLM searches are less than 2% of total search share.

And there's a silver lining.

Just like we talked about in the keynote at Webflow, we see 8% of our self-serve

signups coming from AI search,

and that traffic converts six times

better than unbranded organic search.

Additionally, it's grown.

In the last year, AI search as a percentage of total unbranded search

went from basically 0 to 42% of that total.

It's had a real impact for us.

Others,

Ahrefs and Semrush, prominent SEO firms, found the conversion rates

4.4x to 23x better, and they found that, LLM visitors,

they were further down the funnel.

They visited 50% more pages when they came to your site.

So how do you manage this?

Our suggestion, our mental model is that you should

tackle AEO in four categories.

And lots of people talking about this.

I believe this is a reasonable way for you to assess where you are,

structure your work and set up next steps to level up.

You start with content where you go from counting keywords

to answering questions fully,

and then ensuring you have really relevant content that's personalized.

At a high level, 2.

Technical.

You go from on page SEO to getting some structure on your site

to help the LLMs understand

what's the structure of your site, what's the meaning of your site,

and then automating that on super fast sites.

In authority you go from backlinks which still matter.

They do not NOT matter to increased

importance for plain text mentions on other sites.

Now it matters more for you to be on that top ten list for the sites

that LLMs are citing to mention you, and then you want that pointing

to visually stunning, emotionally evocative experiences. Why?

Because that's a signal to the LLMs that you have authority.

You know, perplexity has a browser today, ChatGPT is rumored to have one

that will give them excellent signal on what's authoritative, good content.

And fourth is measurement,

where we go from trying to get our words to rank in Google.

That concept doesn't exist with LLMs

and so we want to be we go count mentions.

And then as we mature further, we count share a voice.

We pick a basket of questions, Ethan can talk more about that.

And and say, hey, how often did we show up?

And was the sentiment positive?

That's a high level.

We're now going to go

into specific examples to help stimulate your thinking and give you ideas

for when you go back to the office.

In each of these four categories.

And then we're going to wrap with how you can action this for your brand directly.

To start that,

I'm going to turn it over to Ethan to talk about the baskets of questions.

Thanks Guy.

So, as As Guy mentioned, there's SEO

and AEO and how LLMs work is frequently they start with a search.

And so, perplexity you type in what's the best website builder?

Perplexity does a search, and then they summarize the results of that search.

And so.

AEO is sort of an evolution of SEO.

There's a lot of similar parallels.

And so we can take all of the,

strategies from SEO and then evolve them and apply them to AEO.

And so the first is topics.

And when SEO started, it was based on keyword targeting,

where you would target a single individual keyword like best enterprise CMS.

And then SEO evolved into topics and topics are clusters of many,

many keywords.

So for best enterprise CMS, you might be targeting 500 keywords in

Google search, and you might be targeting 5000 questions in LLMs.

And so a topic is essentially a cluster of all the different ways

where you could ask, what's the best, enterprise CMS?

And you'll also see that there's

a lot of follow up questions and more specific questions.

And chat is built for conversations where a search is built

for getting you the answer immediately.

So Google's goal is when you type in best enterprise

CMS, you immediately get the answer and you leave and you're done.

Whereas chat is built for many follow up, conversations.

So the chat knows about you and, you know, you ask best enterprise CMS

and you can say, well, which of them

which enterprise CMS has had this feature, this integration or this language.

And so there's all these follow up questions,

which is probably also why we see such a difference in the conversion

rate, which is because the user’s very primed during that conversation.

And so, AEO topics are groups of all these thousands

of different ways that you can ask,

you know, the similar concept, which is best enterprise CMS.

And, and to add to that, like the getting the answer quickly the average

as we all learn to speak Google the average queries for words.

The average Elo on query today is 23 words.

So the essence point like we have a much deeper conversation with more context.

Yes. And then the other difference is this chain of follow up questions

and refinements.

And so, when you're creating content and when you're doing question research,

you want to make sure that you're grouping them properly.

And, you create content that answers all these questions.

So This is an example with

perplexity where we say best enterprise CMS.

And again you'll see it's doing a search.

And then the answer is a summary of those search results.

And then we can break it up into onsite and offsite.

And this is somewhere with SEO.

So for SEO there's on site

SEO where you do keyword research and you build landing pages around that.

You have relevant content, and there's offsite,

which is, for SEO, it's link building.

Now for AEO, that's different, but it's an evolution of SEO.

and I will go into both.

So this is an example with Rippling where,

we took the the target persona personas for Rippling are the director of HR,

the director of IT, the director of finance.

So there's all these different personas that Rippling is trying to target.

Because when you're picking your payroll management software and your HR software,

there's all these people involved in that decision.

It's a group decision.

And so, we created content around what question

or what features and use cases does the director of HR, want to see.

And, great idea that I learned from Guy is,

how do you know what questions the director of HR has about your product?

And there's no actual, ChatGPT doesn't tell you question volume for those things.

And so how do we get all these followup questions?

Guy's idea was, you know, mine all of your sales calls and summarize because,

your sales team knows what questions people have about your software.

So mine all your, questions from sales calls and group those, or look in Reddit

and see what questions

Reddit people have, about Rippling or about payroll management software

and then come up

with all those different questions and then have a feature and use case page.

And this is probably different from what you would do for SEO.

For SEO, you would probably have dedicated landing pages for each of these, like,

employee database management, payroll management.

These would be separate pages in an SEO, whereas

for AEO, the question really just wants to be able to find the answer.

So you can actually group all of these, features and use cases.

And so in this particular case,

we take each persona and we create dedicated landing pages for all of the use

cases of Rippling for HR, all the features for HR,

and if you ask for

best payroll management software, this would be part of

the answer is and then Rippling is more likely to show up.

Similarly, people have questions about integrations.

So with Webflow or with Notion or Zapier, there's all kinds of integrations

with Webflow.

And and those are the kinds of questions people have.

And so we created integration specific landing pages.

So what are the best integrations to extend Webflow CMS.

And this is pretty similar to the feature use case page, but it's a bit different.

Other other things we've worked on are languages and regions.

So people want to know, does Webflow work in Korean?

Does does does Rippling are they supported in Argentina?

And so you can break up and especially for B2B

break up these four different groups, which is features and use cases,

pages, integration pages, and language and region pages.

And over to you Guy.

I'll cover this one.

So if you only do two things to begin

on AEO, you’d answer questions and create some structure for the LLM

to understand metadata, to understand the structure and meaning of your site.

Here's an example of our team.

Vivian leading our SEO team in partnership with Ethan's team, creating FAQs.

She went to a half dozen top pages about our products and services

and products and created FAQs in them.

You see that on the left and then she created schema,

which how many people in this room know what schema is?

Worth covering?

So this is a way

some small companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex came together

a few years ago and said, here's metadata to tell us the structure of the page.

It's notionally a little bit like Facebook's open graph.

So it's like, here's

a blog page, here's a bio page, here's a product page, here's an event page.

She created that for those FAQs and did some additional nesting.

That's worked out beautifully.

In two weeks after she did this, half of the additional citations

that we got, more than half came from these FAQs across all of Webflow

And SEO traffic to these pages was up 24%.

And so you actually can have a meaningful impact

in AEO sooner

than it would typically take to build authority in SEO.

That query.

Yeah.

And that's also interesting because, if you asked, “what's the best restaurant

in New York?” a year ago, you would get a no click answer

and you would get text and in chat, and now you're starting to see maps.

Or if you ask, “what's the best television for apartments?”

A year ago, it would be all text.

There be nothing to click on.

And now you see rich, commerce carousels.

So essentially what we're seeing is, ChatGPT and Perplexity

are starting to merge.

Some of the changes that Google has at Google has had for years

merge that into, into chat.

Google also used to be 10 blue links, and then they added maps

and shopping carousels and all these rich modules.

And so we're seeing, LLMs start to do that.

And part of why this is such an interesting, fast

growing category is because they've made this change.

They made this change around January,

where they started having these rich modules in chat.

And that comes from schema.

And so again, back to the best TVs for apartments.

If you see that, you'll see a carousel. You'll click on

a particular TV, you'll see

a product card, reviews and all that stuff is coming from schema.

And so schemas are very powerful.

We also did a test with medium where we added.

I think somewhere it was about 25% increase.

And that happens within days because SEO, you know, frequently takes time.

But adding schema, something that can drive a fast impact.

So let's talk about offsite.

Okay.

So this is a big difference with SEO and AEO.

This is the biggest difference

which is that

when we showed the Perplexity example the LLM is summarizing search results.

And so even if your URL is the number one URL in the citations, that doesn't mean

that you're going to win.

You need to be mentioned many times,

and the more times that you're mentioned, the better.

And especially for competitive questions like what's the best

What's the best enterprise CMS?

Webflow can't win by just having a single URL on Webflow rank.

Whereas in Google ranking number one would be sufficient.

So here we need to get mentioned a lot.

And this is different from SEO.

So this is an example with Reddit.

Reddit is huge.

I think they’re the top three citation domain on on ChatGPT and Perplexity.

It's Wikipedia, YouTube and and Reddit.

So it's huge.

I think it's over 10x increased traffic on Google as well.

So Reddit is blowing up.

and As any good growth

person would do, the you start by optimizing Reddit with spam.

So the, the best strategy is you, you know, because we need to scale.

So we scale with automation.

So you create hundreds of Reddit accounts and then you,

you know, sign them up and then you all like each other's posts

and you give give each other karma and comment on it and like, let's do that.

And we're seeing that

that's not working with Reddit and, you know, which is good, which is good.

But yeah, I actually tried.

Well, so I created a Reddit account and I even I created useful content

talking about answer engine optimization, and even I got my own comment buried.

So the Reddit community is very, very, very, very robust.

Which is great.

So how do you like what is Reddit for?

Reddit is for actual people to say who they are and give you some information.

So what if we did that?

And one could say, well, that doesn't really scale, but it does scale.

So this is an example with Webflow

where somebody is asking a question about Webflow.

We have another example.

You know, as a frontend developer, what CMS would you advise on.

So the team at Webflow is creating accounts and saying this is my name.

This is where I work.

I work at Webflow.

Here's a useful piece of information.

Surprisingly, that works. And so

how to

optimize for Reddit is to use Reddit as Reddit was supposed to be used,

which is real, authentic people giving useful answers, to each other.

And again, that that does scale.

You don't need a thousand different Reddit

threads to say that you're the best product.

You, you know, even five or 10.

These are two. and that that drove impact.

So, You don't need to scale to thousands to optimize for Reddit.

Ethan, can I add two things to that? Please.

Two things to keep in mind if you're going to engage on it.

One, and both of these also sound weird, but then I'll explain...

lurk thoughtfully.

And by that I mean watch pick the sub-Reddits

you want to be part of and watch their norms.

They each have different norms and like corporate speak, equals death.

On Reddit they self-police very actively.

And the second is don't lie.

And I don't actually mean not lying.

Assume you're not lying. I mean be ready to admit

when you screwed up,

when something broke, when you're not good at something, those things are valued.

And if you're not ready to do those things,

my humble suggestion would be don't engage in that medium.

Does that resonate? That resonates.

And the way that I think about this is imagine if we worked at Webflow,

and then we showed up to somebody's dinner party and we didn't know anyone

and we started going person by person, saying, you should check out Webflow.

That would be weird.

And, Reddit has all these subcommunities that have their own culture

and don't just show up, start saying, you guys should really be thinking

about Webflow.

Read the room, try to figure out how people are communicating with each other.

Try to be authentic, like go slowly, you know,

introduce yourself to people at the dinner party

and then talk about how wonderful Webflow is.

YouTube is huge. So

one of the largest sources of citations is UGC in video.

And YouTube is a huge, cited source Vimeo,

Reddit, Quora, and the interesting thing.

So the interesting thing about YouTube is you don't have a community saying I do

or I don't like your stuff.

You don't need the community to approve you making a YouTube video.

Anyone can make a YouTube video.

And so this is another way where, you can create content for,

“what's the best enterprise CMS?” or, “what's

the best parallel management software?” The other interesting thing with video is

that video is typically historically

for entertaining things like travel and food and, beauty.

It's not for, you know, manipulating CSS and, payroll.

You know, paying people in Argentina, like people don't spend their weekends,

looking about how to send, crypto to Argentina.

But, a lot of people are searching for that.

And so these less entertaining categories, like B2B categories

are ones where YouTube, and video hasn't really been fully optimized.

And so it's especially an interesting, opportunity to create this, video content

for these high LTV, B2B categories, because there's just not that many.

And so it's easier to win.

Affiliates.

So if you want to be the best credit card, you just have to pay Forbes

to say that you're the best credit card and then you become the best credit card.

And, you know, affiliates are also huge and affiliates are huge on Google as well.

So Forbes, Business Insider,

there's hundreds of these, TechRadar.

It's expensive.

It's not, you know, it's not inexpensive.

Chase is there because they're probably paying Forbes a ton of money.

But, but it works.

So depending on whether or not what category you're in, affiliates can work.

And especially most of the tier one affiliates have an efficient market

where showing up is really expensive.

But some of the tier two, tier three smaller affiliates do show up in,

in citations, and they probably are underpriced.

And probably people also don't know which citations

are showing up for the questions that they want to rank for.

So if you are, you know, back back to ripping.

If you're a payroll management software company,

it doesn't matter showing up on Forbes necessarily.

It's the specific URL on Forbes that is part of the citations

for the question for payroll management software.

And most people haven't actually done the homework to figure out the exact URL.

And so if you know the exact URL that's in the citation for the question

that you care about, you did all that work,

you got this information advantage, then you can, you know,

pay more efficiently for that affiliate.

So I think if you just do the extra work to figure out

which affiliates actually matter for you, you can do really well.

And, the more citations, the better.

So if you ask something, what's the best payroll management software?

You'll see here, It's too small, but Rippling is number one

because it's been mentioned multiple times.

It's been mentioned more than Gusto and more than Deal.

And if Gusto becomes mentioned more Gusto becomes number one.

So the more citations, the better.

Similar to to SEO, the more backlinks, the better, The more the more mentions

and citations, the better.

Technically,

we want to help the LLMs understand the structure and meaning of our site.

So I'm going to touch on three things we mentioned in today's keynote.

The single most important thing you could do is to add schema

to your site.

As Ethan was talking about,

both of us have seen examples for that to have impact in days,

and now you can point Webflow at a page which will crawl the page.

Think which is the right schema?

Is this a product page? This? Is this an event page?

And then auto fill it out for you.

You can then of course edit it there.

You could do that on a page.

You could do that across the entire site.

And it really matters.

88% of sites do not have schema today, but 73% of top

Google results have schema, have some structured data.

Google themselves said, hey, rotten tomatoes.

They took 100,000 pages.

They added structured data.

They didn't say if it was schema specifically.

Those 100,000 pages got 25% more organic traffic

than pages that Rotten Tomatoes had that didn't have that.

So this can be a big impact.

I was candidly, really fired up that we were able to announce this today.

Next, you could, if you go to the next one, ensure that your site is accessible.

Not only is that the right thing to do, LLMs use it heavily.

And so you can, as you saw in the keynote this morning for an individual image

or your whole site, have our AI which is context aware

auto generate all text and you can say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, and edit

so that you've got human in the loop always, but it saves you a bunch of time.

And the last one, if you don't mind flipping

the next one, is traditional SEO metadata.

It is surprising that even today, 25% of top

pages do not have SEO metadata on them.

This is like super low hanging fruit, and this is another one that you can use

Webflow’s AI to go auto generate for you for a page, for a site,

and you can then edit as you would like.

And the hope is that this helps you activate these earlier

because there's so much opportunity here, you will be ahead of others

that aren't doing this and reap the benefits back over you.

Thank you. Yeah.

And we for our agency.

So we work with companies

like Notion and Rippling and we help build their SEO strategies

and the thing that I see the most is that it's

not about the ideas, it's about getting things launched quickly.

And every company that I've ever worked with has limited resources.

We don't have enough engineering and so that's why we

when we work with companies and we build we build stuff in Webflow.

And then there are these other things that we wanted to do that we would get stuck.

So one of those and we have built an app,

we built a Webflow app just to go as fast as we possibly can,

which is especially important right now because everyone's interested in AEO.

So the faster you can go, the faster you can take advantage of this.

So we built a Webflow app for that.

This was from last year for SEO, and we're updating it for answer

engine optimization.

So this allows you to bulk update title tags

which is the single most important feature on your page.

If you could do one thing to get fast

impact is just make your title tags better and make them more keyword rich.

The second thing is a robots builder.

So, an interesting thing with

AI is people don't necessarily people want control of their information.

They want control over their data.

They don't necessarily want all the LLMs to take all their information and create

learning models and displace them.

And so people want to have the option

whether or not they want LLMs to be able to train on their data.

And so we built a robots builder where it makes it really easy.

You could just say, yes, you can train, but index but don't train.

So if you index I could show up

I can I can still benefit from LLMs, but I don't want you to train on my data.

Or you could say I don't want you to look at my site at all.

Or you could say, do whatever you want, train on all my data.

But, this is hard because you have to set all these different user agents,

so it's very complicated. It takes a long time.

So this allows you to just click a couple buttons and say,

yes, index my stuff, send me traffic, but don't train on my data.

And then the last thing is tracking.

So, Guy mentioned that tracking is very important.

And, there's a whole suite of tools that do answer tracking.

So if you want to type in, what's the best, CMS for, for for,

designers, you want to figure out whether or not you're appearing.

And a lot of times the answers are zero click.

So you don't actually know whether or not your

you don't actually know the whether or not you drove conversions by showing up.

If, if Webflow shows up on that answer, you're probably

opening a new tab and typing in Webflow and then going direct via Google.

And you would think that it was direct

branded search actually came from the answer.

And so, tracking is actually much harder with with LLMs.

And so we built this tracker similar to other trackers, but you can essentially

put on all the different questions you want to know, you want to win.

And you can see over time how do you perform.

So this is live.

And also we're giving all Webflow users three months free

of, of answer tracking, as of today.

Thank you. It's awesome.

So useful.

Thank you for creating that.

Very excited for the community to be able to use it.

And if you took two screenshots today, this slide

and a couple from now would be the two I want to come back to.

Sorry, not this one. There's another version of this slide.

This is where we can help you do each of these things.

We have been helping all of us create

visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging experiences forever.

And so you can then use that to create on brand 1:1 personalization.

You can localize natively or with your own tools.

In the technical side,

you will have a blazingly fast site from 350 different places around the world,

with 99% of the static content served at the edge

will help you auto generate structure.

We'll help you be at the cutting edge.

We were the first CMS to support in MCP.

We didn't talk about it today, but we support LLMs text.

With authority, you can point people to that super engaging site.

And finally, on measurement, we help you with content analytics and experiment

analytics so that you can point your efforts in the right

direction.

Later on, we'll come back to our A maturity model.

That's the one. The screenshot.

Given that we have seven minutes, maybe we'll skip the myth busting

and we'll take questions.

So this is the other one if you go back one.

If you were going to take one screenshot

today, I would humbly suggest it's this one.

This is those four categories and five levels of maturity

so that you can go back to your team and assess how are we doing?

What's the next thing for us to do to go improve in AEO?

And while in some sense no one actually knows,

just like no one actually knows exactly what's happening in Google.

This is a very well researched, very thought out thing

that we agree on, that we think is actionable for you.

And if, if you don't mind going to the next slide,

You want an automated assessment specific

to your site, please go to this URL.

If you use that QR code and we wrote a long, you know,

thousand line prompt that will go look at your site,

go look at Reddit, at LinkedIn, at a bunch of other places and see, hey,

how did you perform to give you an assessment of where you are

and what you can do next.

We have about six minutes left out of our 35.

We then wanted to open it up for questions from the audience.

Given how hot a topic this is.

Say it and then we'll repeat it for the recording.

And please, first question.

For the back.

Okay.

How are you filling in for our sponsor?

For the backlink component,

how are affiliate and nofollow backlinks going to be taken into account for LLMs?

Ethan you want to start?

I'll tell you what I think.

So what I think is that the models are not,

are considering the mentions and affiliates with equal.

That's what I think.

Google has nofollow tags, or you can put nofollow tags on those affiliate links.

And then Google says, okay, we're not going to include this in

my domain rank, although actually nofollow links do count.

Now the question is do

nofollow links count for the order of the citations in ChatGPT?

I don't know the answer to that.

I would guess that they probably count somewhat, but they.

But I think a more direct answer to your question is

if a citation mentions your company and it's a nofollow link, does it count?

It seems like it does count because I'm seeing those citations in chat.

So essentially know that since the citations are in chat

that they are being considered.

So it seems like they are being considered,

I think that they're considered equal.

And and one other example

is, TechRadar is showing up a ton as a, as a citation domain.

And it's, you know, it's all affiliates, it's all pay to play.

So it seems like it's, it's equal to non affiliate sites.

I agree completely, nothing to add.

Question?

To adding a thank you to

three pages.

Are you integrating it within your content

or literally putting.

Question was when you're talking about adding FAQs

to your key pages, are you talking about literally like interspersing them

throughout the page and your H1, H2 and so on, or having an FAQ section?

What we tried, what Vivienne and Ethan's team tried

was to create a section at the bottom.

So you've got the whole page

and you've got a section at the bottom that takes similar content,

may flesh it out a bit more, and then puts schema around that.

And most of the other experiments I've been hearing people do has been that

rather than because

you still want the site to be super human readable and useful, folks

are going to want to hear your story told your way forever.

That's not going to change.

We have always built sites for humans

and machines because we were doing SEO.

Now we're more thinking about that more as we think about LLMs,

but we still need this to be there even as the role changes.

Ethan, anything you'd add or change?

Yeah, I would add to that.

I think it depends on the type of an FAQ.

And, for the Rippling example

that I showed you, people had questions about what features

do you have for for HR?

And it's fine to answer some of those in the body,

and maybe there's some follow up questions that you can do for FAQs.

So I think both work.

But yeah an easy way to do that is list out

some of the questions that you want answered at the bottom of the page.

And you made me think of one other thing.

As you reach higher levels of maturity,

those may be triggers for you to then say, I'm going to go somewhere else,

own this cluster of keywords at every stage of the funnel, right?

Like like what is an HR system and multiple levels of altitude.

And then you richly

have a higher probability of being similar or whatever questions somebody asked.

So the content machine wants to be fed.

Question.

There was a question over there please.

And you from a research and traditional search

for the search.

Was that first part of data from then?

So when you think about for

how do you avoid creating your own

branded I.

Don't get to be here.

Like that's not going to be like it turns out

how but when creating that equity

and still finding that.

Awesome question.

To repeat for the recording and those listening in, with search,

we get first party data

from Google Search Console, from Semrush, from Ahrefs in LLMs.

Where do we find that?

So we avoid the sort of talking in our own echo chamber.

Ethan you want to start that?

Yeah.

So, the answer is find indirect, sources of data to suggest what might be true.

So for Google,

we know what's true as you mentioned, because we get it directly from Google,

from Search Console, from from their ads API.

So Google says this keyword has this amount of search volume.

So it's a, you know, it's first,

primary source.

And then for our answers,

ChatGPT is not handing over volume for their questions yet.

At least I'm not sure if they ever will, but, but but today they're not.

So then you need to find indirect indications of what that might be.

So the second best indication of what that might be would be ISP and browser

extension data, which is not readily accessible of similar web does that.

But they're not selling that, at least not in a way that anyone can buy that.

But that's probably the second best source.

Although that's not readily available yet.

Then beat what are other indirect sources.

So I actually think search data is pretty good.

If you, you know, for the example that I gave with website builder does

things people are searching for, probably pretty similar in nature to,

to what they're asking.

So I think Google search

data is actually a pretty good indication of question volume.

But it doesn't tell us about the, the, the tail of all the follow up questions

like I mentioned.

And so I think Reddit is a really good source.

Where how does Rippling know

what questions people have about payroll management software?

You could probably go to Reddit and see what questions

people are asking on Reddit. That's a good indication.

And then Guy’s idea of see what people are asking live in your sales

calls, get transcripts and figure out the all the follow up

questions customers are asking.

I would use all those.

So until we get data directly

from ChatGPT and Perplexity, I would use these indirect sources.

I'll add two things.

And then we're at time.

So Ethan and I will be around for the rest of the afternoon.

But the two things I would add are, one

another indirect source could look at where the bots are crawling.

Go look at where

you are getting attention on your site, whether or not the training bot,

if it's one of the bots that will tell you,

but the inference time bot and also where where's the traffic coming from?

The humans that have clicked that is an indirect source.

And the other one is, I respectfully see it

the other way that I think it's inevitable that ChatGPT will give us

the equivalent of a search console.

I think there's too much money sitting there.

We love this conversation.

We would love to continue with Ethan.

Thank you for being up here together, sharing your insights.

We hope this was useful.