Ethan Smith

CEO of Graphite (graphite.io), an SEO and AEO agency and tooling company. 18 years in SEO; started in 2007 with programmatic and commerce SEO (NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber). Client work includes Webflow and MasterClass. Academic research background — emphasises controlled experiments and reproducibility over accepted best practices. Publishes original research on LinkedIn (Ethan Smith, CEO Graphite) and on Graphite’s blog “The 5%” (so named for the finding that ~5% of landing pages drive ~85% of traffic). One of the few practitioners who ran a rigorous AI content study with a validated detector and pre-ChatGPT false-positive baseline.

Episodes

• Ethan Smith on Answer Engine Optimisation, LLM Search, and the Citation Playbook — Lenny’s Podcast (~2025)