Ethan Smith

“Yes. So I got started in SEO in 2007, so it's been 18 years. Actually, the largest change when I got started in SEO, I got started in programmatic SEO and commerce SEO, like NexTag and Shopping.com an...”

“And that was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things, to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially, you went from the SEO being spam to...”

“I think that the main thing here is it is related to search, but it's a summarization of search and there's new inputs. So it's probably the second-biggest change.”

“And I personally prefer Answer Engine Optimization versus Generative Engine Optimization, because generative, you can generate images and videos and things other than an answer. Whereas answer is more...”

“So an answer is more narrow of a definition than generative, but ultimately, it's whatever we decide is the name and the definition is what it will be.”

“Companies that we work with started in January and it started, one, because of more adoption, but two is because the answers became a bit more clickable.”

“You have maps, you have shopping carousels, you have clickable cards. So I think the clickability of the answer is increased, and then the adoption increased and that was around January.”

“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 c...”

“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 th...”

“And they'll have a whole team looking at that and then they'll change your algorithm to prevent you from doing that.”

“You can affect it a lot. So a specific example with Webflow is we are working with Webflow on their SEO. We're working on their content, and we're seeing a lot of wins on the Answer Engine Optimizatio...”

“So the specific things that we've done there, one is just traditional SEO. So make landing pages for high-search volume keywords, like best no-code website designer.”