September 30, 2025

AEO

How often do you check your website analytics?

I almost never check mine.

But the other day I watched an interview with a guy who does something called AEO, which is basically SEO for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, et al.

Something he said really resonated with me, which was that traffic from ChatGPT was something like 6x “warmer” than traffic from Google.

By which I mean, a citation from ChatGPT is more than five times more powerful “reputationally” (not a real word) than showing up in a Google search result.

This aligns with my experience as a user of both products.

For anything nontrivial, I generally don’t trust Google search results much because Google has been so heavily gamed over the years.

For whatever reason, I (and apparently others) trust ChatGPT more than Google for certain things.

I’m not going to speculate why this is or how long it might last, but it did inspire me to check my website analytics.

I found something interesting:

Last year, Google was my top referrer. ChatGPT was number 22.

This year, Google is still my top referrer and ChatGPT is number 7.

But if I just look at last month, ChatGPT is number 3.

What does this mean?

It means the ChatGPT is rocketing toward the top of my referrer list.

I’d be surprised if it didn’t beat out LinkedIn for the number 2 spot by the end of the year.

All that said...

In terms of quantity, Google is sending about 50x more traffic to my site than ChatGPT is.

But if the quality of the traffic from ChatGPT is really 6x better, it might start to become interesting very quickly.

I’m not sure if there’s anything I can or will do to influence my AEO ranking but I am going to keep an eye on it.

Yours,

—J