Ethan Smith is founder and CEO of Graphite, the research-driven SEO and answer engine optimization agency known for long-tail AEO programs and public LLM case studies. He teaches AEO at Reforge and serves as an adjunct professor at IE Business School while running Graphite from San Francisco.
Research at UC Santa Barbara
Before Graphite became a growth agency brand, Smith's path ran through human-computer interaction and psychology research at UC Santa Barbara and University College London, then into growth advisory work. That research habit shows up in how Graphite talks about SEO and AEO: find the small share of tactics that move results, measure them, and brief content around specific buying questions rather than vague category pages.
The agency positioned itself as research-driven from the start. Public case-study cards on graphite.io list organic and LLM outcomes for brands such as Webflow, Fourthwall, BetterUp, MasterClass, and Notion.
Long-Tail Prompts and AEO
Smith argues that answer engine optimization is a long-tail game. Most AI prompts, in the patterns he highlights, run ten words or longer. That changes how teams brief content: pages that answer a specific buyer question matter more than thin category copy written for a generic head term.
Graphite's research has also reported that AI-written content makes up only a minority of what gets cited in Google and ChatGPT in their measurements, a finding that challenges the assumption that flooding the web with generated pages is a reliable path to AI visibility.
Working with Gregory Druck
On the leadership side, Gregory Druck serves as Chief AI Officer, leading tools and research next to Smith. Graphite treats SEO and AEO as the same underlying work on two surfaces, with a research team hunting leverage and a delivery bench shipping content and technical programs for growth-stage and enterprise buyers.
Graphite's AEO practice page summarizes how the agency frames that work.
Teaching at Reforge and IE
Smith teaches AEO at Reforge and serves as an adjunct professor at IE Business School.
He laid out his AEO playbook in an interview on Lenny's Newsletter. He has also done public AMAs on Reddit and spoken on conference stages.