Graphite

Ethan Smith, Gregory Druck, and José Luis Paredes conducted a study about AI-generated content in Google search results. They analyzed 20,280 URLs across various categories and filtered them using Originality.ai to determine the proportion of AI-generated content. The results:  🔹Purely AI-generated content comprises only 3% of organic search results and generally ranks lower than human-written content.  🔹88% of the top search results are predominantly human-created, with AI-generated content being more common in categories like Crypto, Commerce, Finance, and Local.  🔹Pages with higher AI content tend to rank lower, suggesting that human-written content currently performs better in search rankings. Link in the comments for the complete white paper.

Next Tuesday, Ethan Smith and Gregory Druck will participate in Reforge's free virtual conference on navigating products, marketing, and growth in the age of AI. They will discuss how to plan for the future of SEO with AI search engines like ChatGPT, Google's new features, Perplexity, and more. Register here: https://lnkd.in/ehkPM7CA

For years, Graphite’s agency has delivered SEO outcomes that change the growth trajectories of companies like MasterClass, Honey, and BetterUp. A key part of our success has been building our own technology— a suite of custom AI components and internal tools that have augmented our team and made them much more effective. It incorporates everything we’ve learned about what drives impact— the top 5% of SEO work that actually matters. Here are some highlights: ✅ Topic Graph — rather than researching keywords, our platform uses AI and machine learning to cluster keywords into a database of topics. You can input an idea and instantly get a significantly better understanding of user intent. This ultimately helps you maximize traffic for every article since you’ll rank for hundreds of keywords with a single piece of content. ✅ Topical Authority — rather than prioritize based on keyword difficulty, our platform tells you which topics you have authority to write about. We published a research paper (link in the comments) that shows how our Topical Authority score accelerates search visibility. ✅ Internal Links — your crawl rate increases significantly when your content has at least 5 internal links. Researching what internal links to include requires a lot of manual effort. Our platform tells you exactly which links to add to maximize results. Our platform is built for everyone — regardless of SEO expertise— to drive impact. Our most successful beta customers have little to no SEO background, and they are seeing significant traffic and revenue growth. To get a demo, go to: https://lnkd.in/eDv52Dwr

Last week, Google launched AI Overviews (formerly known as SGE). For the past year, we have been observing SGE and its impact on search in a beta environment. While we’ll need time to observe nuances with the full rollout, we wanted to share our current observations and recommendations. Current Observations: 1/ We view AI Overviews as an evolution of featured snippets. Featured snippets had a noticeable impact on top-of-funnel terms but had a small effect on transactional queries. So far, we have seen a similar pattern with AI search results. 2/ AI Overviews is showing up for high-stakes categories. We had initially theorized that YMYL categories, such as health and finance, would have a lower risk of disruption. However, we have observed that searches in these industries, such as “how to raise your credit score” and “symptoms of rsv”,  are triggering the AI snippet. 3/ While AI Overviews has the potential to be highly disruptive, it also presents new opportunities for growth. The search journey is changing with the integration of AI into the SERPs. Companies that can figure out how to optimize more effectively for this journey will have opportunities to outperform their competitors. Graphite Recommendations: 👉Resist overcorrecting or pivoting without clear data. There is little reward in trying to predict what will happen. 👉Expand your view of the landscape. Collect more data and stay up to date with the latest changes. Here are some examples: *Increase your attention on competitors and which of their keywords are being affected. Target competitor keywords that are not being affected. *Observe CTRs for keywords at different stages of your funnel. Validate whether or not CTRs for top and middle of funnel keywords that trigger AI results are declining. *When Google releases better reporting, be the first to build out dashboards that enable your team to make informed decisions. 👉Build more agile ways of working. The search landscape will likely become increasingly volatile in the coming months. Teams that succeed will be more adaptable and able to react quickly to changes. 👉Continue to focus on unique, informative, human-written content with a clear POV. This is the most defensible and sustainable long-term SEO strategy. 👉Double down on conversion-based goals. If your team was previously measured based on traffic goals, shift to metrics further down the funnel. Below you’ll find some specific types of queries and pages and our current assessment of risk:

Graphite's topical SEO platform is live on Product Hunt today! Our team has been working for years to build the best SEO tooling on the planet and we're so excited to share it with the world. We've stripped away the fluff that is so common in marketing tools so that our users can focus on the 5% of SEO work that drives 95% of the impact. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gmAcDam3

Practice bet early on SEO and it’s paid off. Beyond traffic growth, the team has seen a direct impact on revenue, with SEO driving over $100K in quarterly deal flow. A key driver of Practice’s success has been a clear focus on building topical authority for coaching. With the help of the Graphite Platform, Practice can identify high impact topics, create high performing content, and rank for hundreds of keywords with a single article. “As a venture-backed startup, time is the most valuable resource. We can’t afford to fail on a channel due to bad execution, especially with SEO. Graphite gave us confidence that we were executing with velocity and precision.” – Eva Tang, former Head of Marketing at Practice In the video below, our CEO, Ethan Smith, explains how focusing on topical authority accelerates time to impact, using Practice as an example. Link to the full case study in the comments.

Ethan Smith recently joined Kieran Flanagan and Kipp Bodnar on the Marketing Against the Grain Podcast to talk about the future of SEO & AI. He shared his perspective on how AI is currently affecting search, presenting the latest research conducted by Graphite’s data science team that shows evidence that human generated content is still outperforming heavy AI content across many categories. While much of the discussion about AI and SEO today centers around genAI and LLMs, Ethan explains how Graphite is applying AI in many other ways that can improve SEO strategy and accelerate impact. Ethan also weighs in on the future state of search and what companies may need to do to gain visibility on ChatGPT and other chatbots. Link in the comments for the complete video.

At our launch event last week, our Chief AI Officer, Gregory Druck, explained how we think about AI at Graphite. Here are some key points from the video: 1/ At Graphite, we use AI to assist companies in creating more impactful content rather than entirely automating the process. Our focus is on creating outcomes for our customers, and given the current state of the technology, we believe the best way to create high quality content today is through AI assistance rather than full automation. 2/ Search engines are leveraging the latest advancements in AI, such as scaled up neural networks, to better interpret text, understand intent, and match content to queries effectively. Graphite uses similar technology to power every step of the content creation workflow. 3/ Graphite has built several custom AI components to automate tedious tasks, surface insights from large datasets, and assist in writing. As we learn what actually drives outcomes, it creates feedback loops that improve our platform. If you want to learn more about our platform, visit graphite.io/platform

Today, we’re launching the Graphite Platform, an SEO platform built for topics and powered by AI. Our platform accelerates impact by helping you: 🚀 Select and prioritize high impact topics and build a 3-month content pipeline in a single day 📈 Uncover topics where you have high topical authority, increasing your likelihood to rank and get traffic ✍ Write content that optimizes for a topic, helping you rank for hundreds of keywords with a single article 🔥 Maximize content performance by telling you when to optimize your content and exactly what enhancements to make You can read more in this letter from our CEO, Ethan Smith 👇

📣 Our AI-powered Topical SEO platform launches tomorrow! Join us for our live keynote by registering below👇 📅 Date: May 1st.  ⏰ Time: 10 AM PST Here’s what to expect:  *Platform demo featuring Fourthwall, an early customer who increased search revenue by 936% in 9 months.  *Deep dive from Gregory Druck, our Chief AI Officer, on how we have built AI into our product. We hope to see you there!