The Five Percent Podcast

In this episode, Ethan Smith (CEO of Graphite) and Gaetano DiNardi (Expert Growth Advisor) examine the claims, tactics, and tools driving the AI search market. They discuss how research can be used to support sales narratives, why paid brand mentions resemble link building, and what marketers should evaluate before investing in GEO services.

In this episode, Ethan Smith (CEO of Graphite) and Gaetano DiNardi (Expert Growth Advisor) explain which SEO and AEO efforts create business results and which only create noise. They discuss how B2B buyers move through the dark funnel, why attribution requires multiple signals, and how account-level journeys reveal content’s influence before conversion.

Gaetano shares a process for using Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and AI to find gaps between product messaging and market demand. They also cover commercial prompts, AI query fan-outs, category association, original insights, publishing volume, gated content, and content audits based on organic traffic and LLM citations.

Gaetano also shares an example of a programmatic SEO strategy that generated massive traffic from area-code searches but no sign-ups. The example shows why teams must evaluate rankings and traffic based on search intent, ICP relevance, conversions, and revenue impact.