One post a week. Every claim carries a source you can open and check yourself — because a claim without a source is just an opinion with better clothes.
Seer Interactive sorted 1,926 brands by Trustpilot presence across 804,491 AI answers: no profile, 1% citation rate; as few as 1–13 reviews, 53.5%. Almost all of the gain sits between zero and a dozen. The study was published with Trustpilot and measures one platform — and SOCi's data says the star rating then works as a gate, not a dial. What that means for a firm without a marketing budget.
Two datasets made Reddit the most-cited domain in AI answers, and the advice wrote itself. Then its share of ChatGPT citations fell from 3.83% to 0.52% in August, for a reason nobody has established. The much-quoted "vendors disagree on the baseline fourfold" turns out to be two different denominators, not a dispute — which is the more useful warning. Plus: Reddit is worth 24% of citations on one engine and 0.1% on another.
Stuck on page three and told the AI will never mention you? Ahrefs put 15,000 questions to four assistants and compared the citations against the rankings: only 12% of cited URLs sat in Google's top 10, and about 80% did not rank for the question at all. Rankings still count — but the growth is happening at positions 21 to 100, and in some industries barely at all.
Seer Interactive dated 7,683 pages behind 47,097 AI citations: 75% were updated within the last year. The twist is what counted as "fresh" — a quarter of those pages were first published over two years ago. Refreshing an old page beat writing a new one, and a second study found freshness the strongest citation predictor of sixteen measured.
Every GEO pitch keeps the backlink line item from classic SEO. Two independent correlation studies say it barely applies: Ahrefs measured 75,000 brands and found Domain Rating — the backlink-based authority score — correlating just 0.266 with AI visibility, one of the weakest signals tested. YouTube mentions correlated at 0.737, the strongest single factor found. Where the outreach budget should go instead.
AI now writes 52% of new articles online, so the pitch is to feed the machines content they wrote themselves. The data disagrees: 82% of the pages ChatGPT and Perplexity cite are still written by humans. Volume is the one move that reliably does not get you named — and why that is good news for a small team.
"Add structured data so the AI understands your page" is the most technical-sounding advice in GEO. Ahrefs added schema to 1,885 pages and measured against 4,000 controls: AI Mode +2.4%, ChatGPT +2.2% — both within noise. And five major AI systems ignore the code entirely when they read a page. Worth doing for Google, not the reason you'll get cited.
Google's AI Mode swaps out 56% of its cited sources every week, ChatGPT 74% — and run the same query three times on one afternoon and only 9.2% of the URLs match. But underneath the churn sits a small core that never moves. Being named once tells you which half you were in, and it is probably not the one you want.
It is the first item on almost every AI-visibility checklist. Across 137,000 domains, 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in a month — and the AI bots people publish it for accounted for 1.1% of the traffic that did arrive. What the log data says, and where the fifteen minutes should go instead.
"Get listed in directories" is the advice everyone gives. The data says something more uncomfortable: ChatGPT pulled 58% of its local answers from business websites — and only 15% from directories. Here is what that means for a company with five employees.