Research
What we measure about AI-search citation.
A roughly monthly dispatch, each a dated snapshot of one finding from our hand-run citation probes across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini. The live per-term data lives on the Observatory; these pages are the narrative analysis. Follow via RSS or email.
Dispatches
- Dispatch #5 · GEO's most-cited numbers, checked against the papers they come fromThe GEO field rests on a few foundational studies, but the headline figures travel into the marketing with the methodology stripped off. We read the three papers behind the numbers against how they are cited. The famous '40% boost' is a position-adjusted word-share proxy on a 2023 GPT-3.5 testbed, and the paper's own real-engine headline quietly switches to a different metric; a multi-actor re-test found most content tactics ineffective or negative; and a verifiability audit shows only about half of AI-generated sentences are fully supported by their own citations.
- Dispatch #4 · One panel, five engines, mostly separate citation sets: 'cited by AI' is not one thingWe ran the same prompt for the same pages against five AI engines in one round. Of the eighteen pages any engine cited, ten were cited by a single engine and none by more than three. A citation on one engine barely tells you about the next. In this panel, each engine behaved like its own citation surface.
- Dispatch #3 · Cited more on Gemini, less on ChatGPT: a gradient, and what it is notOur pages are cited as AI sources far more on Gemini than on ChatGPT, and most of what Gemini cites us for is vocabulary we coined. The flattering read is that Gemini prefers our original work. We ran the test that separates that from Google-rank mirroring, and the flattering half did not survive.
- Dispatch #2 · Google caught up: the AI-citation gap looks like a reporting lagLast month, AI engines cited a page Google's index report showed as unindexed. We said we would track whether Google caught up. It did, and the best-supported reading is a reporting lag, with Gemini as the clock that nearly proves it.
- Dispatch #1 · AI engines cited this page before Google indexed itThree AI engines cited our citation-precision page while Google Search Console still showed it unindexed. An honest look at the co-occurrence, with caveats.