Evidence Library

Princeton/Georgia Tech/Allen AI — KDD 2024 open_in_new

Quotations +41%, statistics +32%, citations +30% uplift in AI citation rate (10K queries, GPT-3.5-Turbo RAG)

Tested on GPT-3.5-Turbo RAG pipeline only

University of Tokyo / Tsukuba — March 2026 open_in_new

Clear content structure alone drives +17.3% citation rate improvement

arXiv preprint, not yet peer-reviewed

Virginia Tech AgentGEO — March 2026 open_in_new

+40% AI visibility improvement by fixing just 5% of content issues

arXiv preprint

Citation Absorption Framework — 2026 open_in_new

602 prompts, 21K citations analyzed; documents platform-specific citation behavior

arXiv preprint

Google AIO Source Quality Analysis — 2026 open_in_new

~30% of cited domains are NOT in organic search top-10; underpins 70/30 SEO/GEO formula

Snapshot of early 2026 AI Overview behavior

GenAI Disrupts Search — SIGIR 2026 open_in_new

11.5K queries: Blocking AI crawlers measurably decreases retrieval rate

Google-focused; may not apply to other AI platforms

AIO Wikipedia Traffic Impact — 2026 open_in_new

AI Overviews reduce Wikipedia publisher traffic approximately 15%

Wikipedia-specific; may not generalize to all industries

Ahrefs — 75K Brands Correlation Study — May 2026 open_in_new

Brand authority r=0.664, YouTube presence r=0.737 correlation with AI citation likelihood

Correlation only, not causation

Ahrefs — Schema Markup Controlled Study — 2026 open_in_new

1,885 treated vs 4,000 control pages: Schema markup is NOT a direct citation booster (-4.6% effect)

Study population had 100+ baseline citations (high-authority pages)

Backlinko — 11.8M Google Results Analysis

Keyword-in-title near-zero ranking correlation; backlinks r=0.38; Performance shows little/no correlation

Organic search correlations only; not applicable to AI visibility

Conductor — 3.3B Sessions Report — 2026 open_in_new

AI referrals account for only 1.08% of total organic traffic across analyzed sites

Aggregate across all sites; no per-site breakdown

SparkToro — ChatGPT Brand List Consistency Study open_in_new

Less than 1% probability ChatGPT returns the same brand list for identical queries

Sample of 2,961 queries

OtterlyAI / BrightonSEO — April 2026 open_in_new

llms.txt attracts only 0.1% of AI bot traffic; markdown version generated zero visits

searchVIU — Schema Markup Parser Audit open_in_new

AI engines ignore JSON-LD structured data during real-time fetch operations

AirOps — Retrieval Fanout & SERP Study — March 2026 open_in_new

ChatGPT cites only 15% of retrieved pages; selection is not proportional to ranking position

ChatGPT-specific; may not apply to Perplexity, Gemini, or other AI platforms

Google — AI Features Official Guidance open_in_new

Official: 'No special optimization needed for AI features in Search'

Google — Core Web Vitals Official Guidance open_in_new

Official: 'Core Web Vitals do not guarantee high rankings'