# What Drives AI Citations Topic match and retrieval rank decide most AI citations. Many popular GEO tactics have weak evidence. ## Best evidence - **Controlled study (arXiv, May 2026).** 252,000 trials across six LLMs, brands anonymised.^[https://arxiv.org/html/2605.25517v1] - Four gatekeeper factors dominate: topic match, price, recency, position in the retrieved set. - Completeness and trust cues give secondary gains only. - **Search rank feeds citations.** Answer engines with web search retrieve from an index first. A page that does not rank is rarely read. - **Princeton GEO paper (2023)** is the origin of the field. It found that adding citations, quotes and statistics to text raised visibility in generative answers. Read the original before you quote figures.^[https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735] ## Weak or contested evidence - Brand search volume correlates with citations. Backlinks correlate weakly. Both figures come from vendor blogs without method. - Schema markup, FAQ format and llms.txt: plausible, but no controlled proof of a citation lift. - Treat "X% more citations" claims from tool vendors as marketing. ## The traffic picture - **Clicks fall when an AI answer appears.** - Randomised field test (1,065 Chrome users): organic clicks fell 39.8% when an AI Overview showed.^[https://ppc.land/researchers-find-google-ai-overviews-cut-publisher-clicks-39-8/] - Ahrefs (Feb 2026): top-result CTR fell 58% with an AI Overview. Before/after design, not controlled.^[https://www.medianama.com/2026/02/223-google-ai-overviews-click-through-rates-58-study/] - **AI referrals are still small.** About 1.08% of site traffic across 13,000 domains (Conductor).^[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251113364791/en/Conductor-Unveils-2026-AEO-GEO-Benchmarks-Report-How-AI-Shapes-Brand-Visibility-in-a-Zero-Click-World] - **ChatGPT dominates referrals.** Estimates run from 63% to 95% share, by method. Claude ranges from 1% to 18.5%.^[https://www.brightedge.com/news/press-releases/brightedge-data-chatgpt-referral-traffic-doubles-in-2026] - **Crawl takes more than it gives.** TollBit (H1 2026): 179 AI bot visits per human referral on European publisher sites, 53 in North America.^[https://tollbit.com/state-of-the-bots/] ## So what - Win the retrieval step first (rank, freshness, topic fit). Then improve the page. - Earn third-party mentions. Answers cite G2, Reddit and editorial sources often. - Measure assisted value, not only click-through. Much of the value is zero-click. ---- tags: #boat #ai links: [[Agent Engine Optimisation MOC]] [[Agent Engine Optimisation]] [[Peec AI]]