The Princeton GEO Study

The 2024 GEO paper from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi is the foundational academic evidence that content changes can move AI visibility.

1. 01

   40 percent is the visibility boost GEO methods can achieve in generative engine responses, according to the original GEO research paper published at KDD 2024.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

2. 02

   10,000 queries across diverse domains make up GEO-bench, the benchmark the researchers built to evaluate generative engine optimization methods.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

3. 03

   115.1 percent visibility gains came from the Cite Sources method for websites ranked fifth in search results, showing GEO helps lower-ranked sites the most.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

4. 04

   22 percent visibility improvement over baseline came from Quotation Addition when tested on Perplexity.ai, confirming the lab results on a live generative engine.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

GEO Technique Effectiveness

The paper tested nine optimization methods, and the three winners all involve adding evidence: quotations, statistics, and source citations.

1. 05

   42.6 percent higher visibility came from Quotation Addition, which raised the Position-Adjusted Word Count score from a 19.5 baseline to 27.8, the best result of any tested method.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

2. 06

   33 percent higher visibility came from Statistics Addition, which lifted the visibility score to 25.9 from the 19.5 baseline.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

3. 07

   28 percent higher visibility came from Cite Sources, one of the three strongest GEO methods alongside quotations and statistics.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

4. 08

   29 percent higher visibility came from Fluency Optimization, meaning clearer writing alone improved citation performance without adding any new information.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

5. 09

   Statistics Addition worked best for Law and Government and Opinion queries, while Quotation Addition was most effective for People and Society, Explanation, and History topics.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

What Does Not Work in Generative Engines

Two staples of traditional SEO, keyword optimization and schema markup, show zero or negative effect on AI citations in controlled tests.

1. 10

   17.8 was keyword stuffing's visibility score against a 19.5 unoptimized baseline in the GEO experiments, meaning the classic SEO tactic performed worse than doing nothing.

   Source: GEO paper (arXiv), 2024

2. 11

   Citation changes of +2.4 percent in Google AI Mode, +2.2 percent in ChatGPT, and -4.6 percent in AI Overviews were measured across 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema, effects statistically indistinguishable from zero.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

3. 12

   0.194 is the correlation between a site's page count and its AI visibility, the weakest of all factors Ahrefs tested, so publishing more pages alone does little for generative engine presence.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2025

Content Formats Generative Engines Favor

Generative engines have clear format preferences: comparison listicles, recently updated pages, and clearly structured URLs all outperform.

1. 13

   43.8 percent of all page types cited by ChatGPT are 'Best X' blog listicles, based on an Ahrefs analysis of 26,283 source URLs across 750 buying-intent prompts.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

2. 14

   79.1 percent of best-list pages cited by ChatGPT were last updated in 2025, and 26 percent were updated within the past two months.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

3. 15

   35 percent of best lists cited by ChatGPT were published on low-authority domains, showing generative engines reward format over domain strength.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

4. 16

   More than a third of ChatGPT responses in the software category included a self-promotional best list when its publisher was among the recommendations.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

5. 17

   Almost 90 percent of the pages ChatGPT cites rank at position 21 or lower in traditional organic search for related queries.

   Source: Semrush, 2025

6. 18

   50 percent of links in ChatGPT 4o responses point to business or service websites.

   Source: Semrush, 2025

7. 19

   89.78 percent of retrieved search results with natural language URL slugs earned ChatGPT citations, versus 81.11 percent for those without them.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

8. 20

   500 days is the approximate median age of the search-retrieved pages ChatGPT cites, so established pages with recent updates beat brand-new ones.

   Source: Ahrefs, 2026

GEO Adoption and Outlook

GEO has moved from academic paper to enterprise budget line in about two years, with most large marketing teams now running formal programs.

1. 21

   97 percent of enterprise CMOs reported positive business impact from AEO and GEO work in 2025, and 94 percent plan to invest more in 2026.

   Source: Conductor, 2026

2. 22

   73 percent of enterprise CMOs describe their AEO and GEO programs as advanced or very advanced.

   Source: Conductor, 2026

3. 23

   12 percent of enterprise digital marketing budgets on average went to answer engine optimization in 2025.

   Source: Conductor, 2025

4. 24

   Early 2028 is when Semrush projects AI search will start driving more visitors than traditional organic search for digital marketing topics, sooner if AI Mode becomes Google's default experience.

   Source: Semrush, 2025

Sources

Every statistic on this page links to the publication where the number appears. Data comes from 7 sources.

• GEO paper (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
• Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-citations/
• Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations/
• Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/best-lists-research/
• Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/
• Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/why-chatgpt-cites-pages/
• Conductor: https://www.conductor.com/academy/state-of-aeo-geo-report/

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