“This GEO tactic gets you cited in LLMs!”
“Interesting. How do you know that…?”
“My research bro. I analyzed 10,000 prompts. All of the brands cited in ChatGPT have pages with expert quotes, statistics, inline citations, structured formatting, and topical depth…”
“Ok…sure, but did the page get cited because it had those features? Or did it have those features because it was already high-authority content that performs well everywhere — and AI search just picked it up too?”
Nobody peddling GEO fairy dust wants to answer this question.
Right now, a huge chunk of GEO research is treating correlation like causation. Like these content traits are brand new levers you can pull to “get cited in AI search.”
Do X, get cited. Simple.
Except: if everyone can just add charts and tables to a post and get cited, how does AI determine YOUR brand gets mentioned in a short output of 5 solutions in a space where thousands exist?
It can’t just be “do X tactics.” That math doesn’t work.
What actually separates the brands getting cited? The same thing that’s always separated them: real authority.
Google’s own “How Search Works” documentation states openly that links are a core signal for content quality. AI is very similar.
HubSpot found that 92% of AI mentions come not from your own content, but third party sites mentioning you.
So when someone says AI engines cite content with quotes, data, and good structure, they’re observing a trait of authoritative content. They can’t claim those traits are the cause of a citation.
And even if these content tweaks do influence AI citation likelihood, SparkToro’s recent research found there’s less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google AI will give the same list of brand recommendations in any two responses… even on the identical prompt run 100 times.
The lists are different. The order is different. The number of results is different.
Nearly every response is unique… so the agencies selling revolutionary GEO hacks are building on two broken assumptions: that these tactics directly cause citations (unproven), and that the outputs are consistent enough for those tactics to track reliably (they’re not).
AI search is real. It matters. Heck, we generate tons of leads from it.
But the brands winning there are the same ones that have been winning everywhere… because they built actual authority over years, not because they added a data table to a blog post last Tuesday.
Our own AI visibility increased the most by doing one thing: acquiring mentions + links on publications talking about our niche: being in more places that AI pulls from, increasing the likelihood AI mentions our brand.
-Jeremy
