SourcearXiv (IIT Delhi, Princeton University and independent researchers)
PublishedNovember 16, 2023
TypeAcademic paper
SampleGEO-bench: 10,000 queries across 25 domains
The short version: Make pages easy to quote: clear statements, specific numbers, named sources.
What they studied
The researchers built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and tested nine ways of rewriting a source page to see which ones made it show up more in answers written by a generative search engine.
Key findings
- Adding quotations from relevant sources raised visibility the most, about 41% over the unchanged page on their main measure.
- Adding statistics raised it about 31%, and citing sources about 27%.
- Keyword stuffing made visibility slightly worse, about 8% below the unchanged page.
- Lower-ranked sources gained the most: a fifth-ranked source citing its sources gained about 115%, while top-ranked sources lost visibility with the same changes.
- What worked best varied by topic.
Key learnings
- Make pages easy to quote: clear statements, specific numbers, named sources.
- Keyword stuffing does not help in AI answers either.
- Smaller sites have a real opening in AI answers if their content is the most citable on the page.
Things to keep in mind
- Tested on a research setup built on GPT-3.5 with the top five Google results, not on Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity in production.
- Single-turn answers only, and only one source per query was rewritten.
- Several of the measures are scored by an AI model, which the authors note is poorly calibrated.
Read it alongside
- AI features and your website (Google's own guidance) (Google Search Central, 2025)
- AI Overviews and click-through rate: 15 months of client data (Seer Interactive, 2025)
Source
Academic paper by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan, Ameet Deshpande, published by arXiv (IIT Delhi, Princeton University and independent researchers), November 16, 2023.
We read the source and checked every figure on this page against it on October 13, 2026. Summaries and learnings are ours. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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