Latest GEO & AEO guides
Practical playbooks to get your brand cited by AI search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
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Should You Drop Perplexity From Your AI Tracker? A GEO Lab Fact-Check
A prominent SEO just told everyone to remove Perplexity from their LLM trackers as its referral share collapsed to 4.31%. But referral traffic and citation footprint are different axes — and our cross-engine data shows Perplexity cites sources no other engine does. Here’s the disciplined answer: demote its weight, don’t delete the signal.
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Google Is Testing a Thinner AI Overviews Citation Panel — What a Shrinking Link Rail Means for GEO
Google is quietly testing a narrower, less-noticeable citations panel in AI Overviews on desktop. If it ships, being cited buys you even fewer clicks than before. Here’s the honest read: it’s a test, not a rollout, and it sharpens the one rule GEO Lab keeps insisting on — measure citation and traffic separately.
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The 2026 Google Ranking Factors Survey Just Crowned Original Research — What It Gets Right (and Wrong) for AI Citations
131 SEO experts just ranked Google’s 2026 factors — and voted original research and first-party data the top content signal. Here’s where that survey converges with what we’ve measured for AI citations, and the three places it stops short for GEO.
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The Verdict: A Licensing Deal Doesn’t Buy an AI Citation — Not Even in Its Own Vertical
This week we asked whether a licensing deal decides who gets cited. Monday’s fact-check said no; Thursday’s data made it emphatic — licensed partners took 2.5% of 161 citations, the open web 97.5%. Here we score all five pre-registered predictions (only one held as written), admit where our own “fed-vertical” hedge was wrong (Yelp got…
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Google Is Now Answering 97% of People Also Ask With AI Overviews — What That Means for GEO
New data shows 97% of People Also Ask results are now AI Overviews, up from 12% fourteen months ago. The “question SERP” that SEOs spent years optimizing FAQ content to win has been absorbed into AI answers. Here’s what actually changes for your strategy — and what doesn’t.
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Does a Licensing Deal Buy an AI Citation? We Measured It — Yelp Got Zero
We pre-registered the test Monday: do licensed/ingested partners (Yelp, Reddit, Wikipedia) out-cite the open web in AI answers? The data is in. Across 12 queries on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, licensed partners took 2.5% of citations; the open web took 97.5%. Yelp — whose review feed is wired into ChatGPT — got zero, even…
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Does AI Search Traffic Really Convert 4x Better? The Numbers Run From -13% to 23x
“AI search traffic converts 4x better than Google” is the GEO stat of the season. But the studies behind it span from ChatGPT converting 13% worse to 23x better. Here’s what the honest, large-sample data actually supports, why the mechanism is selection not magic, and why conversion quality tells you nothing about whether you get…
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Apple Says Blocking Its AI Training Crawler Won’t Hurt Search Ranking — Here’s Why It’s Not a GEO Lever
Apple updated its Applebot docs on Sept 7, 2026 to confirm that rules for Applebot-Extended — its AI-training opt-out — are “not considered in ranking for Search,” and blocking it won’t remove you from Siri, Spotlight, or Safari. Here’s what that control actually does, what it doesn’t, why it’s a consent lever rather than a…
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Does a Licensing Deal Actually Buy a Citation? Our Pre-Registered Test of Yelp, Reddit, and Wikipedia vs the Open Web
Monday we fact-checked the “licensing is the new ranking factor” hype: paywalled partners got 0% of AI citations while the open web took 91.3%. This week we test the one place licensing might still move the needle — vertical feeds. Here is the full experiment design, pre-registered before we collect: we’ll measure the citation share…