VercatusA study of citations to AI-generated documentation
In a peer-reviewed audit of Google AI Overviews on Your-Money-or-Your-Life queries (from the MS MARCO Web Search dataset), AI-generated documents were cited more often than human-authored ones even after controlling for retrieval rank, driven mainly by citations of documents that were not among the retrieved results and most pronounced at high ranks. Google's spam policies now name attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Search, and treat using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value as scaled content abuse, so machine-generated volume is an enforcement risk rather than a durable advantage.
Sources
- 1Kakimov, Tan, Gillham, Bejtic · 2026Auditing Citation Behavior in AI-Generated Search Summaries (PMLR 318:224-235, Canadian AI 2026)proceedings.mlr.press
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BGrade B: peer-reviewed or a large controlled study. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.
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