VercatusCitations quotes statistics
Adding sourced statistics, named sources and attributed quotations raised source visibility by 30 to 40 percent in the GEO benchmark, and a replication on Perplexity.ai also found a gain from quotations; ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were not tested, so treat it as likely rather than proven for them.
Do citations and statistics improve AI visibility?
In the GEO benchmark (GEO-bench, GPT-3.5-based generative engine), rewriting a source with Cite Sources, Quotation Addition or Statistics Addition raised its visibility by 30–40% relative on Position-Adjusted Word Count and 15–30% on Subjective Impression; the best method improved on the baseline by 41% and 28%. Keyword Stuffing lowered Position-Adjusted Word Count (17.7 versus 19.3) and was 10% worse than baseline on Perplexity.ai, where Quotation Addition gained 22%. When all sources were optimised, gains concentrated in lower-ranked sources: Cite Sources raised visibility of the rank-5 source by 115.1% while the top-ranked source lost 30.3%.
Sources
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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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