| Claim | Source | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Quotations +40.5%, Statistics +32.3%, Fluency +28.7%, Cite Sources +27.6%, Keyword Stuffing −9.1% on generative visibility; up to 40% overall; +115.1% for a 5th-ranked site adding citations; GEO-BENCH = 10,000 queries | Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", KDD 2024 (arXiv 2311.09735) | A |
| GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do not execute JavaScript. Monthly fetches: Googlebot 4.5bn, GPTBot 569m, Claude 370m, AppleBot 314m, PerplexityBot 24.4m. ChatGPT 34.82% and Claude 34.16% of fetches hit 404s vs Googlebot 8.22% | Vercel / MERJ, "The rise of the AI crawler" | A |
| Click-through 8% with an AI summary vs 15% without; 1% clicked a cited source; 18% of searches produced a summary; 88% of summaries cited 3+ sources; median summary 67 words | Pew Research Center, July 2025. 900 US adults, real browsing data, 68,879 queries, March 2025 | A |
| Branded web mentions 0.664, branded anchors 0.527, branded search volume 0.392, DR 0.326, referring domains 0.295, backlinks 0.218 | Ahrefs, "An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors", 75,000 brands, Spearman | A |
| Adding schema: AI Overviews −4.6%, AI Mode +2.4%, ChatGPT +2.2% — no meaningful uplift. 53% of AI-cited pages carry schema (correlation) | Ahrefs, 1,885 treated pages vs 4,000 controls, Aug 2025 – Mar 2026 | A |
| No special schema, no llms.txt, no chunking requirement, no AI-specific writing style, no inauthentic mentions; no third-party tool has internal access; Business Profiles feed AI features | Google Search Central, AI optimisation guide + AI features documentation | A |
| Search Console generative AI performance reports launched 3 June 2026; impressions/pages/countries/devices/dates only; data from 18 May 2026 | Google Search Central blog | A |
| DNE Logistics, Port Klang imports 2025: 3,928 declarations, 10,400 containers, 56 customer groups, 6,372 × 20ft and 3,267 × 40ft. Comparable Aug–Dec window 2024→2025: declarations +1.6%, containers +2.3%. (2024 records begin in August — full-year 2024 is not comparable.) | DNE Logistics operational database (consolidated_jobs), filtered job_type='import' and pod_name='PORT KLANG (MALAYSIA)' on eta_date. Queried 8 August 2026 against the daily 02:30 MYT clone | A |
| YouTube mentions correlate ≈0.737 with AI visibility | Ahrefs companion report, 75,000 brands | B |
| AI Overviews cut top-result CTR ≈34.5% (Apr 2025) rising to ≈58% (Feb 2026) | Ahrefs | B |
| US zero-click share 60.45% (2024) → 68.01% (early 2026) | SparkToro clickstream | B |
| AI-search visitors ≈4.4× the value of an average organic visitor; ≈3× more likely to convert; AI search projected to overtake traditional search by 2028 | Semrush clickstream analysis | B |
| ChatGPT referral share ≈0.32% of global website traffic, May 2026 | SE Ranking / Similarweb | B |
| llms.txt adoption ≈10.13% of 300,000 domains; 408 targeted requests across 500M+ AI bot visits in a 90-day window | SE Ranking; independent crawler telemetry | B |
| Google AI Mode uses roughly 8–12 sub-queries per question | Multiple SEO analyses; not confirmed by Google | B |
| Cited pages average 1,064 days old vs 1,432 for organic results (≈17m citations, 7 platforms) | Ahrefs | B |
| Review platforms appear in ≈34.5% of commercial AI Overviews | Vendor analysis, method not fully published | B |
| ≈50% of B2B software buyers start research with an AI chatbot; 69% switched intended vendor; ⅓ bought from a vendor they had not heard of | G2 buyer research, 2026 | B |
| AI Overviews trigger on ≈48% of queries (Mar 2026); 36% informational vs 8% commercial vs 5% transactional | Semrush; Seer Interactive. Varies enormously by keyword panel | B |
| Perplexity rebuilt search in-house on Vespa (2025); hybrid BM25 + dense retrieval with multiple rerank layers | Perplexity engineering statements | B |
| Cloudflare shifted pay-per-crawl → pay-per-use (July 2026); default blocking of mixed-use crawlers on ad pages from 15 Sept 2026 | Cloudflare announcements, trade press | B |
| Malaysia: 67% of 2,556 adults used an AI tool in the previous three months; 81% of those used AI-assisted search | Vodus AI Consumption Study, 2026 | B |
| Reddit ≈40% of multi-engine citations / YouTube overtaking Reddit / Wikipedia 47.9% of ChatGPT citations | Three separate 2026 indices that contradict each other. Cited in Ch.12 as evidence of volatility, not as fact | B |
| "Chunking gives 2–4× more citations" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
| "Original research achieves 38–65% citation rates" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
| "Content under 30 days old gets 3.2× more citations" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
| "Each blocked bot costs 18–34% of citations" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
| "98.8% of local businesses are invisible to AI" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
| "ChatGPT draws 70%+ of local data from Foursquare" | Untraceable. Quoted only to warn against it | C |
Compiled August 2026. Tier definitions are in the front matter. Where a Tier B source is a vendor with a commercial interest in the finding, that is noted in the chapter as well as here.