GEO & AEO: How to Get Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI

The term comes from a 2024 KDD paper by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, out of Princeton and Georgia Tech. They built a benchmark of generative-engine responses and tested which content changes actually increased a source's visibility inside them.

The finding that has held up best: adding statistics, quotations and citations to a piece of content produced the largest gains, up to roughly 40% on the paper's Position-Adjusted Word Count metric. Keyword stuffing — the reflex borrowed from classical SEO — performed poorly. In plain terms, generative engines prefer text that is specific, attributable and quotable, which is a fairly good description of a well-written forum answer.

A generated answer is assembled from passages retrieved across several sources. Position one is one input among many, and the model's preference for a directly-worded, specific passage frequently pulls a fourth-place forum thread ahead of a first-place marketing page written to hedge.

Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords between March 2024 and March 2025 and found clicks fell 34.5% where an AI Overview appeared, with position-one CTR dropping from 7.3% to 2.6%. That is the strategic argument in one number: the ranking still exists, but a growing share of its value now sits inside the answer above it.

Part of the answer is commercial. Google signed a data-licensing agreement with Reddit in February 2024, reported at around $60 million a year, giving it a structured feed of Reddit posts and comments to train models and improve Search. Content flowing through a supported pipe is easier to use than content scraped from an unpredictable web.

The rest is editorial. Forum threads are written as direct answers to specific questions, they contain first-hand detail a vendor page cannot credibly claim, and they carry a crowd signal — upvotes — that maps neatly onto a retrieval system's need to rank candidate passages. A model choosing between a marketing page saying “the leading platform for teams” and a comment saying “we ran it for eight months and the export broke twice” will pick the comment.

Citation share is not a stable property of a domain. It is a property of one engine at one moment. Semrush tracked more than 230,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity over 13 weeks in 2025, covering over 100 million citations, and watched Reddit's ChatGPT citation share fall from roughly 60% to about 10% while remaining stable on the other two. That 60%-to-10% figure is the share of ChatGPT's own responses that cite Reddit — a different metric from the 3.11%-of-all-citations aggregate above, not a contradiction of it.

The lesson is not that Reddit stopped mattering. It is that any AEO strategy built on one engine's current snapshot is fragile. The durable version optimises for the thing all of them share — being the clearest, most specific, most obviously human answer to a question people are genuinely asking — rather than gaming whichever retrieval mix is in production this quarter.

Retrieval systems extract passages, not whole comments. A first sentence that states the answer outright is a complete, self-contained passage; a first sentence of throat-clearing is not. The same property makes the comment scannable for humans, which is why it also earns upvotes.

This is the single strongest finding in the GEO research: adding statistics and citations lifted visibility in generative responses by up to roughly 40%. It also happens to be what makes a comment believable. “It handles high volume” is unquotable; “we pushed about 40,000 events a day through it and hit one rate-limit issue” is both quotable and checkable.

If your answer genuinely needs several points, three or four short bullets beat a dense paragraph. Structured text is easier to extract cleanly and easier to skim, and a comment that is easy to skim is a comment that gets upvoted. Do not manufacture structure for a two-sentence answer — a bulleted list of one item reads as formatting for its own sake.

There is an obvious failure mode in a technique whose headline finding is “add statistics.” Making up a plausible-sounding figure will earn a citation for exactly as long as it takes someone to check it, and forums are unusually good at checking. A fabricated number that gets quoted into an AI answer is worse than no citation at all, because it attaches your brand to a correction.

Quote numbers you can point at, say where they came from, and use ranges or hedges when your own data is thin. “Roughly a third of our accounts, though our sample is small” is both more honest and more credible than a confident invented percentage — and it is still specific enough to be quotable.