GEO Pulse
Today in 30 seconds
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60+ GEO data points: PR teams pitch journalists with only 2% overlap with AI-cited journalists. Brand mentions correlate 3x more with AI visibility than backlinks. Zero-click searches grew from 56% to 69% in one year after AI Overviews launched.
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Ahrefs: Most cited domains in AI: Wikipedia leads in ChatGPT (16.3% share) but YouTube dominates Perplexity (16.1%) while being absent from ChatGPT's top-10. Reddit and Quora appear only in Google AI Overviews - each platform has a distinct citation ecosystem.
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Brand mentions study (410K+ signals): Entity recognition and third-party brand mentions drive AI visibility - not domain authority. Brands appearing in ChatGPT were 2.5x more likely to receive a site visit within 7 days.
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GEO at scale (arxiv paper): Measuring brand visibility across multiple AI engines simultaneously reveals citation gaps invisible to single-platform tracking - and shows that GEO leadership on one platform rarely predicts performance on others.
Lead Story
60+ GEO Data Points: The PR-to-AI Journalist Gap Is 2% (And Zero-Click Searches Jumped 13 Points in a Year)
OmniBound's quarterly update to their GEO statistics roundup contains two findings that deserve more attention than they're getting. First: the overlap between journalists that PR teams systematically pitch and journalists who get cited in AI answers is just 2%. This isn't a marginal mismatch - it means earned media programs are almost completely optimized for the wrong outlets. Second: zero-click searches grew from 56% to 69% in a single year following AI Overviews' launch. That 13-point jump happened in twelve months. The citation data reinforces both signals: brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 vs. 0.218 for backlinks, and 83% of AI Overview citations come from pages outside the organic top-10. The complete picture argues for treating AI visibility as a separate discipline with different success metrics - not an extension of existing SEO or PR programs.
View all 60+ stats →
This Week
Wikipedia Is #1 on ChatGPT. YouTube Is #1 on Perplexity. The Citation Ecosystems Don't Overlap.
Ahrefs analyzed ~78.6 million searches across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to map which domains each platform cites most. The findings confirm platform divergence at the domain level: Wikipedia leads ChatGPT at 16.3% mention share and is second in Perplexity (12.5%), but YouTube dominates Perplexity (16.1%) while appearing absent from ChatGPT's top-10. Reddit and Quora register only in Google AI Overviews, not in the other two platforms. News organizations like Reuters and AP appear primarily in ChatGPT - not Perplexity. The upshot: the platform-specific citation ecosystem means a domain strategy optimized for one AI surface will miss most of the available citation share on the others.
Read the domain breakdown →
410,000 Brand Mentions, 240 Brands: Entity Recognition Drives AI Visibility More Than Domain Authority
Three months of tracking 410K+ public mentions across 240 B2B SaaS, fintech, and ecommerce brands finds entity recognition and third-party mentions as primary AI visibility drivers. Brands in ChatGPT recommendations were 2.5x more likely to receive a site visit within 7 days. LLM traffic converts at 15.9% (ChatGPT), 10.5% (Perplexity), and 5% (Claude).
Full findings →
GEO at Scale: Multi-Platform Brand Visibility Measurement Reveals Citation Gaps Invisible to Single-Platform Tracking
New academic framework for measuring generative engine optimization across multiple AI search engines simultaneously. The core finding: brand citation performance on one platform is a poor predictor of performance on others, meaning single-platform GEO monitoring creates blind spots that only cross-platform benchmarking can surface.
Read the paper →
Navarro's Take
The 2% Number That Breaks the Entire PR-to-AI Logic
The finding that PR teams pitch journalists with only a 2% overlap to those cited in AI answers is the most actionable single stat I've seen in the space this year. It means virtually every earned media program in operation today is optimized for an audience - journalists and publications - that AI systems almost entirely ignore when constructing answers. The press release channels, media databases, and journalist relationships built over the last decade are being used to reach the wrong distribution layer. The brands that figure this out first - and redirect even a fraction of their PR budget toward AI-cited publication targets - will compound a visibility advantage that won't be easy to close once it's established.