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GEOoptimised

AI search · Evidence ledger · Checked 2026-07-10

4 of the most-repeated claims in AI search have no source we could find.

We went looking for the primary source behind every number this industry repeats. Some reproduced exactly. One drifted by a factor of ten in the retelling. Four lead nowhere at all. Below is the ledger, and beneath it, the list of every tool we review and precisely what each one pays us.

Read the ledger See who pays us →
03
VERIFIED
04
REFUTED
05
MISLEADING
02
DIRECTIONAL
01
UNREPRODUCED
04
UNTRACEABLE

19 claims graded. Every grade links to its primary source. Disagree with one? The method is published, so you can check us.

We turned this into a study nobody else runs. Of 19 of the field's most-repeated statistics, only 26% survive a check against their own primary source. Read the reproduction study →

Start with the number everybody quotes

If you have read anything about generative engine optimisation, you have met the 40% figure. It comes from a real, peer-reviewed paper. It does not mean what the marketing pages say it means.

MISLEADING #forty-percent

The claim, as it circulates

“Generative engine optimisation boosts a brand's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.”

The paper says this. The paper is measuring a benchmark, not ChatGPT.

What the source actually says

The uplift is measured on GEO-bench, a research benchmark the authors introduce in the same paper, using a 'visibility' metric derived from how much of a generated response is attributable to a given source. It is a controlled lab result. It is not a measurement of citation behaviour on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews, and the paper does not claim it is. Almost every marketing page that repeats the 40% omits this.

“GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.”

Source
Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan & Deshpande , GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
Published
2023-11-16, last revised 2024-06-28 (v3). Accepted to KDD 2024.
Sample
GEO-bench, a benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains
Reproduction
We reproduced this from the primary source. checked 2026-07-10

We fetched the arXiv abstract and confirmed the sentence verbatim, and confirmed GEO-bench is introduced by the same paper. The abstract page does not state GEO-bench's query count, so we do not publish one. Figures of '~10,000 queries' circulate; we could not confirm that number from the abstract and have not read the full PDF.

Read the full anatomy of the 40% claim →

The conflict, stated up front

Some of the best tools in this field cannot pay us a penny.

Ahrefs closed its affiliate programme in 2019. Screaming Frog has never run one. Profound, the category leader, publishes no payout at all. Meanwhile Nightwatch pays 30% for the lifetime of every customer we send, on a 365-day cookie. Every listicle you have read about AI visibility tools was written by someone facing that arithmetic. Most of them do not mention it.

What the tools we review pay GEOoptimised
Tool What it pays us Model Are we enrolled?
Nightwatch 30% lifetime recurring No
Otterly.ai 20% recurring, first 12 months only No
Ahrefs NOTHING no programme No
Screaming Frog NOTHING no programme No
Clearscope NOTHING no programme found No

As of today we are enrolled in none of them, so nothing on this site earns us anything. That will change, and when it does the table above will say so on the same day. The full table, all 16 tools →

Correction 001

The first error in the ledger is ours.

This is the exact failure this site exists to catch, and we committed it on day one, on the single claim we were most confident about. A real statistic drifted by a factor of ten in the space of one retelling. Nobody lied. Somebody paraphrased.

Every correction we have ever made →

We said

SparkToro found that AI assistants return an identical brand list less than 0.1% of the time.

Actually true

SparkToro found that the same brand list repeats less than 1 time in 100 (under 1%). The 1-in-1,000 figure, about 0.1%, applies to getting the same list in the same ORDER. The two are routinely conflated.

Logged 2026-07-10

What this site is not

  • Not an agency. We sell no GEO services. There is nothing to book.
  • Not a tool vendor. We have no dashboard to defend and no subscription to protect.
  • Not ad-funded. No display advertising, now or later.
  • Not quiet about the conflict. Where we do earn a commission, we say so on the page, in the row, every time.

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