GEO Experiments
Hands-on GEO experiments from OtterlyAI.
Each test puts a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tactic to the test and measures the result across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. These AI Search experiments cover on-page, off-page, and technical tactics, so you can see which AI SEO and AEO methods move AI visibility and which ones do nothing. Browse the experiments below for tested, data-backed results.
GEO Experiments
The 2,000 AI Blogs Experiment: Does Google Penalize AI Content?
Updated August 5, 2026 with a fourth month of data and a new chapter: what Bing did with the same content, and why ranking in Bing did not get us into ChatGPT. Can you shortcut your way into AI Search by publishing thousands of AI-generated blog posts with a single click? We tested it. We […]
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GEO Experiments
We Added 2026 to 11 Page Titles. Citations Rose 61%, and So Did the Page We Never Touched
Key takeaways Why we tested this The idea came from a pattern in our own data. Most of our highest cited blog posts already carry “2026” in the title tag. Some of them do not carry it in the H1, which is an inconsistency in its own right, but the title tag pattern was hard […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
ChatGPT Ads Study: 76.4% of Commercial Answers Carry an Ad, and the Leaders Buy None
Paid ads now sit inside ChatGPT’s commercial answers, and the paid layer does not look the same in any two categories. OtterlyAI measured OpenAI’s paid Ads and product Shopping Card appearances across different industries in the United States, then mapped who is buying the slots, how often, and where the advertised brands diverge from the […]
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GEO Experiments
Dead AI Citations: Why Deleting a Page Doesn’t Remove It From AI Search
Here is a question most brands never test: when you delete a page, does it truly disappear from AI Search? We ran the experiment. One brand deliberately removed 15 comparison pages on known dates, and we tracked their citations across seven AI Search Engines every day, before and after each takedown. The pages kept getting […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
Claude Citation Study Reveals What Actually Gets Cited
Claude has become one of the most widely used AI assistants for research, comparison, and decision-making queries, and like every AI Search engine it answers by pulling from, and citing, sources across the open web. For brands, that raises a practical question: when Claude composes an answer, which kinds of sources does it actually reach […]
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GEO Experiments
Active Reddit Communities Get Cited x9 Times More
Reddit is the most cited source in AI Search. In this study, OtterlyAI tracked over 8,000 Reddit citations across 126 subreddits and found that community content consistently appears in AI-generated answers at a rate that outpaces most other content categories. That makes Reddit more than a social platform for GEO purposes. It is an active […]
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GEO Experiments
Human vs AI: Has AI gotten good enough to predict our taste? We had to know.
People have taste. We argue about it, defend it, and change our minds about it. The question for this experiment was simple: do AI Search Platforms have taste too, and does it look anything like ours? To find out, we ran a controlled aesthetic test. We built five pairs of abstract images, each isolating one […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
1 in 8 Social Media AI Citations Point to LinkedIn: AI Search Study by OtterlyAI
LinkedIn surpassed 1.3 billion registered members in January 2026, with roughly 310 million monthly active users. It is also one of the most cited social sources in AI Search. That makes LinkedIn more than a professional network. It is a working part of AI Search Optimization. OtterlyAI analyzed 1,310,455 LinkedIn AI citations to understand what […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
OtterlyAI’s Research Methodology: How We Design Correct Experiments
Setting a golden standard to run GEO experiments for the marketing community. This document explains how. A Note on How We Write About Research Disclaimer: OtterlyAI follows the structured research methodology of Kohavi et al, which is described in this document. However, our primary audience is marketing professionals, not statisticians. Our published experiment articles are written […]
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GEO Experiments
Does Winning An Industry Awards Increase Your AI Visibility?
What One Award Win Did to Our Brand Visibility Across 32 AI Search Prompts Industry awards are a fixture of B2B and agency marketing. Teams spend time and budget entering them, and a win earns a badge in the website footer and a line in the next update. The question we wanted to answer is […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
Are Analyst Relations Sites Important for AI Visibility? How Gartner Dominates 81.7% of Citations While Blocking 5 Major AI Crawlers
10 Analyst Firms, 1M+ URLs: One Firm Owns the Citations, and It Is Not the Research You Think Gartner. Forrester. IDC. The big three names in industry analyst research influence trillions in annual enterprise IT spending decisions. For four decades, their Magic Quadrants, Waves, and MarketScapes have shaped how enterprise buyers pick vendors. So when […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
The URL AI Citation Study 2026
1 Million URLs Studied: Which URL Structures Gets You Cited The Most on AI Search URLs are the first signal AI Search engines see, before any content loads. Shorter URLs are “better.” Descriptive slugs “help.” Clean canonical structure “signals authority.” These conventions carry over from traditional SEO, where URL attributes have measurable influence on rankings. […]
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GEO Experiments
25 AI-Generated YouTube Videos, One Week, and What They Did to AI Search Visibility
A guest AI Search experiment by Hannes Kaltofen (TRYSEO), measured end-to-end in OtterlyAI According to OtterlyAI’s YouTube Citation Study 2026, YouTube and Reddit account for 78.2% of all social media citations in AI Search. The data also revealed that being the best answer seems to drive AI citations, not popularity. YouTube’s popularity metrics like views, […]
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GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Your Image Alt Text is Built for SEO. AI Search Reads Right Past It
If you add a fact to an image filename, alt text, or caption, but don’t mention it anywhere in the visible body text, can AI search engines pick it up? We tested it across five AI search platforms using six page variations, and the answer was clear: image metadata alone is not enough. This experiment […]
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Black Hat GEO
GEO Experiments
We Hid Text on a Webpage to Trick AI Search – Here’s What 7 AI Platforms Actually Did
Hidden text, white text on a white background, is one of the oldest tricks in SEO. Google penalized it over a decade ago. But AI Search Engines are a different system with different retrieval pipelines. So we tested it: can you hide text on a page and have AI search platforms read it? And what […]
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GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Markdown vs. HTML, Which Format Do AI Crawlers Prefer?
A recurring suggestion in GEO circles is that brands should publish Markdown (.md) versions of their web pages alongside standard HTML. The reasoning sounds plausible: LLMs process plain text more efficiently than HTML, so giving them a clean Markdown file should make your content easier to consume, and therefore more likely to be cited. To […]
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GEO Experiments
GEO Experiment: Does Schema Markup Really Impact AI Search?
Schema markup is one of the most consistently recommended tactics in technical SEO, and for good reason. It has a 10+ year track record of helping Google surface rich results, trigger featured snippets, and improve SERP feature eligibility, benefits that remain fully intact today. As AI Search platforms have grown in prominence, a natural question […]
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AI Search Studies
GEO Experiments
We’re Running Live GEO Experiments And You Can Follow Along
Explore All GEO Experiments & AI Search Case Studies You can download the latest version of the experiment sheet below. It gets updated every week with new experiments as we test them, so bookmark this page or check back regularly to follow our progress. 👉 View GEO Experiment/Studies (Google Sheets) Weekly GEO Experiments: What We’re […]
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GEO Experiments
New Brand, Zero Authority: How We Got AI Search Mentions in 14 Days
The central debate in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) right now is deceptively simple: does AI Search care more about who you are on your own site, or who talks about you across the web? OtterlyAI designed a controlled, real-world experiment to find out. We built a brand from scratch, zero domain authority, seven pages, and […]
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GEO Experiments
We Tested AI vs Human-Written Content. The AI Page Won by 40x.
To be honest, the following words are not easy for me to write. Why? Because I’ve been telling everyone in the past few months and weeks: DON’T use AI-generated content on your website. I haven’t believed in the hype. I was pretty sure that AI-generated content doesn’t rank on Google, nor would it be cited […]
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GEO Experiments
Llms.txt Experiment: What Marketers Get Wrong about llms.txt
Will llms.txt actually improve your AI visibility?In this OtterlyAI research piece, we test real AI crawler data to see whether llms.txt meaningfully affects how AI systems discover and use web content. Study Methodology About This Research: OtterlyAI implemented an /llms.txt file at the root of an experiment website and monitored AI bot traffic over a […]
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