AI Search Statistics
Short answer: the strongest published evidence on what makes a page get cited by generative engines comes from Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024). It found that adding statistics, citations and expert quotations lifted a page’s visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%, while keyword stuffing performed roughly 10% worse than making no changes at all.
Every figure on this site appears below with the study or report it came from. If a number is not on this page with a source next to it, we do not publish it.
Adding statistics, citations and expert quotes to a page increased its visibility in generative-engine answers by up to 40%.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024 — view source
Statistics Addition was the single strongest optimization tested, producing a 41% increase in position-adjusted word count in generated answers.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024 — view source
Citing sources lifted the visibility of pages that started in fifth position by more than 115% — the largest gain for lower-ranked content.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024 — view source
Keyword stuffing performed about 10% worse than making no changes at all — traditional SEO tactics do not transfer to generative engines.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024 — view source
Reddit accounted for roughly 44% of social-platform citations appearing in Google AI Overviews.
Source: Tinuiti, Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends report — view source
Typical window for AI models to crawl, re-index and begin citing new on-site and off-site mentions.
Source: MyFast.ai operational benchmark across client campaigns
How to read these numbers
The KDD 2024 figures are relative improvements measured in a controlled setting where five candidate sources compete to be cited for a query, across the study’s GEO-bench dataset of roughly 10,000 queries spanning nine datasets and seven domains. They describe how much more visible an optimized page became versus its unoptimized self — not a promise that any specific business will gain 40% more customers. The Tinuiti share-of-citations figure is a measurement of one platform’s share of social citations in Google AI Overviews, and it differs sharply by engine: Reddit made up about 44% of social citations in AI Overviews but only about 5% in Gemini.
We do not publish citation-rate guarantees. AI models change their retrieval and ranking behaviour without notice, and no vendor — including us — controls what they say.
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