Cited · Edition 3 · 15 May 2026
What is Known & Cited? Known & Cited is a GEO consultancy and GEO-led PR partner. We measure how AI search cites and recommends brands, and help you change what it says.
I still hate newsletters. But Cited keeps going because there’s nowhere I trust pulling GEO together for the people who actually need it. PR teams, marketers, businesses working out whether AI is recommending them or ignoring them entirely.
GEO gets lumped in with every other AI conversation. This one only covers GEO and what it means for PR and marketing.
You’ll notice I include competitor news. The reason being; GEO is new, all new research is good research, and there’s room for all of us (hopefully.)
Still no fixed schedule. Comes when there’s something worth saying… which is a bit more regular than I expected tbf. If it’s useful, stay. If it’s not, run away (or better, tell me why.)
Edition 2 from last fortnight is here.
Russ
Josh Blyskal at Profound has put a real clock on AI citation. 90% of newly published marketing pages were cited by ChatGPT or Claude within 37 days of going live. Half were cited inside 7 days. Typical first-citation time: 6.81 days. Sample: around 900 newly published pages observed across ChatGPT and Claude agent logs in a 60-day window, March to May 2026.
For two years the honest answer on “how long does AI citation actually take” was “we don’t know”. Now we have one.
Day 37 is your benchmark. If a page you’ve published goes more than 37 days without appearing in any AI answer, something is wrong. Not maybe wrong. Wrong.
The bit Profound’s data doesn’t measure: this is the first-citation clock. AVS measures the second clock, sustained citation across the volatility window. You need to know both.
Read the full story: https://knownandcited.com/blog/ai-citation-clock-profound
On 1 May, 5WPR published an AI Platform Citation Source Index, ranking the 50 sites most cited across ChatGPT, Google AIO, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. The headline most coverage picked up: Reddit at the top across every engine, around 40% citation share.
Three things to know before you panic and start recruiting teenagers to plaster Reddit with your business.
It’s a meta-analysis, not original research. The Index synthesises six published citation studies, most sampling US-centric, English-language, “best X” consumer queries. The headline is true at the consolidated-average level. It’s not true at the per-platform level. Claude leans heavily on long-form legacy journalism. Perplexity rewards primary sources and named B2B authority. On time-sensitive queries, journalism climbs to 49% of citations. 5WPR’s own release notes that Reddit’s ChatGPT share moved from roughly 60% to 10% in six weeks last autumn after a single Google parameter change.
Read the source list as a starting point for category research - not as a content plan.
Read the full story: https://www.5wpr.com/new/research/ai-platform-citation-source-index-2026
Google rolled out five changes to AI Overviews and AI Mode on 6 May. The model behind AIO didn’t change, but the surface did.
Subscription labels now flag publishers users have linked to their Google account, and Google says users are noticeably more likely to click those. Inline links sit next to the specific sentence they support, not only at the end. Desktop hover previews show the destination before you click. A new Further Exploration section recommends deeper reading. A new Personal Perspectives panel pulls in discussion from Reddit, forums and social.
Two takeaways. Earning placement in an FT, Times, Economist or NYT piece is worth slightly more than it was a week ago, for users with a linked subscription. And Reddit and forum surfacing has moved from “the ChatGPT story” to inside Google’s own answer surface.
Read the full story: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/explore-web-generative-ai-search
6 weeks ago we spent half the call explaining what AI visibility measurement is. Now we spend it explaining why a dashboard isn’t a methodology. The Profound finding helps with that, because day 37 gives every PR director a number they can actually report on.
Our own AVS measurements line up with the sustained-citation point directly. Across the brands we run through the platform, around 45% appear only once in a 7-day window on unbranded prompts. Brands that look like winners on a single snapshot are often missing from the consideration set a week later. That second clock is the thing AVS Quarterly is built to track. We wrote the long version down: https://knownandcited.com/blog/ai-citation-clock-profound.
Who are we having conversations with right now? Provoke Media ran a piece on PR + AI that includes K&C in the round-up. First proper trade-press mention. Maybe not a framer, but a marker that the category is now visible enough to be written about. Agency partner conversations are also picking up. Agencies want the methodology layer and don’t want to build it. Partner-and-referral is probably how most of this work reaches mid-market UK brands over the next twelve months.
Coming next on the K&C blog: the methodology piece on how AVS actually measures AI visibility, followed by a worked-example walkthrough on a real measurement. And new today: a live page listing every brand we’re currently measuring, anonymised for now, named with consent as engagements progress: knownandcited.com/who-we-measure.
If you want to know how your business actually surfaces in AI search, tailored to your category and your buyers, book an AVS Exec Brief. Single engagement, free, no commitment.
Be Known. Be Cited.
Four things have landed in the same fortnight that I wasn’t expecting.
I’m on a HIMSS Europe panel in Copenhagen on Wednesday next week. I have a short piece running in a Guardian supplement on 9 June. Yesterday I put a mega data dump on the FC:AI Open Source Me page, fourteen months of fortnightly bloods, three months of daily symptom and WHOOP tracking, all the imaging reports, all downloadable, all at fcancerwith.ai/open-source-me.
In other news - I now need glasses. Didn’t see that coming…
See you next time.
Russ
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