Cited · Edition 4 · 29 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.
Another newsletter, from a man that hates newsletters (apart from The Neuron - AI News actually, which inspired our one-off graphic) - but there is so much going on in GEO we just can’t stop.
If anything in here doesn’t cut it, or you want more of X and less of Y, please do DM me. It’s great to see the subscriber numbers going up, but in all honesty I’m not quite sure why :).
Edition 3 is here if you missed it.
Russ
Van Buskirk at Search Engine Journal analysed 846,000 US Google searches. When AI Overviews are present, users stay on Google far longer. At 21 seconds, only 12% of navigational searchers are still on the page without AIO. With AIO, 46% are still there. Every search type flattens to one slow, compare-everything behaviour.
Read the study
Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse popped up again in the last week. 25 million links across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini - 84% of answers come from earned media. 99% are the result of non-paid for content (eat that advertising.) Most interesting finding for us: each engine cites from a completely different universe. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia and Axios. Claude averages 13 sources per response. Gemini pulls from Reddit and YouTube. How different? Sweeney at First Position Digital shows Reddit’s search visibility up 342% since Google’s $60M licensing deal. Reddit is Gemini’s top cited domain. ChatGPT cited it 16 times in 25 million links. Claude cited it zero.
Read the Muck Rack report | Read Sweeney’s piece
Google published an AI Optimisation Guide on 15 May. GEO isn’t real, it’s just SEO. Three days later, King at iPullRank published a refutation, which we agree with. SEO measures rank in a results page. GEO measures citation across answer-generation engines that often don’t share results pages at all. Different measurement and different fundamentals, that are complementary, but not the same discipline. The “it’s just SEO” line keeps the budget inside existing teams. On 19 May, Google announced at I/O that AI Mode is going into the search box. Liz Reid called it the biggest upgrade in 25 years. In reality, it means more people using AI on a daily basis, and a lot of them probably not even realising they are doing it.
Read King’s piece
AMEC launched seven GEO Principles at their Dublin summit on 19 May. It pretty much maps exactly to what we already do, so that’s nice. But the principles name the discipline without explaining how to do it. As far as we can see, they don’t make GEO usable for a practitioner picking it up for the first time (if you want that, check out our GEO for everyone guide.) What it does do a good job of is folding GEO into the rest of AMEC’s measurement machinery (whilst unsurprisingly wanging on about not using GEO alone.)
I spent 20 years in PR. From what I’ve seen, most agencies don’t actually use the AMEC frameworks they claim to follow - and I’m not convinced this helps. GEO is accessible right now. Affordable, measurable, repeatable, comparable over time. It can also be used by an agency as a great way to measure PR impact WITHOUT all the other AMEC stuff. Over-engineering it with layers of framework is the fastest way to make sure nobody does it.
Read the principles
We see the same point in our own data. Different sectors lean on different citation sources. Some barely touch Wikipedia. Some don’t surface Reddit at all. Axios is all over the aggregate research. I’ve yet to see it in a single K&C client report.
Whilst all of this makes very interesting reading, none of it tells you what’s happening to your brand. Reddit is up 342% in AI search visibility. Irrelevant if your sector doesn’t generate Reddit conversation. 84% of AI citations come from earned media. Doesn’t tell you which outlets are citing you. Aggregate research is a map. It doesn’t tell you where you are on it.
If you want to see a tailored report that is 100% exclusive to your business/brand, contact us.
I was in Copenhagen last week, talking at HIMSS Europe. Clinicians, technologists, hospital system leaders, AI vendors, all in the same building. I was on a panel about AI autonomy in healthcare.
Loads of interesting points came out of the conversation, including me realising I’m maybe not as 100% pro AI in healthcare as I thought I was (see post here.)
But the thing I keep coming back to is the room. HIMSS Europe is thousands of people. There were two patients on stage. Me and Dale Atkinson. Two. In a room full of people building technology for patients, the patients weren’t really in the conversation.
It also made me realise that (perhaps unsurprisingly for a stage 4 cancer patient), health matters a fair bit to me. And that it’s time to mix up my two passions - Known & Cited and fcancerwith.ai - and launch a GEO service specialising in working with brands in the healthcare space.
K&C Vital is live. People-led GEO with healthcare writers, and clinicians pulled in where they’re needed. Same methodology, applied to the brands that don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong.
knownandcited.com/vital
“He doesn’t need our frameworks. He needed to not die faster, and so he built something.” Jan Beger, GE HealthCare (full article)
Christ it’s been hot. If anyone needs a paddling pool recommendation, ours has been a game-changer. Possibly the only thing that kept me and the family talking to each other for the last five days.
And I didn’t even use AI to find it - straight to Argos. Get involved before the whole country sells out - Bestway 10 footer with filter and cover.
Be Known. Be Cited.
See you next time.
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