Cited · Edition 5 · 5 June 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.
Here we go again. More news and research from the world of GEO / AI Search.
GEO is just Generative Engine Optimisation, which is a slightly annoying name (bit too close to SEO) for getting your brand mentioned by AI when someone asks it a question. This is what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks. Some of it is fresh, some of it is a bit older, so think of it as a round-up rather than a news flash.
Reading time: about 7 minutes. If this is useful, pass it on to someone who’d get something from it. And tell me what’s off, missing, or you want more of. Just DM me. Edition 4 is here if you missed it.
Russ
A measurement firm called AirOps put out a run of studies recently. Four stats stuck with me. Each comes from its own piece of work, so treat them as four separate readings, not one stacked case.
Visibility is jumpy. Only about 30% of brands stay visible from one AI answer to the next, and just 20% show up across five runs of the same question. So one snapshot lies. This is exactly why we ask upwards of 6,000 prompts over seven days. It is the only way we have found to see past the wobble and give a client a number they can actually trust. Source.
Stale pages fall out. Pages not updated in over a year are roughly twice as likely to lose their AI citations. So keeping fresh content moving is not optional, and we tend to push clients towards a quarterly refresh. But the answer is not cheap automated AI content, because that will not cut through. It matters because you need real writing, maybe started by AI and then finessed by good copywriters, or you will quietly drop out of the answers without ever knowing why. Source.
Other people’s pages do the work. You are around 6.5 times more likely to be cited on someone else’s page than your own. So your own website is not where most of the battle is won. It matters because it means good PR people who know what they are doing are worth their weight, and getting you mentioned in the right third-party places is exactly the sort of thing we can help with. Source.
Communities count. Community sites make up nearly half of all AI citations, and Reddit alone turns up in over a fifth of answers. So community matters, and we do include guidance on it. But it is not the be-all and end-all. It matters because in your particular category Reddit might not show up at all, which is exactly what we have seen across recent work with 25 to 30 different businesses, so it is worth checking before you pour effort in. Source.
Steve Huffman, who runs Reddit, stood up at a Fast Company summit in late May and said large language models (the tech behind ChatGPT and the rest) “would not exist as we know them” without Reddit. He called all that human conversation “modern oil”. He has also been busy backing it up: Reddit has signed licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, says it is “open for business” for more, and is suing the AI firms it reckons helped themselves without paying.
Reddit is very important to LLMs. It is also a great addition because it is something that is very hard to influence, and it often contains a lot of natural consumer insight that is worth the LLMs factoring in. That said, it is not the be-all and end-all of LLM content. Your own category may not look at Reddit at all.
Read the piece.
Google has switched on a new report inside Search Console, the free tool most marketing teams already use to see how they turn up in search. For the first time it pulls your appearances inside AI answers out as their own line, and it shows you impressions, the pages involved, countries, devices and dates. What it does not show you is a single click, or what anyone actually asked.
It is a genuinely useful start, but it is only a small part of the full picture. There is plenty more you can do once you know how Google’s data fits with everything else, and I’ll share more as we get our hands on it properly. For the whole story rather than one slice of it, you need to talk to someone like us. Read Google’s announcement.
Two things landed on the publisher side. The UK competition regulator, the CMA, used new powers to force Google to let sites opt out of appearing in its AI summaries without being punished in normal search, a world-first ruling that the BBC and other big UK names had been pushing for. And in Marseille, AG Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times, told a room full of the world’s news publishers that AI scraping is “brazen theft” and that they should fight it in court, in parliament, and by setting licensing terms together.
Honestly, this looks like a tactic to force commercial agreements. There’s no way these publishers don’t want their content looked at by LLMs, they need the reach. Any publisher that doesn’t have LLM access or doesn’t strike a commercial deal will just become less and less important. We have already seen where this goes: OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit, and Stack Overflow, the site every developer and IT person lives on, signed one with OpenAI too. The endgame is not walls. It is contracts.
CMA ruling. Sulzberger’s speech, via Press Gazette.
Burson, one of the largest PR firms in the world, put out a report called The Credibility Paradox: being mentioned by AI is necessary but no longer enough, because a mention is worthless if the reader doesn’t believe it. AMEC, the body that sets the rules for PR measurement, made the sharper point that citation share must not become the new vanity number, it is only one part of the picture alongside being described accurately and whether any of it leads anywhere.
Both are right on the substance, and here is where I’ll push harder than I did last month. Being cited IS the point, because it’s the beginning. You can’t go “beyond” a starting line that nine in ten brands haven’t crossed yet. Credibility comes after, and it comes from a solid strategy, good content, and consistency in your message. All the things great copywriters and great PR people deliver, and all things we can help with.
AMEC GEO Principles. Burson’s Credibility Paradox.
The last couple of weeks have been about talking to some great agencies and freelancers about how we can work together. Lots of exciting conversations: some partnerships, some potential white labelling, some collaboration. It’s been brilliant. Working with sharp PR people who genuinely care about what they do, and combining that with something I care a lot about and believe will make a real difference, is exactly the bit of this job I enjoy most.
If you’re interested in our partnership offering, just get in touch and I can share our partnership pack.
I’m heading back to London a few times over the next couple of months. If you fancy meeting up, give me a shout and we’ll get a coffee or a beer in the diary. After being locked in the garage for what feels like a long time, it’ll be good to actually meet some people face to face and have a proper chat. Drop me a note if you’d like to catch up. Otherwise, see you next time.
Be Known. Be Cited.
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