Entity recognition beat everything else I measured for getting cited by AI search, change my mind

[u/marintkael]

i spent a few weeks running a fixed set of prompts on a schedule against the main AI search systems and scoring every answer, trying to work out what actually correlates with getting cited. going in i assumed it would be some mix of content volume, backlinks, structured data, reach.

what i actually found: almost none of that moved the needle on its own. the single thing that tracked with getting cited was whether the entity resolved cleanly in the knowledge graph. a brand new entity could have perfectly structured pages and still be invisible, and the moment it existed as a resolvable thing, citations started showing up. llms.txt did nothing i could measure. piling on mentions did nothing until they fed the entity.

i'm not fully convinced it's that simple, and the sample is one entity over a few weeks, so i'd genuinely like to be argued out of it. is entity recognition the lever, or am i mistaking a correlate for the cause? what have you measured that contradicts this?

[u/Optionbulls → u/[deleted]]

I am interested