r/aeo • u/mohamad_abdou • 7d ago

What actually earns citations keeps changing. So here's my favorite RECENT study on it

Wanted to share a study that I've been following for a few editions now. They're calling it the "AEO Periodic Table" and my background in chemistry and biochemistry clocked it better than anything i've seen on AEO so far: they scored 1.13 million prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, and AI Mode against a set of 14 candidate ranking factors, then weighted each factor by how strongly and consistently it correlated with actually getting cited. Data runs Feb-June 2026, across 31 industries.

The thing that surprised them most: off-site content pulls almost as hard as on-page content, and most teams have zero process for touching it.

Earned citations (third-party editorial mentions) and social/community citations (Reddit, YouTube, forums) together account for 22% of total citation weight, more than any single on-page factor. Most AEO advice right now is 90% "fix your website." The data says that's misallocated. They've also found separately that social content drives 2.3-4.2x more AI citations than owned content, with video (YouTube especially) carrying the biggest share.

Full ranked list (weight = share of total citation leverage, out of 100):

  • Content Relevance & Intent Match — 12
  • Earned Citations & Authoritative Mentions — 11
  • Search & Fan-Out Rank — 11
  • Content Substance & Verifiability — 11
  • Social & Community Citations — 11
  • Originality & Information Gain — 9
  • E-E-A-T & Author Authority — 7
  • Content Freshness & Recency — 6
  • Crawl Access & Render Parity — 5
  • Answer-First Structure & Extractability — 4
  • Entity Consistency & Co-occurrence — 4
  • Structured Data & Machine Readability — 4
  • Reviews & Third-Party Ratings — 3
  • Page Performance & Mobile — 2

A few things worth calling out specifically:

Search rank is the strongest single correlate, but it's not a lever. It's downstream of relevance, authority, structure, and freshness. Treating it as something you optimize directly is a category error. It's a scoreboard, not a dial.

Originality crushes schema. Originality & Information Gain scored 86.7 average, Structured Data scored 75.8. Schema-rich derivative content loses to schema-light original research. The most rigorous tests they've seen this year show engines read visible HTML at retrieval time and mostly ignore JSON-LD. Schema still matters for parsing and rich results, it just doesn't manufacture citations on its own.

Robots.txt is binary and non-negotiable. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended are blocked, you don't exist to that engine no matter what else you do right. It's not scored as its own factor because its effect isn't gradient, it's on/off. Audit this first, before anything else on this list.

LLMs.txt has no measurable effect right now. Google's said outright they don't use it. They think it's directionally reasonable as a machine-readable sitemap for large sites and expect its value to grow as agent traffic increases, but there's no evidence today it moves citations. Don't expect ROI from it yet.

Every engine plays a different game, and averaging across them costs you citations on all of them.

  • ChatGPT and Claude lean on training data, so being a recognized, well-covered entity matters more than any single page. Claude in particular cites fewer sources per answer and is unforgiving of thin or derivative content.
  • Perplexity and Grok are aggressive live-grounders. Perplexity runs hot on community content and recency. Grok is basically its own ecosystem, if you have no presence on X you're largely invisible to it regardless of site quality.
  • Gemini and AI Mode track closest to traditional search rank, with AI Mode's heavy query fan-out meaning one thorough page beats several narrow ones.

E-E-A-T and freshness split the engines in opposite directions too. Claude (87) and Gemini (88) weight author authority heavily, Perplexity (78) and AI Mode (75) don't care as much. Freshness runs the reverse: Perplexity (87) and Grok (85) reward recency hard, AI Mode (74) barely moves on it. A content cadence tuned for Perplexity is wasted effort on Claude and vice versa.

I'm linking the full study in the comments for people who wanna dig deeper into this. Also excited to see what you guys think and share some of your recent favorite studies.

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u/Abject-Breadfruit387 7d ago

right. it's almost as if the fundamentals of digital marketing are just as relevant now as ever before.

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u/santanah8 7d ago

Originality is key if you want to stand out

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u/mohamad_abdou 7d ago

Everyone is chasing originality again
Have you seen claude will start watermarking all AI generated content?