What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines
The paper titled 'What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines' explores how AI answer engines cite sources. It identifies key factors influencing citation, such as topical relevance and list position. The authors provide a reproducible evaluation protocol and a GEO checklist for practitioners based on their findings.
- ▪AI answer engines generate answers from retrieved pages but cite only a few sources.
- ▪The study executed 252,000 trials across six LLMs to determine citation influences.
- ▪Topical relevance and list position were found to be the biggest drivers of being cited first.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | arXiv cs.AI |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25517 |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T04:07:43.013Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T04:07:43.013Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | U-YcfL1L5q8p |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2605.25517 (cs) [Submitted on 25 May 2026] Title:What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines Authors:Rahul Vishwakarma, Shushant Kumar, Ratnesh Jamidar View a PDF of the paper titled What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines, by Rahul Vishwakarma and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI answer engines generate answers from retrieved pages but cite only a few sources. This makes visibility depend not just on ranking, but on being cited.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv cs.AI.
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