arXiv cs.LGPaper
What Drives AI Citations? Content, Retrieval and Model Knowledge in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The finding that matters: generative engines retrieve pages using model-rewritten sub-queries, not the original user query, and those retrieved results dictate citations far more than traditional SEO signals do. For publishers, optimizing for traditional search engines misses what actually matters. For builders of generative engines, this highlights how internal retrieval and query rewriting shape the web's information ecosystem. Content matching question phrasing helps, but it's secondary.