GEOforge · The GEO Show, Live Special
A 107-million-answer study found brand-owned websites earn just 2% of AI citations. The other 98% goes somewhere else.
Paris Childress sat down live with Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing, for a wide-ranging conversation that landed on one uncomfortable number: in a 107-million-answer study, brand-owned websites showed up as the cited source just 2% of the time.
Here’s the full breakdown, with the receipts.
Before getting to citations, a warning from the trenches. Hop AI detected a bot on a client’s Cloudflare setup using the exact same name as OpenAI’s real crawler, but originating from a different IP address. It’s trivial to spin up a bot, name it “OpenAI User Bot” or “Google Bot,” and send it out to scrape whatever you want, pricing, product data, anything a site doesn’t lock down. Most sites have no process for checking whether a crawler claiming a familiar name is actually who it says it is.
That makes bot policing, actively analyzing crawl logs and selectively blacklisting impersonators, a real part of the technical side of GEO now, not an edge case. It sits alongside a related, older problem: more than 50% of all internet traffic is now bots, a share that’s been quietly eating into paid ad budgets for years the same way click fraud did in the early days of online advertising.
The core of the conversation was about scaling citation-building outreach. Right now, that kind of outreach is highly personalized and one-to-one, and it’s lucky to land a 1-2% reply rate. Sending more volume from a single domain risks burning that domain’s reputation, so the instinct is to build outreach capacity underneath a portfolio of domains and scale up.
But the bigger problem isn’t volume, it’s the pitch itself. A common approach is to find a site that already has a competitor listed in an article and ask the owner to add you too. Most people don’t want to reopen something they’ve already published. It’s a weak ask, and the data backs that up: reply rates stay in the low single digits.
The stronger idea discussed on the session: stop chasing sites where competitors are already cited, and instead find fresh domains that haven’t covered the topic yet. Offer them an exclusive, high-information-gain piece of original research, free to publish, with your brand credited as the source.
This is closer to classic PR than to link building. Give an editor a story with genuine news value and let them run it, exclusively, for a set window, before it goes anywhere else, including your own site or social channels. In exchange, you don’t need a reciprocal placement or a dofollow link. The citation comes from the content actually being worth publishing.
The reasoning connects directly to what’s already been established about GEO and domain authority: it’s not a DA game anymore. AI systems don’t check domain rating or a dofollow attribute the way search crawlers once did, so paying to place content the old link-building way doesn’t carry the same value it used to.
Midway through the conversation, Paris read out a stat from an upcoming episode that reframed the entire discussion. A company called Trendos analyzed 107 million AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, all within the IT services vertical.
| Source type | Share of citations |
|---|---|
| Community / UGC | 51% |
| Independent editorial | 47% |
| Brand-owned websites | 2% |
A brand talking about itself on its own domain isn’t evidence of anything to a model trying to answer someone else’s question.
Two percent. That’s the strongest argument yet for the fresh-domain, give-it-away strategy above. If your own site is functionally invisible to the systems deciding what to cite, publishing there and hoping is not a citation strategy on its own; it has to be paired with getting your best material in front of someone else’s audience, on someone else’s domain.
A viewer, Ashley Pearson, asked the question live: for AI visibility, where should the effort go, unlinked brand mentions and citations, or traditional backlinks?
Simon’s answer, from his own live test on a client right now: pure volume backlinking risks a cliff-edge demotion, the same pattern that’s sunk sites publishing hundreds of AI-written blog posts a month for years. Building a brand the right way still means the fundamentals SEO should have prioritized all along, social proof, third-party recommendations, and genuine reviews, rather than shortcuts.
Paris’s answer went further: since AI isn’t checking domain rating or a dofollow attribute, and a mention request currently converts at roughly 5% against roughly 1% for a link request, with both carrying similar value in a GEO-first strategy, the math says prioritize mention requests over link requests. Not abandon links, just stop treating them as the default ask.
The roadmap that came out of this conversation: when a piece of content scores high enough on information gain, say a 95 or 96 out of 100, the default shouldn’t automatically be “publish this on our own site.” It should be a decision point: does this deserve to be pitched exclusively to a third-party site first, PR-style, with the brand’s own site getting it only after, or later, or not exclusively at all.
That’s a meaningful shift for SiteForge, which has so far focused on scraping existing citation opportunities and scoring outreach targets. The next iteration treats the best of what ContentForge produces as bargaining currency for those pitches, rather than assuming everything gets published at home first.
Four moves to make out of this conversation:
GEOforge tracks your actual citation sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, so you know whether your brand is one of the 2%, or already ahead of it. 14-day free trial, no sales call.
Start a free trial →Sources & method. Citation source breakdown (51% community/UGC, 47% independent editorial, 2% brand-owned) from Trendos’ analysis of 107 million AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews in the IT services vertical. Bot impersonation and crawl-policing observations from Hop AI client Cloudflare logs. Outreach reply-rate figures and the mentions-versus-backlinks comparison from live testing discussed on this session. Full conversation recorded live with Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing, on The GEO Show.
Paris Childress is the CEO of Hop AI and creator of GEOforge, a platform that helps B2B brands get cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. A former Google Country Manager and agency veteran with 20+ years in digital marketing, Paris is focused on helping brands win in the era of AI search.
