GEO finding: Cite Sources lifts visibility +28%

Claim: "Cite Sources" — adding named external citations (author + institution + URL) — lifted AI-response visibility by +28% on Position-Adjusted Word Count in the Princeton GEO paper. Fluency Optimization also scored +28%.

Source: Aggarwal et al., arXiv:2311.09735 v3, Table 6. See Princeton GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD '24) — the foundational generative engine optimization study.

Confidence: Verified (primary).

Mechanism: AI retrievers extract more reliably from passages that anchor claims to a named institution + date. The signal is the same that Wikipedia's verifiability policy enforces — attribution makes a passage extractable as a fact, not as an opinion. See Wikipedia verifiability policy: all challenged material must carry an inline citation to a reliable published source.