GEO paper — critical methodology caveat: the lifts come from BODY-TEXT edits, NOT schema markup; authors explicitly note "less likely to affect search engine rankings"

Claim: The GEO paper's lifts are from edits to visible page text, NOT schema markup. The authors explicitly note their changes are "less likely to affect search engine rankings" because they don't touch metadata or backlinks. Visibility is measured as citation-share in synthesised answers, not real click traffic.

Source: Aggarwal et al., arXiv:2311.09735 — Jun 28, 2024; methodology section.

Confidence: Verified (authors' own framing).

Why this matters for Candid: This caveat is as important as the headline finding. It means: (a) you cannot generalise the 40%+ result to "schema works" — the paper says nothing about schema; (b) you cannot translate citation-share into traffic without further evidence; (c) the lever is editorial discipline on body text. Anchors R3 — Favor body-text citations, quotations and statistics over schema markup as the AI-visibility lever; the peer-reviewed lift is in body text.