Princeton GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD '24) — the foundational generative engine optimization study
Claim: Aggarwal et al. (Princeton + IIT Delhi + Georgia Tech + Allen AI) introduced "Generative Engine Optimization" as a discipline in arXiv:2311.09735 (v1: Nov 2023; v3: Jun 2024), accepted at KDD '24 Barcelona (ACM DOI 10.1145/3637528.3671900). They proposed GEO-bench (10,000 queries × 9 source datasets × 25 domains) and tested 9 optimization methods on GPT-3.5-turbo + a 200-query Perplexity.ai validation subset.
Source: arXiv:2311.09735 v3 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735. KDD proceedings paper.
Confidence: Verified (primary).
Why it matters for Candid: This is the most rigorous publicly available study on what content patterns lift AI-response visibility. The headline finding (+30-40% lifts) is from this paper. Every "GEO" claim in industry blog posts traces back here.
Atomic findings filed separately: [[geo-quotation-addition-41pct]], [[geo-statistics-addition-31pct]], [[geo-cite-sources-28pct]], [[geo-keyword-stuffing-negative]], [[geo-rank-5-pages-115pct-lift]].
Caveats: Tested on 2024-era engines (GPT-3.5, Perplexity). Whether the lifts persist on Gemini 3.5 / GPT-5 / Claude 4 / Sonar Pro is unverified. The Subjective Impression metric has been critiqued (Sandbox SEO) for construction.
Referenced by (9)
- reference GEO finding: Quotation Addition is the top-performing tactic at +41% on Position-Adjusted Word Count depends-on
- reference GEO finding: Statistics Addition is the #2 tactic at +31% depends-on
- reference GEO finding: Cite Sources lifts visibility +28% depends-on
- reference GEO finding: Keyword stuffing is the only tested tactic that hurts AI visibility (-8% to -10%) depends-on
- reference GEO finding: Lower-ranked pages (organic rank ~5) gain 115.1% AI visibility when given GEO treatments depends-on
- reference Extractability: a quotable paragraph leads with the answer, is 40-60 words, lives under semantic HTML, and names entities concretely relates-to
- reference Research brief: Structured content as a competitive advantage (piece 2 of 15) relates-to
- reference Research brief: What makes a marketing site do something (piece on brochure vs platform) relates-to
- reference Research brief: The knowledge-base-backed website (piece 3 of 15) relates-to